The subscription price was to be a guinea, and subscriptions would be received by the publisher, L. White, No. 86, Dame Street. What happened to the money received for the subscriptions is not known; probably Maurice Goldsmith drew cash “on account” for most of it. Anyhow the book was never published.
If it had been set about at once, and been limited as proposed to Goldsmith’s Poetical Works, and a Life of him compiled from the original materials collected by Percy, it would doubtless have been a success. As it was, the Bishop’s episcopal duties and other preoccupations appear to have disinclined him to undertake the work himself, and he therefore placed it in other hands, with very unfortunate results to himself and to those members of the Goldsmith family for whose benefit it was intended. Maurice Goldsmith no doubt told his relatives of the pecuniary advantages that were in store for him when the work came out, and appeals for help reached the Bishop from the daughter of Henry Goldsmith, from the widow of Maurice, from Charles Goldsmith, and from a son of Charles named John Goldsmith. In the absence of the published work these appeals had to be met out of the Bishop’s private purse, and involved him in much distressing correspondence with the impoverished relatives of his dead friend.
At what period Percy formed the idea of expanding the publication so as to include all Goldsmith’s known works—prose as well as poetry—is not clear. Probably he was more concerned to see the Life written or at least in preparation. It must be remembered that he was exceedingly badly placed for now attempting work of this kind. He was in a remote part of Ireland where the posts were irregular and the magazines did not reach him till months after their issue. Writing to Malone on 16 June, 1785, he said: “I see publications about as soon as they would reach the East Indies.” (Lit. Ill., VIII, 237.)
He seems to have attempted to shift the burden of compilation of the biography on to a somewhat fulsome correspondent, Dr. Thomas Campbell, Rector of Clones. When, after a long interval, Campbell’s efforts proved unsatisfactory, the Bishop tried as collaborator the Rev. E. H. Boyd, the translator of Dante, with equally disappointing results, Boyd, like Campbell, having no personal knowledge of Goldsmith. Eventually he had to set to work himself on a thorough revision; but troubles arose after he had sent the manuscript to the publishers in London (Cadell & Davies). Evidently that firm, to give local colour to the narrative, got Samuel Rose to add some particulars about Goldsmith (not always complimentary) from Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Percy, who was not consulted, dissented from these “interpolations,”[2] and eventually repudiated all responsibility for the work, which did not actually see the light of day until it appeared in four volumes in 1801. Percy let his correspondents who wrote to him about Goldsmith know how badly he was being treated, and they replied softly to him, except George Steevens, who wrote on 9 September, 1797:
“Thus my Lord, you are left to make the best of your bargain; for if you cannot intimidate you must submit. It is true that the works of Goldsmith will always be sought after; but with equal truth it may be observed that in this kingdom you will discover little zeal to promote the welfare of his needy relatives, hundreds of objects here having a superior claim to publick charity.” (Litt. Ill., VII, 1848, pp. 30-1.)
After Percy’s death in 1811 the major part of his voluminous correspondence with literary and other friends appears to have descended to his elder daughter Barbara, who had married in 1795 Mr. Samuel Isted, of Ecton, Northamptonshire. It probably consisted not so much of Percy’s own letters, which were doubtless retained in most cases by their recipients, as of his correspondents’ letters to him, with drafts of his replies to the more important of them. John Nichols, the antiquarian printer who managed the Gentleman’s Magazine, was a great friend and frequent correspondent of Percy, and the sixth volume (1831) of the well-known Literary Illustrations contained a short memoir and portrait of Percy, with a selection of his letters partly derived from William Upcott, Assistant Librarian of the London Institution (p. viii of Introduction). The 856 pages of the next Volume VII of the Illustrations, which was not published till seventeen years later (1848), were practically entirely devoted to letters from and to Percy—mostly the latter. This correspondence, according to the “Advertisement” by J. B. Nichols, the editor, “was not in my possession at the completion of the sixth volume, but has been acquired since by public sale.”[3] Even this huge book did not contain all the Percy letters, for the eighth and final volume of the Illustrations, not published till 1858, was, so far as the letterpress (436 pages) is concerned, wholly taken up with the rest of the “Percy correspondence.” There are many references to Goldsmith and to the long-delayed “Memoir” of 1801 in these letters, but nothing of great importance, and I therefore have to fall back on the bundle of “Goldsmithiana” which has happily been preserved in the other branch of the Percy family—the Meades.
The story of the incubation, preparation and final publication of the Edition of 1801 is long, complicated and tedious. It does not however particularly concern us here, except in so far as we are indebted to Bishop Percy for having collected practically all the original letters written by Goldsmith to members of his family, and for having in his disappointment after they were published, put them away with the other documents concerning the publication, in a bundle which has been practically unexplored ever since. Setting aside therefore any questions as to the merits or demerits of what has been consistently labelled by subsequent commentators as the “Percy Memoir,” we are left with the consideration of the point to which I had intended to address myself exclusively, the epistolary style of Oliver Goldsmith himself. Percy could not resist the temptation of editing his friend’s letters—not much, it is true, but still enough to induce us to turn to the originals, as we are now enabled to do through the kindness of their present possessor, Miss Constance Meade.
Now whilst Percy, as I have indicated, was an ardent and industrious letter writer, Oliver Goldsmith emphatically was not.
One of Percy’s most frequent correspondents, James Grainger, M.D. (1724-1766), who was, as already mentioned, the first to introduce Percy and Goldsmith to each other, wrote to the former on 24 March, 1764: “When I taxed little Goldsmith for not writing as he promised me, his answer was that he never wrote a letter in his life, and faith, I believe him, except to a bookseller for money.” (Nichols’ Literary Illustrations, Vol. VII, 286.) The letters written by Goldsmith to members of his family and Irish friends of his youth which were collected from various quarters at the instance of Percy after the poet’s death show him to have had a great power of expressing his feelings in simple and moving language, all the more interesting as the writer could not possibly have imagined that they would ever be seen in the cold light of print. Such letters divide themselves naturally into three categories, viz.: those written (1) whilst he was a student in Scotland and abroad; (2) after he had returned to England and was a struggling hack-writer; (3) when he had achieved success in the literary world. It will be convenient to consider these three series of letters separately.