Biography Essay

During his short but remarkable literary career of only fifteen years, Oliver Goldsmith wrote individual essays, a pseudoletter essay series, biographies, poems, a novel, and plays— every literary genre practiced in mid-eighteenth- century England. In all, his style showed such grace and charm that, when his friend Samuel Johnson wrote the epitaph for Joseph Nollekens's monument to Goldsmith in Westminster Abbey, he made special note of Goldsmith's versatility, adding that he had touched virtually every literary form, and he had touched none that he did not adorn. In one way or another Goldsmith commented on almost every social change that he and his contemporaries were living through: greater social mobility, the beginnings of the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions, increasing urban growth and economic development, changing sexual customs, and even the early effects of British imperialism at home and abroad. Through the years since, his literary...