Excerpt from The Life and Times of Oliver Goldsmith Genius And Its Rewards Are Brieply Told: A Liberal Nature And A Niggard Doom, A difficult Journey To A Splendid Tomb. New-Writ, Nor Lightly Weighed, That Story Old In Gentle Goldsmith's Life I Here Unpold: Thro' Other Than Lone Wild or Desert-Gloom, In Its Mere Joy And Pain, Its Blight And Bloom, Adventurous. Come With Me And Behold, O Friend With Heart As Gentle For Distress, As Resolute With Wise True Thoughts To Bind The Happiest To The Unhappiest Of Our Kind, That There Is Fiercer Crowed Misery In Garret-Toil And London loneliness Than In Cruel islands 'Mid the Far-Off Sea. John Forster. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Excerpt from The Life and Times of Oliver Goldsmith, Vol. 1 of 2 When this work first appeared, twenty-three years ago, it was made the subject of an attack by the author of a former Life of Goldsmith so unprovoked and inex ensable that even literary history affords hardly a parallel to it. I at once published a reply, to which no rejoinder was ever attempted; and all the subsequent editions of my book were prefaced by it. Sir James Prior is now dead, and I do not print it here. It is, however, necessary to retain some remark' on the principle involved in his com plaint. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Oliver Goldsmith arrived in England in 1756 a penniless Irishman. He toiled for years in the anonymity of Grub Street—already a synonym for impoverished hack writers—before he became one of literary London’s most celebrated authors. Norma Clarke tells the extraordinary story of this destitute scribbler turned gentleman of letters as it unfolds in the early days of commercial publishing, when writers’ livelihoods came to depend on the reading public, not aristocratic patrons. Clarke examines a network of writers radiating outward from Goldsmith: the famous and celebrated authors of Dr. Johnson’s “Club” and those far less fortunate “brothers of the quill” trapped in Grub Street. Clarke emphasizes Goldsmith’s sense of himself as an Irishman, showing that many of his early literary acquaintances were Irish émigrés: Samuel Derrick, John Pilkington, Paul Hiffernan, and Edward Purdon. These writers tutored Goldsmith in the ways of Grub Street, and their influence on his development has not previously been explored. Also Irish was the patron he acquired after 1764, Robert Nugent, Lord Clare. Clarke places Goldsmith in the tradition of Anglo-Irish satirists beginning with Jonathan Swift. He transmuted troubling truths about the British Empire into forms of fable and nostalgia whose undertow of Irish indignation remains perceptible, if just barely, beneath an equanimous English surface. To read Brothers of the Quill is to be taken by the hand into the darker corners of eighteenth-century Grub Street, and to laugh and cry at the absurdities of the writing life.