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. But Johnson also remarks that it’s ‘amazing how little Goldsmith knows. He seldom comes where he is not more ignorant than any one else.’ How could such a talented writer (who in his life of Beau Nash described the MC of fashionable Bath as a man who ‘dressed to the edge of his finances’) be also such a bore in conversation?
These contradictions perhaps explain why Goldsmith appears but dimly cast in Norma Clarke’s latest study of literary London in the 18th century. She argues that ‘there is no better writer to take us behind the scenes and under the surface of British literary culture’ of his period. But of Goldsmith himself we catch only glimpses, not helped by a lack of letters or a journal from which to determine his true character or the impulse for his talent.
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