20 Facts About Oliver Goldsmith

Oliver Goldsmith was an Anglo-Irish poet, novelist, playwright, and hack writer.

Oliver Goldsmith wrote the comedy plays The Good-Natur'd Man and She Stoops to Conquer, as well as the social commentary poem The Deserted Village.

Oliver Goldsmith maintained a close friendship with Samuel Johnson, another prolific English writer.

Oliver Goldsmith produced a very large number of poems during his career, and contributed to the flourishing of idyllic poetry during the Georgian era.

Oliver Goldsmith died in 1774 in London, and was buried in Temple Church.

Oliver Goldsmith was born either in the townland of Pallas, near Ballymahon, County Longford, Ireland, where his father was the Anglican curate of the parish of Forgney, or at the residence of his maternal grandparents, at the Smith Hill House near Elphin in County Roscommon, where his grandfather Oliver Jones was a clergyman and master of the Elphin diocesan school, and where Oliver studied.

When Oliver Goldsmith was two years old, his father was appointed the rector of the parish of "Kilkenny West" in County Westmeath.

Oliver Goldsmith was graduated in 1749 as a Bachelor of Arts, but without the discipline or distinction that might have gained him entry to a profession in the church or the law.

Oliver Goldsmith's education seemed to have given him mainly a taste for fine clothes, cards, singing Irish airs, and playing the flute.

Oliver Goldsmith lived for a short time with his mother, tried various professions without success, studied medicine desultorily at the University of Edinburgh from 1752 to 1755, and set out on a walking tour of Flanders, France, Switzerland, and Northern Italy, living by his wits.

Oliver Goldsmith settled in London in 1756, where he briefly held various jobs, including an apothecary's assistant and an usher of a school.

Perennially in debt and addicted to gambling, Oliver Goldsmith produced a massive output as a hack writer on Grub Street for the publishers of London, but his few painstaking works earned him the company of Samuel Johnson, with whom he was a founding member of "The Club".

In 1760 Oliver Goldsmith began to publish a series of letters in the Public Ledger under the title The Citizen of the World which brought him fame.

Oliver Goldsmith has sometimes been credited with writing the classic children's tale The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes, though this cannot be proved.

Oliver Goldsmith was described by contemporaries as prone to envy, a congenial but impetuous and disorganised personality who once planned to emigrate to America but failed because he missed his ship.

Mitchell sorely missed good company, which Oliver Goldsmith naturally provided in spades.

Thomas De Quincey wrote of him "All the motion of Oliver Goldsmith's nature moved in the direction of the true, the natural, the sweet, the gentle".

Oliver Goldsmith was an Anglican, and famously said "as I take my shoes from the shoemaker, and my coat from the taylor, so I take my religion from the priest".

Oliver Goldsmith wished this to be the British equivalent of the Encyclopedie and it was to include comprehensive articles by Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Sir William Jones, Fox and Dr Burney.

Oliver Goldsmith's life was dramatised in the 1940 Australian radio play A Citizen of the World.