Author: Goldsmith, Oliver
Biography:
Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-74: ODNB)
The son of an Anglo-Irish clergyman, Charles Goldsmith, and his wife Ann (Jones) Goldsmith, he graduated from Trinity College Dublin in 1750 but was for some time unsettled about his future course. He was not suitable for the church; he gambled away money meant to be spent on legal studies; and although he spent some years studying medicine at the University of Edinburgh and on the Continent, he does not appear ever to have completed the requirements for a medical degree and he failed the examination to be a ship's surgeon with the East India Company. He did however occasionally practise medicine and was generally given the title "Doctor." He found success working for the booksellers of Grub Street in London as a versatile writer of reviews, histories, biographies, translations, and social commentary. His best-known works before 1770 were the essays collected in The Citizen of the World (1762), a long poem entitled The Traveller (1764), his very popular fiction The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), and the first of several lucrative plays, The Good-Natur'd Man (1768). He was a clubbable man, a close friend of Johnson, Garrick, Reynolds, and Burke: he dedicated The Deserted Village to Reynolds. He died in his lodgings in London and was buried in the grounds of the Church of St Mary, Middle Temple; Johnson composed the Latin inscription for the marble memorial to him in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey. (ODNB 9 Jan. 2019)
Other Names:
- Doctor Goldsmith
- Dr. Goldsmith
- Goldsmith