Oliver Goldsmith哥尔斯密简介
Oliver Goldsmith
born Nov. 10, 1730, Kilkenny West, County Westmeath, Ire.
died April 4, 1774, London
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, Oliver Goldsmith, oil painting from the studio of Sir Joshua
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Reynolds, 1770; in the National „
Anglo-Irish essayist, poet, novelist, dramatist, and eccentric, made
famous by such works as the ries of essays The Citizen of the World, or, Letters from a Chine Philosopher (1762), the poem The Derted Village (1770), the novel The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), and the play She Stoops to Conquer (1773).
Goldsmith was the son of an Anglo-Irish clergyman, the Rev. Charles
Goldsmith, curate in charge of Kilkenny West, County Westmeath. At about
the time of his birth, the family moved into a substantial hou at nearby
Lissoy, where Oliver spent his childhood. Much has been recorded
concerning his youth, his unhappy years as an undergraduate at Trinity
College, Dublin, where he received the B.A. degree in February 1749, and
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his many misadventures before he left Ireland in the autumn of 1752 to
study in the medical school at Edinburgh. His father was now dead, but
veral of his relations had undertaken to support him in his pursuit of
取名男孩a medical degree. Later on, in London, he came to be known as Dr.
Goldsmith—Doctor being the courtesy title for one who held the Bachelor
of Medicine—but he took no degree while at Edinburgh nor, so far as anyone
knows, during the two-year period when, despite his meagre funds, which
were eventually exhausted, he somehow managed to make his way through
Europe. The first period of his life ended with his arrival in London,
bedraggled and penniless, early in 1756.
Goldsmith's ri from total obscurity was a matter of only a few years.
He worked as an apothecary's assistant, school usher, physician, and as
a hack writer—reviewing, translating, and compiling. Much of his work
was for Ralph Griffiths's Monthly Review. It remains amazing that this young Irish vagabond, unknown, uncouth, unlearned, and unreliable, was
yet able within a few years to climb from obscurity to mix with aristocrats
and the intellectual elite of London. Such a ri was possible becau
Goldsmith had one quality, soon noticed by bookllers and the public,
that his fellow literary hacks did not posss—the gift of a graceful, lively, and readable style. His ri began with the Enquiry into the
Prent State of Polite Learning in Europe (1759), a minor work. Soon he emerged as an essayist, in The Bee and other periodicals, and above all in his Chine Letters. The essays were first published in the journal
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The Public Ledger and were collected as The Citizen of the World in 1762.
The same year brought his Life of Richard Nash, of Bath, Esq. Already
Goldsmith was acquiring tho distinguished and often helpful friends
whom he alternately annoyed and amud, shocked and charmed—Samuel
Johnson, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Percy, David Garrick, Edmund Burke,
and James Boswell. The obscure drudge of 1759 became in 1764 one of the
nine founder-members of the famous Club, a lect body, including Reynolds,
Johnson, and Burke, which met weekly for supper and talk. Goldsmith could
now afford to live more comfortably, but his extravagance continually ran
him into debt, and he was forced to undertake more hack work. He thus
produced histories of England and of ancient Rome and Greece, biographies,
ver anthologies, translations, and works of popular science. The were
mainly compilations of works by other authors, which Goldsmith then
distilled and enlivened by his own gift for fine writing. Some of the
makeshift compilations went on being reprinted well into the 19th century,
科英布拉however.
By 1762 Goldsmith had established himlf as an essayist with his Citizen
of the World, in which he ud the device of satirizing Western society
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through the eyes of an Oriental visitor to London. By 1764 he had won a
reputation as a poet with The Traveller, the first work to which he put
his name. It embodied both his memories of tramping through Europe and
his political ideas. In 1770 he confirmed that reputation with the more
famous Derted Village, which contains charming vignettes of rural life while denouncing the evictions of the country poor at the hands of wealthy
