Their nephew, Sir Isaac Lyon Goldsmid, Bart. (1778-1859), was born in London, and began in business with a firm of bullion brokers to the Bank of England and the East India Company. He amassed a large fortune, and was made Baron da Palmeira by the Portuguese government in 1846 for services rendered In settling a monetary dispute between Portugal and Brazil, but he is chiefly known for his efforts to obtain the emancipation of the Jews in England and for his part in founding University College, London. The Jewish Disabilities Bill, first introduced in Parliament by Sir Robert Grant in 1830, owed its final passage to Goldsmid’s energetic work. He helped to establish the University College hospital in 1834, serving as its treasurer for eighteen years, and also aided in the efforts to obtain reform in the English penal code. Moreover he assisted by his capital and his enterprise to build part of the English southern railways and also the London docks. In 1841 he became the first Jewish baronet, the honour being conferred upon him by Lord Melbourne. He had married his cousin Isabel (see above), and their second son was Sir Francis Henry Goldsmid, Bart. (1808-1878), born in London, and called to the bar at Lincoln’s Inn in 1833 (the first Jew to become an English barrister; Q.C. 1858). After the passing of the Jewish Disabilities Bill, in which he had aided his father with a number of pamphlets that attracted great attention, he entered Parliament in 1860 (having succeeded to the baronetcy) as member for Reading, and represented that constituency until his death. He was strenuous on behalf of the Jewish religion, and the founder of the great Jews’ Free School. He was a munificent contributor to charities and especially to the endowment of University College. He, like his father, married a cousin, and, dying without issue, was succeeded in the baronetcy by his nephew Sir Julian Goldsmid, Bart. (1838-1896), son of Frederick David Goldsmid (1812-1866), long M.P. for Honiton. Sir Julian was for many years in Parliament, and his wealth, ability and influence made him a personage of considerable importance. He was eventually made a privy councillor. He had eight daughters, but no son, and his entailed property passed to his relation, Mr d’Avigdor, his house in Piccadilly being converted into the Isthmian Club.
Another distinguished member of the same family, Sir Frederic John Goldsmid (1818-1908), son of Lionel Prager Goldsmid (see above), was educated at King’s College, London, and entering the Madras army in 1839 served in the China War of 1840-41, with the Turkish troops in eastern Crimea in 1855-56, and was given political employment by the Indian government. He received the thanks of the commander-in-chief and of the war office for services during the Egyptian campaign, and was retired a major-general in 1875. Sir Frederic Goldsmid’s name is, however, associated less with military service than with much valuable work in exploration and in surveying, for which he repeatedly received the thanks of government. From 1865 to 1870 he was director-general of the Indo-European telegraph, and carried through the telegraph convention with Persia; and between 1870 and 1872, as commissioner, he settled with Persia the difficult questions of the Perso-Baluch and Perso-Afghan boundaries. In the course of his work he had to travel extensively, and he followed this up by various responsible missions connected with emigration questions. In 1881-1882 he was in Egypt, as controller of the Daira Sanieh, and doing other miscellaneous military work; and in 1883 he went to the Congo, on behalf of the king of the Belgians, as one of the organizers of the new state, but had to return on account of illness. From his early years he had made studies of several Eastern languages, and he ranked among the foremost Orientalists of his day. In 1886 he was president of the geographical section of the British Association meeting held at Birmingham. He had married in 1849, and had two sons and four daughters. In 1871 he was made a K.C.S.I. Besides important contributions to the 9th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and many periodicals, he wrote an excellent and authoritative biography of Sir James Outram (2 vols., 1880).
A sister of the last-named married Henry Edward Goldsmid (1812-1855), an eminent Indian civil servant, son of Edward Goldsmid; his reform of the revenue system in Bombay, and introduction of a new system, established after his death, through his reports in 1840-1847, and his devoted labour in land-surveys, were of the highest importance to western India, and established his memory there as a public benefactor.
GOLDSMITH, LEWIS (c. 1763-1846), Anglo-French publicist, of Portuguese-Jewish extraction, was born near London about 1763. Having published in 1801 The Crimes of Cabinets, or a Review of the Plans and Aggressions for Annihilating the Liberties of France, and the Dismemberment of her Territories, an attack on the military policy of Pitt, he moved, in 1802, from England to Paris. Talleyrand introduced him to Napoleon, who arranged for him to establish in Paris an English tri-weekly, the Argus, which was to review English affairs from the French point of view. According to his own account, he was in 1803 entrusted with a mission to obtain from the head of the French royal family, afterwards Louis XVIII., a renunciation of his claims to the throne of France, in return for the throne of Poland. The offer was declined, and Goldsmith says that he then received instructions to kidnap Louis and kill him if he resisted, but, instead of executing these orders, he revealed the plot. He was, nevertheless, employed by Napoleon on various other secret service missions till 1807, when his Republican sympathies began to wane. In 1809 he returned to England, where he was at first imprisoned but soon released; and he became a notary in London. In 1811, being now violently anti-republican, he founded a Sunday newspaper, the Anti-Gallican Monitor and Anti-Corsican Chronicle, subsequently known as the British Monitor, in which he denounced the French Revolution. In 1811 he proposed that a public subscription should be raised to put a price on Napoleon’s head, but this suggestion was strongly reprobated by the British government. In the same year he published Secret History of the Cabinet of Bonaparte and Recueil des manifestes, or a Collection of the Decrees of Napoleon Bonaparte, and in 1812 Secret History of Bonaparte’s Diplomacy. Goldsmith alleged that in the latter year he was offered £200,000 by Napoleon to discontinue his attacks. In 1815 he published An Appeal to the Governments of Europe on the Necessity of bringing Napoleon Bonaparte to a Public Trial. In 1825 he again settled down in Paris, and in 1832 published his Statistics of France. His only child, Georgiana, became, in 1837, the second wife of Lord Lyndhurst. He died in Paris on the 6th of January 1846.
GOLDSMITH, OLIVER (1728-1774), English poet, playwright, novelist and man of letters, came of a Protestant and Saxon family which had long been settled in Ireland. He is usually said to have been born at Pallas or Pallasmore, Co. Longford; but recent investigators have contended, with much show of probability, that his true birthplace was Smith-Hill House, Elphin, Roscommon, the residence of his mother’s father, the Rev. Oliver Jones. His father, Charles Goldsmith, lived at Pallas, supporting with difficulty his wife and children on what he could earn, partly as a curate and partly as a farmer.
While Oliver was still a child his father was presented to the living of Kilkenny West, in the county of West Meath. This was worth about £200 a year. The family accordingly quitted their cottage at Pallas for a spacious house on a frequented road, near the village of Lissoy. Here the boy was taught his letters by a relative and dependent, Elizabeth Delap, and was sent in his seventh year to a village school kept by an old quartermaster on half-pay, who professed to teach nothing but reading, writing and arithmetic, but who had an inexhaustible fund of stories about ghosts, banshees and fairies, about the great Rapparee chiefs, Baldearg O’Donnell and galloping Hogan, and about the exploits of Peterborough and Stanhope, the surprise of Monjuich and the glorious disaster of Brihuega. This man must have been of the Protestant religion; but he was of the aboriginal race, and not only spoke the Irish language, but could pour forth unpremeditated Irish verses. Oliver early became, and through life continued to be, a passionate admirer of the Irish music, and especially of the compositions of Carolan, some of the last notes of whose harp he heard. It ought to be added that Oliver, though by birth one of the Englishry, and though connected by numerous ties with the Established Church, never showed the least sign of that contemptuous antipathy with which, in his days, the ruling minority in Ireland too generally regarded the subject majority. So far indeed was he from sharing in the opinions and feelings of the caste to which he belonged that he conceived an aversion to the Glorious and Immortal Memory, and, even when George III. was on the throne, maintained that nothing but the restoration of the banished dynasty could save the country.
From the humble academy kept by the old soldier Goldsmith was removed in his ninth year. He went to several grammar-schools, and acquired some knowledge of the ancient languages. His life at this time seems to have been far from happy. He had, as appears from the admirable portrait of him by Reynolds at Knole, features harsh even to ugliness. The small-pox had set its mark on him with more than usual severity. His stature was small, and his limbs ill put together. Among boys little tenderness is shown to personal defects; and the ridicule excited by poor Oliver’s appearance was heightened by a peculiar simplicity and a disposition to blunder which he retained to the last. He became the common butt of boys and masters, was pointed at as a fright in the play-ground, and flogged as a dunce in the schoolroom. When he had risen to eminence, those who had once derided him ransacked their memory for the events of his early years, and recited repartees and couplets which had dropped from him, and which, though little noticed at the time, were supposed, a quarter of a century later, to indicate the powers which produced the Vicar of Wakefield and the Deserted Village.
On the 11th of June 1744, being then in his sixteenth year, Oliver went up to Trinity College, Dublin, as a sizar. The sizars paid nothing for food and tuition, and very little for lodging; but they had to perform some menial services from which they have long been relieved. Goldsmith was quartered, not alone, in a garret of what was then No. 35 in a range of buildings which has long since disappeared. His name, scrawled by himself on one of its window-panes is still preserved in the college library. From such garrets many men of less parts than his have made their way to the woolsack or to the episcopal bench. But Goldsmith, while he suffered all the humiliations, threw away all the advantages of his situation. He neglected the studies of the place, stood low at the examinations, was turned down to the bottom of his class for playing the buffoon in the lecture-room, was severely reprimanded for pumping on a constable, and was caned by a brutal tutor for giving a ball in the attic storey of the college to some gay youths and damsels from the city.