Kate Chisholm

The gooseberry fool

The friend of Boswell and Johnson was clearly a most engaging man of letters — but, frustratingly, he remains an enigma in Norma Clarke’s Brothers of the Quill

issue 07 May 2016

On 10 April 1772, the biographer James Boswell recorded in his diary that he had hugged himself with pleasure on discovering he would be dining with Oliver Goldsmith. This was not because he hoped to elicit from the Irish-born writer some fruity details for the life of Dr Johnson, the dictionary-maker, that he was planning to write (although Goldsmith did know Johnson intimately). On the contrary, Boswell, the literary groupie, was fascinated by Goldsmith himself. He devotes several pages of his Life of Johnson to him in an attempt ‘to make my readers in some degree acquainted with his singular character’. But, frustratingly, Goldsmith remains an enigmatic figure.

Boswell reports how Johnson said of him that he ‘touched every kind of writing, and touched none that he did not adorn’, which was praise indeed from a critic who enjoyed savaging those writers who did not meet his high standards of probity, meaning and cut-glass clarity.

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