Oliver Goldsmith

He died prematurely in 1774 due to his self-misdiagnosis of his kidney infection. He was buried in Temple Church in London.

Posthumously, the place where he lived has a lane and a school named after him.

Several statues dedicated to him have been built and stand as the testimony of his greatness as a writer. While one is located at the Front Arch of Trinity College Dublin, there is one in Ballymahon County Longford and one in Westminster Abbey.

There is no specific information as to when was Oliver Goldsmith actually born. However, based on a Library of Congress authority file and his word of mouth, it is speculated that he was born on November 10, 1728

Born in an Anglican-Irish family, his father was a curator of the parish of Forgney. It was when young Goldsmith turned two that his father attained the service of the rector of the parish of "Kilkenny West" in County Westmeath, which resulted in the family shifting base to the parsonage at Lissoy.

In 1744, he enrolled at the Trinity College in Dublin to study theology and law. However, he soon drifted away from studies and found himself rank at the below most position in the class.

Furthermore, he was expelled from his class in 1747 along with four other undergraduates for attempting to storm the Marshalsea Prison. Two years later, he finally graduated as a Bachelor of Arts, however, without a discipline or distinction that otherwise would have gained him a direct entry to a profession in the church or the law.

He thoughtlessly spent away the after-graduation years trying various professions without any success. For three years, from 1752 until 1755, he studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh but without much interest. Later on, he set on a walking tour moving across Flanders, France, Switzerland and Northern Italy.

In 1756, he settled in London for a brief duration of time where he took upon various jobs to earn a livelihood, including that of an apothecary’s assistant and an usher of a school. He even contributed as a hack writer for a publisher in London, reviewing, translating and compiling materials.

During his time as a hack writer, he contributed much for Ralph Griffith’s ‘Monthly Review’. Unlike other hack writers of his generation, he had the inherent talent of coming up with graceful, lively, and readable style work.

Within a short span of time, from being the once-obscure and relatively less known writer, he emerged to walk along and shake hands with the aristocrats and the intellectual elites of London.

He often used the pseudonym James Willington during the early days of his writing. In 1758, he published the translation of the autobiography of the Huguenot Jean Marteilhe.

Interestingly, this Anglo-Irish writer of ‘The Vicar of Wakefield’ fame envied everyone, right from his contemporaries to his critics. He could not bear a praise of anyone else and as such, would discharge the feeling by making a joke of the admiration or a mockery of himself.