Oliver Goldsmith Biography Quotes 36 Report mistakes

Overview
Oliver Goldsmith was an Irish writer of uncommon versatility, best remembered as a poet, novelist, dramatist, and essayist. Born in 1730 and dying in 1774, he moved from rural beginnings to the heart of London literary life, crafting works that balanced wit with sympathy for ordinary people. His reputation rests on a body of writing that is elegant yet plain, moral without severity, and animated by a humane regard for social bonds.

Early Life and Education
Goldsmith spent his childhood in the Irish midlands, an area whose landscapes of villages, fields, and small parishes would later nourish his imagination. He was educated locally before entering Trinity College Dublin, where he studied as a sizar, a student who performed certain duties to offset expenses. University life was difficult; money was scarce and progress irregular, but he revealed a gift for verse, storytelling, and convivial talk. These gifts, together with an eye for the textures of rural life, later became the hallmarks of his mature style.

Seeking a Profession and Continental Wanderings
After leaving Ireland he pursued medicine in Edinburgh and then continued his studies in Leiden. He traveled widely on the Continent, observing societies and customs that fed a lifelong interest in how nations prosper and decline. Tales of him budget-traveling with a flute for company circulated among friends and later readers, reinforcing an image of the amiable, if impractical, man of letters. When he returned to London in the mid-1750s, he tried a precarious medical practice while turning increasingly to books, journalism, and translation to earn his living.

Finding a Voice in London
London brought him into contact with publishers and newspapers hungry for copy. With the support of the bookseller John Newbery, he issued essays, reviews, and short pieces that showed an easy command of the familiar style then in fashion. An Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe offered a critical overview of literature and the arts, while the sketches collected as The Citizen of the World, framed as letters by a Chinese observer in London, allowed him to study English manners from a witty, oblique angle. These works established him as an author of clear prose and gentle satire.

Poet, Novelist, and Dramatist
As a poet, Goldsmith achieved distinction with The Traveller, a reflective work that considers the temper and institutions of different nations. He reached a wider audience with The Vicar of Wakefield, a novel of domestic trials and comic reversals that places a virtuous family at the mercy of fortune yet affirms the strength of kindness and forgiveness. In the theater he first offered The Good-Naturd Man, which had a modest reception, and later triumphed with She Stoops to Conquer, a comedy of mistaken identities and lively intrigue that restored hearty laughter to the London stage. The Deserted Village, his most celebrated poem, lamented the social costs of economic change, giving memorable expression to the dislocation of rural life.

Circle and Friendships
Goldsmith moved among leading figures of the age. Samuel Johnson admired his talents and, despite teasing him for foibles, championed his work; James Boswell recorded their conversations with affectionate precision. Sir Joshua Reynolds offered friendship and hospitality; Edmund Burke, keenly attentive to politics and taste, appreciated Goldsmiths moral sensibility and ease of style. On the theatrical side David Garrick and George Colman figured in the fortunes of his plays. With Johnson and Reynolds he belonged to the Club, where talk ranged across poetry, drama, politics, and art, and where even his missteps and anxieties were met with warmth.

Work for the Market
To meet expenses he produced accessible histories and compilations that were widely read in schools and by general audiences: works on Rome and Greece, abridged accounts of English history, and a lively natural history. These books, sometimes dismissed as hack work, are in fact notable for their clarity and narrative drive. They reveal a writer who could distill complex material without losing its human interest, and they helped form the tastes of a broad reading public.

Style and Character
Goldsmiths style is marked by balance and grace, a preference for lucid diction, and a gentle irony that exposes folly while sparing cruelty. He disliked pedantry and obscurity, believing that literature serves best when it clarifies experience. Friends remembered him as generous and impulsive, poor at managing money yet eager to share it when he had it. He could be thin-skinned before critics, but his work radiates forbearance, and his comic art never descends into malice.

Later Years and Death
The demands of constant writing, together with debts and anxieties, wore on him. In 1774 he died in London after a short illness. He was laid to rest in the precincts of the Temple, and his friends commemorated him with a monument in Westminster Abbey bearing a Latin epitaph by Samuel Johnson. In his final months he had composed Retaliation, a series of playful epitaphs on his companions, which remained unfinished at his death but revealed the affectionate wit of his social world.

Legacy
Oliver Goldsmiths legacy rests on the rare union of accessibility and depth. The Vicar of Wakefield continued to be read across Europe for generations; She Stoops to Conquer retains its vigor on stage; The Traveller and The Deserted Village, with their poised couplets and moral clarity, remain touchstones of 18th-century poetry. His humane vision, anchored in the lives of ordinary people and alive to the costs of progress, shaped an enduring ideal of literary gentleness. Among the writers and artists who knew him best, he was esteemed not only for the sparkle of his conversation and the polish of his prose, but for the warmth of his heart.

Our collection contains 36 quotes who is written by Oliver, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Justice - Friendship.

Other people realated to Oliver: Washington Irving (Writer)