The Poet and the Hack: Goldsmith's Career as a Professional Writer

Abstract

Although recognized by his contemporaries as a major writer, Oliver Goldsmith was also widely ridiculed. This essay reads the unresolved tension between the acknowledged writer of genius and the foolish public figure as a manifestation of his desire to succeed as a professional writer and yet to be considered a gentleman.

After years in which Goldsmith expressed considerable disdain for professional authorship, he eventually embraced it and, after the publication of “The Traveller”, became one of the shrewdest exploiters of the literary market-place. While the status of the “Traveller” increased his success as a professional writer, it also helped him to identify himself as someone above the market, as someone outside of, and not defined by, its logic.

However, this reconciliation of his pro-market and his anti-market sentiments was short-lived. Despite his success, Goldsmith never resolved the contradictions inherent in his position as a professional writer determined to transcend that position. A discussion of the purposes of Goldsmith's notorious sartorial choices, perhaps the most prominent aspect of his celebrity, alongside the argument concerning luxury presented in “The Deserted Village” shows that his second major poem dramatizes these contradictions but cannot resolve them.