EARLY LETTERS FROM LONDON.
The second series of letters begins after Oliver had returned to England about a couple of years, and was “by a very little practice as a physician and a very little reputation as a poet making a shift to live,” as he describes it in a letter to his brother-in-law Daniel Hodson, dated from the Temple Exchange Coffee House, on 27 December, 1757. His brother Charles Goldsmith had paid Oliver a visit in London, and had informed him “of the fatigue you were at in soliciting a subscription to relieve me, not only among my friends and relations, but acquaintance in general. Tho my pride might feel some repugnance at being thus relieved, yet my gratitude can suffer no diminution.... Whether I eat or starve, live in a first floor or four pairs of stairs high, I still remember them [my friends] with ardour, nay my very country comes in for a share of my affection. Unaccountable fondness for country, this maladie du Pays, as the french call it.” He hopes that if he can be absent six weeks from London next summer “to spend three of them among my friends in Ireland. My design is purely to visit, and neither to cut a figure nor levy contributions—neither to excite envy nor solicit favour: in fact my circumstances are adapted to neither. I am too poor to be gazed at, and too rich to need assistance.”
Percy here omits what he calls “some mention of private family matters.” The letter is at this point frayed and imperfect, but these words can be made out:
“Charles is furnished with everything necessary, but why ... stranger to assist him. I hope he will be improved in his ... against his return [from Jamaica]. Poor Jenny! But it is what I expected. My mother too has lost Pallas! My dear Sir, these things give me real uneasiness, and I could wish to redress them. But at present there is hardly a Kingdom in Europe in which I am not a debtor” etc.
After an interval, Goldsmith had what was for him a real bout of letter-writing to a number of his kinsfolk and friends, to solicit their assistance in getting subscriptions for his “Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe” on which he was engaged, and which was about to be published. On 7 August, 1758, he wrote to his cousin and school-fellow Edward Mills that his “Essay on the Present State of Taste and Literature in Europe,” as it was then called, was “now printing in London, and I have requested Mr. Radcliff, Mr. Lawder, Mr. Bryanton, my brother Mr. Henry Goldsmith, and my brother-in-law Mr. Hodson, to circulate my proposals among their acquaintances.”
The letter to Dr. Radcliff is unknown: the date of that to Mrs. Lawder, asking her husband’s help, is 15 August, 1758; that to Bryanton is 14 August, 1758; the letter to Henry Goldsmith is lost, but a second letter to him on the same subject says “I shall the beginning of next month send over two hundred and fifty books.” As the work was published on 2 April, 1759, the date of this second letter to the Revd. Henry Goldsmith was probably February, 1759. (It has been preserved, but is not actually dated.)
Taking these several communications in the order of their date, the letter of 7 August, 1758, to Edward Mills, which I exhibit to-day, is a frank appeal for help in circulating the prospectus of Oliver’s new book, but otherwise contains nothing of importance. “Every book published here [London] the printers in Ireland republish there, without giving the Author the least consideration for his coppy. I would in this respect disappoint their avarice, and have all the additional advantages that may result from the sale of my performance there to myself.”
Neither Mills nor Lawder (to whom a similar request was made through the medium of his wife on the 15th of the same month of August, 1758) appears to have taken any notice of it, and in writing to his brother Henry at a later date—about February, 1759—Oliver says “The behaviour of Mr. Mills and Mr. Lawder is a little extraordinary: however, their answering neither you nor me is a sufficient indication of their disliking the employment which I assignd them. As their conduct is different from what I had expected so I have made an alteration in mine. I shall the beginning of next month send over two hundred and fifty books, which are all that I fancy, can be well sold among you.”
The next letter, that dated 14 August, 1758, addressed to Robert Bryanton is only known to us through its appearance for the first time in Prior’s Life (I, 263). It complains of not having heard from Bryanton or of his doings, gives an amusing prophecy of his own future fame 200 years onwards as the author of the Essay on Polite Learning “a work well worth its weight in diamonds,” and then descends suddenly to earth with “Oh! Gods! Gods! here in a garret writing for bread and expecting to be dunned for a milk-score! However, dear Bob, whether in penury or affluence, serious or gay, I am ever thine. Give the most warm and sincere wish you can conceive to your mother, Mrs. Bryanton, to Miss Bryanton, to yourself: and if there be a favourite dog in the family, let me be remembered to it.”
The letter to Mrs. Lawder of 15 August, 1758, is a good deal more guarded, as his relations with his cousin and her husband appear not to have been at that time of a very cordial nature. The original has passed through several hands, and has been reproduced more than once in facsimile. I believe it is now the property of Mr. Sabin of Bond Street. Oliver says he had written to Kilmore (Mrs. Lawder’s address) from Leyden, from Louvain and from Rouen, but had received no answer. “To what could I attribute this, please, but displeasure or forgetfulness?”... “I heartily wish to be rich, if it were only for this reason to say without a blush how much I esteem you, but alas I have many a fatigue to encounter, before that happy time comes: when your poor old simple friend may again give a loose to the luxuriance of his nature, sitting by Kilmore fireside, recount the various adventures of an hard-fought life, laugh over the follies of the day, join his flute to your harpsicord and forget that he ever starv’d in those streets where Butler and Otway starv’d before him.” After a pathetic allusion to the decaying mental powers of his uncle Contarine, Oliver then makes his appeal as to the “Polite Learning,” but “whether this request is complied with or not, I shall not be uneasy.”
The second letter to Daniel Hodson, which I exhibit, is provisionally dated by the modern authorities about November, 1758. It was published by Percy in the edition of 1801, with the family matters omitted, and some few alterations and excisions. The letter really begins “You can’t expect regularity in a correspondence with one who is regular in nothing.” Later, Goldsmith says: “You imagine, I suppose, that every author by profession lives in a garret, wears shabby cloaths and converses with the meanest company; but I assure you such a character is entirely chimerical.” The family matters omitted by Percy may as well be restored:
“I am very much pleasd with the accounts you send me of your little son; if I do not mistake that was his hand which subscrib’d itself Gilbeen Hardly. There is nothing could please me more than a letter filld with all the news of the country, but I fear you will think that too troublesome, you see I never cease writing till a whole sheet of paper is wrote out. I beg you will immitate me in this particular and give your letters good measure. You can tell me, what visits you receive or pay, who has been married or debauch’d, since my absence, what fine girls you have starting up and beating of the veterans of my acquaintance from future conquest. I suppose before I return I shall find all the blooming virgins I once left in Westmeath shrivelled into a parcel of hags with seven children apiece tearing down their petticoats. Most of the Bucks and Bloods whom I left hunting and drinking and swearing and getting bastards I find are dead. Poor devils they kick’d the world before them. I wonder what the devil they kick now.” [End of first sheet of letter.]
On a fresh sheet:
“Dear Sister I wrote to Kilmore [where the Lawders lived]. I wish you would let me know how that family stands affected with regard to me. My Brother Charles promised to tell me all about it but his letter gave me no satisfaction in those particulars. I beg you and Dan would put your hands to the oar and fill me a sheet with somewhat or other, if you can’t get quite thro your selves lend Billy or Nancy the pen and let the dear little things give me their nonsense. Talk all about your selves and nothing about me. You see I do so. I do not know how my desire of seeing Ireland which had so long slept, has again revived with so much ardour....” “I ... brother Charles is settled to business. I see no probability of ... any other proceeding.” [Here follow sixteen lines of writing, which have been very effectually blotted out with ink of another tint, probably by the recipient, who sent the letter to be read by a neighbour.]
The letter ends thus (it is not signed):
“Pray let me hear from my Mother since she will not gratify me herself and tell me if in any thing I can be immediately serviceable to her. Tell me how my Brother Goldsmith and his Bishop agree. Pray do this for me for heaven knows I would do anything to serve you.” [ends.]
The back page is blank, except the address in Goldsmith’s writing: “Daniel Hodson Esqr. at Lishoy near | Ballymahon | Ireland.”
We come now to the one letter to his brother the Revd. Henry Goldsmith which has been preserved. It bears no date, and was doubtless written about February, 1759. After speaking about the “Polite Learning” book, Oliver goes on to describe his own difficulties:
“You scarce can conceive how much eight years of disappointment anguish and study have worn me down. Imagine to yourself a pale melancholly visage with two great wrinkles between the eye-brows, with an eye disgustingly severe and a big wig, and you may have a perfect picture of my present appearance.”
He then discusses and approves as judicious and convincing his brother’s proposals for “breeding up your son as a scholar.” “Preach then my dear Sir, to your son not the excellence of human nature nor the disrespect of riches, but endeavour to teach him thrift and economy. Let his poor wandering uncle’s example be placed in his eyes. I had learned from books to love virtue before I was taught from experience the necessity of being selfish.” (The Percy Memoir of 1801 prunes and waters down this passage.)
After references to his mother and other members of the family, Oliver mentions the imminent publication of his “catchpenny” life of Voltaire, which has brought him in £20, and quotes some phrases of the “heroicomical poem” on the design of which he had asked his brother’s opinion in a previous letter (now lost).
These are the well-known lines commencing
The window, patch’d with paper lent a ray,
That feebly show’d the state in which he lay
with the subsequent references to the “sanded floor” the “humid wall” the game of goose, “the twelve rules the royal martyr drew,” etc. These lines with a different setting reappeared in Letter XXX of the Citizen of the World, which first appeared in the Public Ledger for 2 May, 1760, and some of them were worked afterwards into lines 227-36 of the Deserted Village, 1770, where they are improved by the addition of:
“The Chest contriv’d a double debt to pay
A bed by night, a chest of drawers by day.”
Following his usual practice when he does set to work on a letter, Oliver writes on to the extreme bottom of the page, and finishes thus: “I am resolved to leave no space, tho I should fill it up only by telling you what you very well know already, I mean that I am your most affectionate friend and brother, Oliver Goldsmith.”