Oliver Goldsmith

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the renowned and versatile Irish writer Oliver Goldsmith (1728 - 1774). There is a memorial to him in Westminster Abbey’s Poet’s Corner written by Dr Johnson, celebrating Goldsmith’s life as a poet, natural philosopher and historian. To this could be added ‘playwright’ and ‘novelist’ and ‘science writer’ and ‘pamphleteer’ and much besides, as Goldsmith explored so many different outlets for his talents. While he began on Grub Street in London, the centre for jobbing writers scrambling for paid work, he became a great populariser and compiler of new ideas and knowledge and achieved notable successes with poems such as The Deserted Village, his play She Stoops to Conquer and his short novel The Vicar of Wakefield.

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Guests

• David O'Shaughnessy No other episodes
  Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of Galway
• Judith Hawley 15 episodes
  Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London
• Michael Griffin No other episodes
  Professor of English at the University of Limerick

Reading list

• Brothers of the Quill: Oliver Goldsmith in Grub Street
  Norma Clarke (Harvard University Press, 2016) Google Books →
• The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age
  Leo Damrosch (Yale University Press, 2019) Google Books →
• The Vicar of Wakefield: A Tale, Supposed to Be Written by Himself
  Oliver Goldsmith (ed. Aileen Douglas and Ian Campbell Ross) (Cambridge University Press, 2024) Google Books →
• The Vicar of Wakefield
  Oliver Goldsmith (ed. Arthur Friedman) (Oxford University Press, 2008) Google Books →
• The Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, 5 vols
  Oliver Goldsmith (ed. Arthur Friedman) (Clarendon Press, 1966)
• Oliver Goldsmith: Everyman's Poetry, No. 30
  Oliver Goldsmith (ed. Robert L. Mack) (Phoenix, 1997)
• She Stoops to Conquer
  Oliver Goldsmith (ed. James Ogden) (Methuen Drama, 2003) Google Books →
• The Citizen of the World
  Oliver Goldsmith (ed. James Watt) (Cambridge University Press, 2024) Google Books →
• She Stoops to Conquer and Other Comedies
  Oliver Goldsmith (ed. Nigel Wood) (Oxford University Press, 2007) Google Books →
• Oliver Goldsmith in Context
  Michael Griffin and David O'Shaughnessy (eds.) (Cambridge University Press, 2024) Google Books →
• The Letters of Oliver Goldsmith
  Michael Griffin and David O'Shaughnessy (eds.) (Cambridge University Press, 2018)
• The Poems of Gray, Collins and Goldsmith
  Roger Lonsdale (ed.) (Longmans, 1969)

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Programme ID: m00282pq

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00282pq

Auto-category: 820.9 (English literature - History and criticism)