Grub Street revisited
Brothers of the Quill: Oliver Goldsmith in Grub Street Norma Clarke Harvard University Press 416 pp; $45.50
How does a presentday biographer record the life of a centuries- old writer such as Oliver Goldsmith? Numerous biographies have already appeared on the subject, no new witnesses can be called to give testimony, and the relevant documents have long since been pored over, the subject and his slender body of work told and re-told.
Professor of English Norma Clarke has the answer: “I have endeavoured to broaden the context,” she states, “and complicate readings.” The first imperative is reflected in her book’s title, Brothers of the Quill: Oliver Goldsmith in Grub Street. Grub Street was a street in 17th- and 18thcentury London, the home of innumerable hack writers, publishers (then known as “booksellers”), poets on the make, journalists and other threadbare men of letters — Brothers of the Quill, in short. It was the epicentre of the new literary culture in Britain, a culture of professional writers dependent on book sales and the favour of a middle-class readership as opposed to the old system of seeking aristocratic patronage and subscriptions ( soliciting money for proposed books).
Oliver Goldsmith, born in 1728, attained prominence in the new culture — by 1760, Clarke writes, he “had become one of London’s most prolific contributors to the popular periodicals” — just as its predecessor was bei ng replaced. Of course, there were no movies, radio or television to hinder the process. Glorious reign of print! ( Even then, however, the literati complained that nobody read. Instead the public was interested only in “sights and monsters,” such as a cat with two legs, a needlewoman without any hands, a painter who drew with his feet.)
This is the context Clarke intends to broaden. Also expanding horizons is the presence of figures such as the Dublin- born Samuel Derrick, an obscure individual to whom Clarke devotes several pages on the grounds that he was, as one commentator put it, “Grub Street incarnate,” the medium by which Goldsmith encountered and experienced the new literary world. Derrick was best known as a gambler and a pimp — but a gambler and a pimp with high literary ambitions. He produced considerable verses that he hoped, understandably, would make an impression on posterity. But he also helped contribute to a notorious publication called the Harris List, a catalogue of prostitutes working Covent Garden, complete with their ages, appearances, specialties, manners, and so on. This was knowledge of a kind few could surpass, and Derrick no doubt gave invaluable assistance to the project.
Derrick, of short stature and ill- favoured, was nonetheless a favourite with the ladies, doubtless because, as Prof. Clarke comments, “he liked women and was kind to them.” Goldsmith could not be considered a similar favourite. The painter Joshua Reynolds, Clarke writes, “noticed that Goldsmith was ill- at- ease in mixed groups, trying too hard to amuse the women, and rarely succeeding. They laughed at him rather than with him.”
At the same time, according to Clarke, Goldsmith successfully constructed a harmless persona, a good-natured image that took him a long way in drawing rooms and publishers’ offices, and also helped ease the sting of being Irish. It also partly explains his politics, which favoured the poor and dispossessed and warned against the accumulation of wealth. This was a sore point with Goldsmith not merely because he was often deeply in debt, but because he, like the other Brothers of the Quill, could not afford to be poor. If it ever became known that he didn’t have two shillings to rub together, he would lose status in the literary world as a man of taste.
The French managed it better, it seemed to Goldsmith. “Their writers were respected and had small but adequate provision from government as well as payment from the sale of books,” according to Clarke.
In the meantime, Goldsmith’s Irish background underscored his awareness of the tendency of the English to amass wealth at the expense of others. Not only had Britain stripped Ireland of her wealth, for example, but Britain had also taken away the very means by which Ireland could regain her prosperity.
From t his awareness comes the complicated reading of such outwardly sweet- tempered narratives as The Vicar of Wakefield, a “serio- comic fable about Goldsmith’s life and times.” This novel is about a bucolic family dogged by an evil squire, one who succeeds in reducing the family to penury and unjust imprisonment. In the end, of course, the family is vindicated.
It’s a melodramatic tale, to be sure, and seemingly impervious to criticism. Clarke quotes Samuel Johnson on Goldsmith’s writing as an art of saying everything one has to say in a pleasing manner. Accordingly, The Vicar of Wakefield, Clarke writes, seems to be destined “to be venerated for its sweetness and lack of guile.” However, she adds, “A cool and much considered resentment animates the novel under its coating of good nature and good humour.”
The resentment becomes clear when the bucolic, virtuous family is identified — as many critics do — with Ireland, and the evil squire is identified as England. This equation lends a certain bitter irony to the vicar’s homespun defence of virtue and divine providence.
Irony, of course, will complicate anything if it has not yet already gone to work on the surface of things. The reader may salute the shade of Goldsmith for helping an academic critic find irony in The Vicar of Wakefield and therefore complicating our own reading of it. We still can enjoy “that sweet story,” as Thackeray put it, even if its sentiment turns to acid in our hands.