Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (8 page)

Goldsmith was the fifth child of an impecunious Anglican clergyman in Co. Longford, Ireland. His father Charles Goldsmith is recorded as being amiable but feckless and is popularly supposed to have had much of the Revd Primrose about him. The family supplemented his curate’s stipend with a small farm. Goldsmith
offers a nostalgic picture of his childhood environment in the idyllic passages of his poem, ‘The Deserted Village’ – but it was not all idyll. Aged eight, Oliver contracted smallpox. It ‘ravaged the roses off his cheeks’ disfiguring him for life. He would grow up stumpy, ill-favoured and awkward in society, with a thick accent. ‘Monkey face’ was a hurtful insult thrown at him. As Johnson portentously put it: ‘Goldsmith was a plant that flowered late. There appeared nothing remarkable about him when he was young.’ His first schoolteacher declared him ‘impenetrably stupid’. It soon became apparent, however, that he had a remarkably absorptive mind. From priests (the Goldsmiths were relaxed on matters of faith) he picked in his schooldays a command of French which was the admiration of all who knew him. He similarly picked up his virtuosity with the flute – the inseparable partner on his nomadic path through life.

It was his mother, Ann, who insisted he go to Trinity College, Dublin, which he did in 1745. The entrance examination – translation from the classics – caused him no difficulty. But he was obliged to enrol, to his disgust, as a ‘sizar’ – a student whose fees were remitted in return for acting as a servant to better-off fellows. Goldsmith was a desultory student. He roistered, gambled (a lifelong weakness), and attended the theatre more readily than the classroom. But he also read phenomenally. His father died during his time at Trinity College and his financial support dried up. He sold ballads for money in the streets and cadged – something at which he was adept. He took his degree in 1750.

There were clergymen in the Goldsmith family going back generations and it was logical for him to go into the Church. But at the initial interview he chose to wear scarlet trousers and intimated that the dark clothes of the profession were not to his taste. The story may be apocryphal but his fondness for clothes was not. He spent money he did not have on finery all his life. The tailors of London wept at his death.

Over the next few years Goldsmith was supported by the bounty of a well-off, and well-disposed, uncle, the Revd Thomas Contarine. The young man’s first idea was to emigrate to America but, with all his belongings already on board, he missed the boat, having been delayed by ‘a jaunt in the country’. His uncle gave him £50 to return to Dublin and study law but he lost ‘every shilling’ gambling. In 1752 the family, in some desperation, packed him off to study medicine in Edinburgh – Uncle Contarine again footing the bill. At his new university Goldsmith pigged it in lodgings with only his skeleton, his folios and his cat for company – or so he told his family. Ostensibly in pursuit of his medical studies he spent some time in Leyden. Europe, he found, was much to his taste, and over the next year, 1775 (‘the lost year’), he undertook a rambling tour which took in France, Switzerland and Italy. He supported himself, it is assumed, by gambling, borrowing and busking.

After this interlude, he took up what would hereafter be lifelong residence in London. He never completed his medical studies, although he practised for a while, awarding himself, if Edinburgh begrudged it, the title ‘doctor’. It was a low point in which he contemplated suicide. Instead he drifted to Grub Street, which, some would say, was scarcely preferable. Goldsmith’s wide reading, quick wit and ready pen meant that he was in demand. The metropolitan book world was expanding explosively with increased literacy, peace and new copyright regulation.

Goldsmith had a remarkable skill for digesting, summarising and rendering readably attractive the work of heavier writers – particularly the French. His favoured metaphor was that of the bee which sucks up honey from wherever it lands in its random flights. One of the engaging features of Goldsmith is his self-deprecation. He wrote, at this period, a spoof CV: ‘Oliver Goldsmith flourished in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He lived to be an hundred and three years old and in that age may justly be styled the sun of literature and the Confucius of Europe.’ The Confucius reference is a joke within a joke. Goldsmith’s first substantial publication was the papers gathered as
The Citizen of the World
(1761), a supercilious view of British and European society through Chinese eyes. It still reads well.

The book was a hit and Goldsmith was on his way. He became the friend, fellow conversationalist and ‘bosom friend’ of Dr Johnson, Edmund Burke and Reynolds at their weekly club meetings at the Turk’s Head Tavern, in Soho. They (particularly Reynolds) loved ‘Noll’; Boswell less so and declared him an ‘impudent puppy’ after some ineffably rash comments about Shakespeare’s lack of ‘merit’. On what evidence we have, Goldsmith had little time for fiction. How, one wonders, could the author of a life of Voltaire (whom he may have met and certainly admired) produce a work as ingenuously sentimental as
The Vicar of Wakefield
? How could a man who never troubled to marry (his sexual life is entirely obscure) put his name to this extended eulogy on ‘monogamy’?

His biographer, A. Lytton Sells, plausibly sees Goldsmith’s fictional Yorkshire vicar as a dart thrown at an actual Yorkshire vicar’s current bestseller. Goldsmith pronounced
Tristram Shandy
‘obscene’ and its author Sterne (whose sexual delinquencies were common knowledge) a degenerate disgrace to his cloth. The noble Primrose outlines his un-Sterneian philosophy of life in the novel’s opening sentences:

I was ever of opinion that the honest man, who married and brought up a large family, did more service than he who continued single, and only talked of population. From this motive, I had scarce taken orders a year, before I began to think seriously of matrimony, and chose my wife as she did her wedding-gown, not for a fine glossy surface, but such qualities as would wear well.

Mrs Primrose not only wears, but bears well. They have six children (‘the offspring of temperance’, Dr Primrose is in haste to assure us). The family lives comfortably off the father’s invested wealth; his £35 a year stipend he gives to the poor. Disaster strikes when Primrose’s fortune is lost through the malfeasance of a city speculator, who leaves not ‘a shilling in the pound’ for his investors. Job-like tribulation ensues. Adversity, however, does not destroy but further ennobles the hero and his family. All ends providentially.

The novel’s route into print is mysterious. When, in 1862, Goldsmith found himself in more than usual financial distress with his landlady – arrest was in prospect – Johnson dispatched a guinea. When, a little later he called by, he found the guinea had been expended on a bottle of Madeira. Johnson stuck the cork back in the bottle and ‘talked to him on the means by which he might be extricated’: ‘He then told me he had a novel ready for the press, which he produced to me. I looked into it and saw its merit: told the landlady I should soon return; and, having gone to a bookseller, sold it for sixty pounds. I brought Goldsmith the money, and he discharged his rent, not without rating his landlady in a high tone for having used him so ill.’ Johnson was a friend in need if not the astutest of literary agents. The sale ranks with Milton’s £10 for
Paradise Lost
as one of the worst in literary history. And, oddly,
The Vicar of Wakefield
was not published for a further four years: the delay has never been satisfactorily explained.

Since 1866, Goldsmith’s novel has never been out of print. It never brought him a fair reward but his long poem
The Deserted Village
(reprinted five times in its first year, 1770) and the comedy
She Stoops to Conquer
(1772) earned huge sums. He spent even more hugely on himself (he never troubled to relieve the poverty of his mother), and his taste for purple silk underwear raised eyebrows in the Johnson circle, whose famed mascot by the mid-1760s he was. In 1769, the King appointed Goldsmith Professor of Ancient History in the Royal Academy. Luckily it entailed no lectures or any other work. By now, however, years of deadlines and keeping one hop ahead of creditors was catching up with him, and he died of a fever. His last words – in response to his physician’s lugubrious enquiry, ‘Is your mind at ease?’ – were ‘No, it is not.’

Goldsmith’s funeral was a sorry affair. He left the vast debt of £2,000. Mary Horneck – the girl who, from her fourteenth year, seems to have loved him – requested that his coffin be unnailed so that she could have a lock of his hair. Johnson’s verdict was generous: ‘Let not his failings be remembered; he was a very great man.’

A strong mind, playful fancy, and extensive knowledge are everywhere apparent.
Walter Scott

Two things are routinely said of Bage by those (few) who ever get around to reading him: one is that more people should read him and the other that
Hermsprong
qualifies as the most bizarre title in English literature. Bage, a child of non-conformity, the Industrial Revolution, and provincial self-improvement, was born (the exact date is uncertain) near Derby, the son of a paper maker ‘remarkable only for having had four wives’, as Walter Scott (a staunch admirer of
Hermsprong
) laconically put it. Robert was the offspring of the first Mrs Bage, who died shortly after her son’s birth, making way for the second.

The family may have been Quaker, although the point is disputed. A friend records that by the age of seven Bage made ‘such progress in letters, that he was the wonder of the neighbourhood’. Wondrous clever as he might be, his life’s course lay in making paper, not writing on it, and he was apprenticed to the family trade. Paper, at the time, was made out of rags. The process was filthy, but required considerable skill. The finished material was subject to complicated excise demands; one of the many taxes on knowledge which Bage – like other self-improved men – loathed.

Aged twenty-one he married – and it was a good match. His wife is recorded as sweet-tempered and well-dowered. Her money enabled him to set up in the paper and cardboard business independently. The couple would have three sons, two of whom survived to go, like their father, into ‘trade’. Bage himself was a shrewd tradesman. In his mid-twenties he set up an arrangement with his fellow businessman and lifelong friend, William Hutton, to wholesale paper for distribution via his (Hutton’s) Birmingham warehouse. This supplied ‘an ample fortune’ (£500) for both entrepreneurs. Bage expanded his commercial activity by going into the ironworks business in 1765. One of his new partners was the formidable Enlightenment thinker, Erasmus Darwin. Darwin thought highly of Bage – as did everyone who met him (including, at the end of his life, the even more formidable William Godwin). As his biographer records (working from the scant records): ‘Bage continued his self-education, setting aside three hours each afternoon for reading. In his thirties he taught himself French and Italian and travelled to Birmingham once a week to learn mathematics, which he picked up so quickly that within a month he was teaching his teacher.’

He never went to France, but devoured the doctrines of the
philosophes
who were revolutionising the other country. He was, it is recorded, ‘of spare habit’ and
temperate. Everyone had nice things to say about Robert Bage. Even his horses, ‘whom he kept till old age’ loved him, Hutton recorded. ‘Mild’ as his temper was, there were radical influences around him from his childhood. In all his surviving writing Bage strenuously opposes the established Church and Britain’s unreformed Parliament. His ideas were sharpened by the ‘societies’ that flourished in this period of the late Enlightenment in provincial towns and cities. A rationalist, he belonged to the Derby Philosophical Society (founded in 1784, by Darwin). He was more loosely connected with the Lunar Society of Birmingham. That, for him, was far afield. He rarely travelled more than a horse-ride from his Derby home and could never bring himself to spend more than a week in London before hurrying away from the hateful place.

Bage would never have written fiction had his business not run into difficulty. In the early 1780s, a slitting mill failed, resulting in a loss of some £1,500. As Hutton records, with the pleasing stiltedness of eighteenth-century essayistic style: ‘Fearing the distress of mind would overcome him, he took up the pen to turn the stream of sorrow into that of amusement; a scheme worthy a philosopher.’ Money came into it. But novels were not easy money, then or now, and Bage got between £30 and £50 apiece for the six he wrote. He began writing in his early fifties and his fiction-writing career coincided with that historical moment – with revolutions in France and America – when, as Wordsworth said, it was ‘bliss’ to be alive.

It was not always comfortable, however. Dissenters and supporters of what was happening in France (particularly) came under state suspicion and occasional mob violence. Bage wrote to Hutton (who had been forced to flee his home by supporters of ‘King and Church’) that ‘Since the riots … my ears have been insulted with the bigotry of 50 years.’ His biographer records that in the early 1790s (a low point, with the premature death of one of his sons) Bage may himself have experienced ‘harassment’, from local ‘bigots’ and, of course, the ever-rapacious ‘Excise’. In these last years he became a ‘hermit’, although he continued to run his paper-making business virtually until his death.

Bage’s first novel,
Mount Henneth
, ‘A Practical Utopia’ (1782), tells the tale of a select group of like-minded radicals who, little by little, establish a successful community at Henneth Castle in Wales. Like the three novels that followed (
Barham Downs
, 1784;
The Fair Syrian
, 1787;
James Wallace
, 1788) it was epistolary in form. The novels are amateurish but richly quirky.
James Wallace
, for example, contains the first cricket match described in English fiction.
The Fair Syrian
is written against slavery, and may also claim to be something of a first in that line of protest fiction.