Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives by John Sutherland Page B

– 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