Oliver Goldsmith

Oliver Goldsmith was an Anglo-Irish writer who rose from obscurity to become one of the most popular and celebrated authors of the 18th century. He was born in either County Longford or County Roscommon, Ireland, where his father was a clergyman. He studied at Trinity College, Dublin, but was expelled for his involvement in a riot. He then travelled to Edinburgh to study medicine, but never completed his degree. He spent some years wandering through Europe, living by his wits and his flute. He arrived in London in 1756, where he worked as a hack writer, reviewing, translating, and compiling for various publishers. He also wrote essays, poems, novels, and plays, often using his own experiences and observations as material. He became friends with some of the leading literary figures of his time, such as Samuel Johnson, David Garrick, and Edmund Burke, who were members of the informal club that met at the Turk's Head Tavern. He was known for his generosity, his humour, and his eccentricity, but also for his vanity, his carelessness, and his debts. He died of a kidney infection in 1774, at the age of 43. He was buried in the Temple Church, London, where a monument was erected in his honour in 1776. His works include the novel The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), which tells the story of a virtuous and simple clergyman and his family, who suffer various misfortunes but retain their faith and integrity; the poem The Deserted Village (1770), which laments the depopulation and decay of rural life in England due to the enclosures and the rise of commercialism; and the play She Stoops to Conquer (1773), which is a comedy of manners and mistaken identities, featuring a lively heroine who pretends to be a maid to win the love of a shy and wealthy young man.