Later Life

Illustration from The Vicar of Wakefield.

Although Goldsmith enjoyed a great deal of literary success his personal and private life remained less than idyllic. His carelessness, intemperance and his habit of gambling (The Vicar of Wakefield was originally published to cover a gambling debt) brought him into ever-increasing debt. Even at his death in 1774 he remained a puzzle to his contemporaries, with Horace Walpole declaring: "here was a man who had sometimes parts though never common sense". By many he was seen as a man with the uncanny ability to be both a true literary genius and a truly absurd clown. However it is perhaps one of his closet friends, Dr. Samuel Johnson who best summarises his legacy, declaring in his epitaph –

Oliver Goldsmith: A Poet, Naturalist, and Historian, who left scarcely any style of writing untouched, and touched nothing that he did not adorn. Of all the passions, whether smiles were to move or tears, a powerful yet gentle master. In genius, vivid, versatile, sublime. In style, clear, elevated, elegant.

His gift to the world, in terms of his literary work, in particular The Deserted Village, would have a lasting influence on literature, with its central themes being taken up by Wordsworth and the Romantics, and later Lawrence, Pound and in particular T.S. Eliot, whose vision of London in The Wasteland is in many ways a fulfillment of Goldsmith's prophecy of the vacuity of urban life. His work is also relevant in today's environmentally aware era with issues such as rural depopulation and mass migration to urban areas causing the problems Goldsmith foresaw. In short, the extent of Goldsmith's influence on English literature is undeniable and remains to this day one of Ireland's greatest writers.