Read Online Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives by John Sutherland - Free Book Online

outlines his un-Sterneian philosophy of life in the novel’s opening sentences:
I was ever of opinion that the honest man, who married and brought up a large family, did more service than he who continued single, and only talked of population. From this motive, I had scarce taken orders a year, before I began to think seriously of matrimony, and chose my wife as she did her wedding-gown, not for a fine glossy surface, but such qualities as would wear well.
     
    Mrs Primrose not only wears, but bears well. They have six children (‘the offspring of temperance’, Dr Primrose is in haste to assure us). The family lives comfortably off the father’s invested wealth; his £35 a year stipend he gives to the poor. Disaster strikes when Primrose’s fortune is lost through the malfeasance of a city speculator, who leaves not ‘a shilling in the pound’ for his investors. Job-like tribulation ensues. Adversity, however, does not destroy but further ennobles the hero and his family. All ends providentially.
    The novel’s route into print is mysterious. When, in 1862, Goldsmith found himself in more than usual financial distress with his landlady – arrest was in prospect – Johnson dispatched a guinea. When, a little later he called by, he found the guinea had been expended on a bottle of Madeira. Johnson stuck the cork back in the bottle and ‘talked to him on the means by which he might be extricated’: ‘He then told me he had a novel ready for the press, which he produced to me. I looked into it and saw its merit: told the landlady I should soon return; and, having gone to a bookseller, sold it for sixty pounds. I brought Goldsmith the money, and he discharged his rent, not without rating his landlady in a high tone for having used him so ill.’ Johnson was a friend in need if not the astutest of literary agents. The sale ranks with Milton’s £10 for
Paradise Lost
as one of the worst in literary history. And, oddly,
The Vicar of Wakefield
was not published for a further four years: the delay has never been satisfactorily explained.
    Since 1866, Goldsmith’s novel has never been out of print. It never brought him a fair reward but his long poem
The Deserted Village
(reprinted five times in its first year, 1770) and the comedy
She Stoops to Conquer
(1772) earned huge sums. He spent even more hugely on himself (he never troubled to relieve the poverty of his mother), and his taste for purple silk underwear raised eyebrows in the Johnson circle, whose famed mascot by the mid-1760s he was. In 1769, the King appointed Goldsmith Professor of Ancient History in the Royal Academy. Luckily it entailed no lectures or any other work. By now, however, years of deadlines and keeping one hop ahead of creditors was catching up with him, and he died of a fever. His last words – in response to his physician’s lugubrious enquiry, ‘Is your mind at ease?’ – were ‘No, it is not.’
    Goldsmith’s funeral was a sorry affair. He left the vast debt of £2,000. Mary Horneck – the girl who, from her fourteenth year, seems to have loved him – requested that his coffin be unnailed so that she could have a lock of his hair. Johnson’s verdict was generous: ‘Let not his failings be remembered; he was a very great man.’
     
FN
Oliver Goldsmith
MRT
The Vicar of Wakefield
Biog
A. Lytton Sells,
Oliver Goldsmith: His Life and Works
(1974)

10. Robert Bage 1730–1801
    A strong mind, playful fancy, and extensive knowledge are everywhere apparent.
Walter Scott
     
    Two things are routinely said of Bage by those (few) who ever get around to reading him: one is that more people should read him and the other that
Hermsprong
qualifies as the most bizarre title in English literature. Bage, a child of non-conformity, the Industrial Revolution, and provincial self-improvement, was born (the exact date is uncertain) near Derby, the son of a paper maker ‘remarkable only for having had four wives’, as Walter Scott (a staunch admirer