Oliver Goldsmith
About this episode
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and works of Irish writer Oliver Goldsmith.
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the renowned and versatile Irish writer Oliver Goldsmith (1728 - 1774). There is a memorial to him in Westminster Abbey’s Poet’s Corner written by Dr Johnson, celebrating Goldsmith's life as a poet, natural philosopher and historian. To this could be added ‘playwright’ and ‘novelist’ and ‘science writer’ and ‘pamphleteer’ and much besides, as Goldsmith explored so many different outlets for his talents. While he began on Grub Street in London, the centre for jobbing writers scrambling for paid work, he became a great populariser and compiler of new ideas and knowledge and achieved notable successes with poems such as The Deserted Village, his play She Stoops to Conquer and his short novel The Vicar of Wakefield. With David O’Shaughnessy Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of Galway Judith Hawley Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London And Michael Griffin Professor of English at the University of Limerick Producer: Simon Tillotson Reading list: Norma Clarke, Brothers of the Quill: Oliver Goldsmith in Grub Street (Harvard University Press, 2016) Leo Damrosch, The Club: Johnson, Boswell…
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