The Letters of Oliver Goldsmith

This first modern scholarly edition of the letters of Oliver Goldsmith (1728–1774) sets the author of The Vicar of Wakefield, The Deserted Village, and She Stoops to Conquer in a rich context, showing how Goldsmith's Irish identity was marked and complicated by cosmopolitan ambition. He was at the very heart of Grub Street culture and the Georgian theatre, and was a founding member of Dr Johnson's Literary Club; his circle included Edmund Burke, Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, George Colman and Hester Piozzi. Containing a detailed introduction and extensive notes, this edition is essential to those wishing to know more about Goldsmith the man and the writer, and provides a rich and suggestive nexus for understanding the cultural cross-currents of the literary Enlightenment in eighteenth-century London.

List of illustrations; Acknowledgements; List of abbreviations; Introduction; A note on the edition; Chronology of Goldsmith's life and works; The letters; Bibliography; Index.

Michael Griffin is a senior lecturer in English Literature at the University of Limerick. He is the author of Enlightenment in Ruins: The Geographies of Oliver Goldsmith (2013). He has also edited The Selected Writings of Thomas Dermody (2012), and The Collected Works of Laurence Whyte (2016).
David O'Shaughnessy is an associate professor in English at Trinity College Dublin. He is the author of William Godwin and the Theatre (2010), editor of The Plays of William Godwin (2010) and co-editor of the online edition of Godwin's diary. He has also edited a special issue of Eighteenth-Century Life (2015) on the London Irish of the eighteenth century.