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Premiere of Oliver Goldsmith’s Play “The Good-Natur’d Man”

The Good-Natur’d Man, a play written by Oliver Goldsmith in 1768, is first performed at Central London’s Covent Garden on January 29, 1768. The play is written in the form of a comedy with Mary Bulkley as Miss Richland. It is released at the same time as Hugh Kelly‘s False Delicacy, staged at Drury Lane Theatre. The two plays go head to head, with Kelly’s proving the more popular. Goldsmith’s play is a middling success and the printed version of the play becomes popular with the reading public.

Although his birth date and year and birthplace are not known with any certainty, it is believed that Goldsmith is born on November 10, 1728, in Kilkenny West, County Westmeath. He is an Anglo-Irish essayist, poet, novelist, dramatist, and eccentric, made famous by such works as the series of essays The Citizen of the World, or, Letters from a Chinese Philosopher (1762), the poem The Deserted Village (1770), the novel The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), and the play She Stoops to Conquer (1773).

Goldsmith is the son of an Anglo-Irish clergyman, the Rev. Charles Goldsmith, curate in charge of Kilkenny West. At about the time of his birth, the family moves into a substantial house at nearby Lissoy, where he spends his childhood. Much has been recorded concerning his youth, his unhappy years as an undergraduate at Trinity College Dublin, where he received the BA degree in February 1749, and his many misadventures before he leaves Ireland in the autumn of 1752 to study in the medical school at Edinburgh. By this time his father has died, but several of his relations support him in his pursuit of a medical degree. Later on, in London, he comes to be known as Dr. Goldsmith, Doctor being the courtesy title for one who holds the Bachelor of Medicine, but he takes no degree while at Edinburgh nor, so far as anyone knows, during the two-year period when, despite his meagre funds, which are eventually exhausted, he somehow manages to make his way through Europe. The first period of his life ends with his arrival in London, bedraggled and penniless, early in 1756.

Goldsmith’s rise from total obscurity is a matter of only a few years. He works as an apothecary‘s assistant, school usher, physician, and as a hack writer, reviewing, translating, and compiling. Much of his work is for Ralph Griffiths‘s Monthly Review. It remains amazing that this young Irish vagabond, unknown, uncouth, unlearned, and unreliable, is yet able within a few years to climb from obscurity to mix with aristocrats and the intellectual elite of London. Such a rise is possible because he has one quality, soon noticed by booksellers and the public, that his fellow literary hacks do not possess – the gift of a graceful, lively, and readable style.

Goldsmith’s rise begins with the Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe (1759), a minor work. Soon he emerges as an essayist, in The Bee and other periodicals, and above all in his Chinese Letters. These essays are first published in the journal The Public Ledger and are collected as The Citizen of the World in 1762. The same year brings his The Life of Richard Nash. Already he is acquiring those distinguished and often helpful friends whom he alternately annoys and amuses, shocks and charms – Samuel Johnson, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Percy, David Garrick, Edmund Burke, and James Boswell.

The obscure drudge of 1759 becomes in 1764 one of the nine founder-members of the famous The Club, a select body, including Reynolds, Johnson, and Burke, which meets weekly for supper and talk. Goldsmith can now afford to live more comfortably, but his extravagance continually runs him into debt, and he is forced to undertake more hack work. He thus produces histories of England and of ancient Rome and Greece, biographies, verse anthologies, translations, and works of popular science.

Goldsmith’s premature death on April 4, 1774, may be partly due to his own misdiagnosis of a kidney infection. He is buried in Temple Church in London. A monument is originally raised to him at the site of his burial, but this is destroyed in an air raid in 1941. A monument to him survives in the centre of Ballymahon, also in Westminster Abbey with an epitaph written by Samuel Johnson.

Among Goldsmith’s papers is found the prospectus of an encyclopedia, to be called the Universal dictionary of the arts and sciences. He wishes this to be the British equivalent of the Encyclopédie and it is to include comprehensive articles by Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Sir William Jones, Charles James Fox and Dr. Charles Burney. The project, however, is not realised due to Goldsmith’s death.

(Pictured: “Mr Honeywell introduces the bailiffs to Miss Richland as his friends,”a scene from the play “The Good-Natur’d Man” by Oliver Goldsmith, oil on panel by William Powell Frith)


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Birth of George Henry Perrott Buchanan, Poet, Novelist & Journalist

George Henry Perrott Buchanan, poet, novelist, and journalist is born on January 9, 1904, in Kilwaughter, County Antrim, in what is now Northern Ireland.

Buchanan is the second child and younger of two sons and one daughter of the Rev. Charles Henry Leslie Buchanan (1863–1939) and Florence Buchanan (née Moore). He is educated at Larne Grammar School in Larne, County Antrim, Campbell College, Belfast, and Queen’s University Belfast (QUB). He works for the Northern Whig (1921) and is a founder member of the Northern Drama League, Belfast (1923). After moving to London, he joins The Daily Graphic, becomes a reviewer (1928–40) for The Times Literary Supplement, sub-editor (1930–35) of The Times, and columnist and drama critic (1935–38) for the News Chronicle.

During World War II, Buchanan serves as an operations officer in RAF Coastal Command (1940–45). His service includes a period in Sierra Leone, operational liaison with Free France in French Equatorial Africa, and night attacks on U-boats in the Bay of Biscay. After the war, he lives in Limavady, County Londonderry, Northern Ireland, for nearly ten years, which he later describes as a period of regeneration. During this time, he broadcasts for BBC Radio and becomes chairman of the NI town and country development committee (1949–53) and a member (from 1954) of the executive council of the European Society of Culture (Venice), and later president of its London centre.

A versatile writer with wide-ranging concerns, Buchanan publishes his first journal, Passage Through the Present, in 1932. It is followed by six novels, including A London Story (1935) and Naked Reason (1971). His plays include A Trip to the Castle (1960) and War Song (1965). The Politics of Culture (1977) is one of several collections of essays, and Green Seacoast (1959) and Morning Papers (1965) are autobiographical. His writing has been noted for its integrity and for the diversity of its ideas. Recurrent themes are the importance of common experience, living sensitively in the present, and the impoverishment of urban life. He believes in the power of ideas and the creative nature of journalism in the modern world. Despite his prosaic style, he writes poetry from his teenage years. It “was always the base from which everything else was motivated. . . [it] affected, and perhaps energised, everything I did. Its pressure led me to special attitudes in journalism, in the theatre, in the novel.” He publishes his first collection, Bodily Responses, in 1958. Other collections include Annotations (1970) and Inside Traffic (1976). In order to bring the variety of his work to a wider audience, Frank Ormsby devotes a supplement in the Honest Ulsterman (1978) to Buchanan, whom he believes is almost forgotten in Ireland and has been unjustly neglected.

Buchanan lives at 18A Courtnell Street, London W2. He marries four times, first to Winifred Mary Corn (1938-45), secondly to Noel Pulleyne Ritter (1949-51), thirdly to the Hon. Janet Hampden Margesson (1952-68), with whom he had two daughters, and fourthly to Sandra Gail McCloy (1974-89). He dies on June 28, 1989, in Richmond, London, and is cremated at Mortlake Crematorium, Richmond.

(From: “Buchanan, George Henry Perrott” by Helen Andrews, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009 | Pictured: George Henry Perrott Buchanan by Howard Coster, 10 x 8 inch film negative, 1935, transferred from Central Office of Information, 1974)


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Death of Dennis O’Driscoll, Poet, Essayist, Critic and Editor

Dennis O’Driscoll, Irish poet, essayist, critic and editor, dies suddenly on December 24, 2012, in Naas, County Kildare. Regarded as one of the best European poets of his time, Eileen Battersby considers him “the lyric equivalent of William Trevor” and a better poet “by far” than Raymond Carver. Gerard Smyth regards him as “one of poetry’s true champions and certainly its most prodigious archivist.” His book on Seamus Heaney is regarded as the definitive biography of the Nobel laureate.

Born on January 1, 1954 in Thurles, County Tipperary, O’Driscoll is the child of James O’Driscoll and Catherine Lahart, a salesman/horticulturist and a homemaker. He is educated by the Congregation of Christian Brothers. After completing his secondary education in 1970 at the age of sixteen, he is offered a job at Ireland’s Office of the Revenue Commissioners, the internal revenue and customs service. Specializing in “death duties, stamp duties, and customs,” he is employed for over thirty years full-time. He lives in Naas, County Kildare, until his sudden death.

In the 1970s and 80s, O’Driscoll holds many part-time jobs and positions in association with his writing. He takes a position as part-time editor of Tax Briefing, a technical journal produced in Ireland, as well as reviewing poetry for Hibernia, and The Crane Bag. He also serves on the council of the Irish United Nations Association from 1975–80. After this, he marries Julie O’Callaghan, a poet and writer, in September 1985. He stays in the revenue business for as long as he does due to the advice of a colleague, who teels him, “If you ever leave your job, you will stop writing.” Thus, revenue becomes a sort of fall back option for him; a career that pays regularly and provides a pension. Whereas poetry is his art. Even so, in his memoir entitled, Sing for the Taxman, he states, “I have always regarded myself as a civil servant rather than a ‘poet’ or ‘artist’ – words I would find embarrassing and presumptuous to ascribe to myself.”

After thirty-eight years in Revenue, in early 2008, O’Driscoll is asked to write a poem marking the opening of the Revenue Museum in Dublin Castle, marking the first time his job and his art intermingle. This poem, At The Revenue Museum, which is originally brought to life to be printed in a program for the opening ceremony, now hangs as an exhibit in the museum itself.

Prior to the publication of his own poems, O’Driscoll publishes widely in journals and other print publications as both an essayist and poetry reviewer, for which he is very widely known. He writes nine books of poetry, three chapbooks, and two collections of essays and reviews. The majority of his works are characterised by the use of economic language and the recurring motifs of mortality and the fragility of everyday life. In 1987, he temporarily becomes a writer-in-residence at the National University of Ireland. He also serves for a short time as editor of Poetry Ireland Review.

O’Driscoll dies suddenly at the age of 58 on December 24, 2012. He is rushed to hospital after becoming ill but quickly succumbs to his fate. The arts world is shocked by his sudden demise. His wife and siblings – brothers Proinsias, Seamus, Declan, and sisters, Marie and Eithne – survive him.

President Michael D. Higgins notes that O’Driscoll is “held in the highest regard not only by all those associated with Irish and European poetry.” Joe Duffy, with whom O’Driscoll had appeared on air on the very week of his death, calls him a “generous, caring and witty man.” Fellow writer Belinda McKeon says he was “a scholar, a gentleman, a character, a friend.” English poet and critic David Morley describes him as a “fine poet and great critic.” Irish PEN mourns his death.


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Birth of Jonathan Swift, Essayist, Pamphleteer, Poet & Cleric

Jonathan Swift, satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer, poet and cleric who becomes Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, is born in Dublin on November 30, 1667.

Swift’s father, an attorney, also named Jonathan Swift, dies just two months before he is born. Without steady income, his mother struggles to provide for her newborn. Moreover, he is a sickly child. It is later discovered that he suffers from Ménière’s disease, a condition of the inner ear that leaves the afflicted nauseous and hard of hearing. In an effort to give her son the best upbringing possible, Swift’s mother gives him over to Godwin Swift, her late husband’s brother and a member of the respected professional attorney and judges group Gray’s Inn. Godwin Swift enrolls his nephew with one of his cousins in Kilkenny College, which is perhaps the best school in Ireland at the time. He arrives there at the age of six, where he is expected to have already learned the basic declensions in Latin. He has not, and thus begins his schooling in a lower form. He graduates in 1682, when he is 15. His transition from a life of poverty to a rigorous private school setting proves challenging. He does, however, make a fast friend in William Congreve, the future poet and playwright.

In 1682, Swift commences his undergraduate studies at Trinity College, Dublin. In 1686, he receives a Bachelor of Arts degree and goes on to pursue a master’s degree. Not long into his research, huge unrest breaks out in Ireland. The king of Ireland, England and Scotland is soon to be overthrown. What becomes known as the Glorious Revolution of 1688 spurs him to move to England and start anew. For 10 years, Swift works in Surrey‘s Moor Park and acts as an assistant to Sir William Temple, 1st Baronet.

During his Moor Park years, Swift meets the daughter of Temple’s housekeeper, an 8-year-old named Esther Johnson, known as “Stella.” They become lovers for the rest of their lives until Johnson’s death in 1728. It is rumored that they marry in 1716 and that Swift keeps of lock of Johnson’s hair in his possession at all times.

During his decade of work for Temple, Swift returns to Ireland twice. On a trip in 1695, he takes all necessary requirements to become an ordained priest in the Anglican tradition. Under Temple’s influence, he also begins to write, first short essays and then a manuscript for a later book. Temple dies in 1699. Swift completes the task of editing and publishing Temple’s memoirs. He then leans on his priestly qualifications and finds work ministering to a pea-sized congregation just 20 miles outside of Dublin. For the next ten years, he gardens, preaches and works on the house provided to him by the church. He also returns to writing. His first political pamphlet is titled A Discourse on the Contests and Dissentions in Athens and Rome.

In 1704, Swift anonymously releases A Tale of a Tub and The Battle of the Books. Tub, although widely popular with the masses, is harshly disapproved of by the Church of England. Ostensibly, it criticizes religion, but Swift means it as a parody of pride. Nonetheless, his writings earn him a reputation in London and when the Tories come into power in 1710, they ask him to become editor of The Examiner, their official paper. After a time, he becomes fully immersed in the political landscape and begins writing some of the most cutting and well-known political pamphlets of the day, including The Conduct of the Allies, an attack on the Whigs. Privy to the inner circle of Tory government, he lays out his private thoughts and feelings in a stream of letters to his beloved Stella. They are later published as The Journal to Stella.

When he sees that the Tories will soon fall from power, Swift returns to Ireland. In 1713, he takes the post of Dean at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin. While leading his congregation at St. Patrick’s, he begins to write what would become his best-known work. In 1726, at last finished with the manuscript, he travels to London and benefits from the help of several friends, who anonymously publish it as Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships, more simply known as Gulliver’s Travels. The book is an immediate success and has not been out of print since its first run.

Not long after the celebration of this work, Esther Johnson, falls ill. She dies in January 1728. Her death moves Swift to write The Death of Mrs. Johnson.

In 1742, Swift suffers a stroke and loses the ability to speak. He dies on October 19, 1745. He is laid to rest next to Esther Johnson inside Dublin’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral.


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Birth of Irish Novelist John Banim

John Banim, Irish novelist, short story writer, playwright, poet and essayist, sometimes called the “Scott of Ireland,” is born in Kilkenny, County Kilkenny on April 3, 1798. He also studied art, working as a painter of miniatures and portraits, and as a drawing teacher, before dedicating himself to literature.

At age four, Banim’s parents send him to a local school where he learns the basics of reading and grammar. At age five, he is sent to the English Academy at Kilkenny where his older brother Michael (1796–1874) is a student. After five years at the English Academy, he is sent to a seminary run by a Reverent Magrath, considered to be the finest Roman Catholic school in Ireland. After a year at the seminary, he transfers to another academy run by a teacher named Terence Doyle. Throughout his school years, he reads avidly and writes his own stories and poems. When he is ten, he visits the poet Thomas Moore, bringing along some of his own poetry in manuscript. Moore encourages him to continue writing and gives him a season ticket to his private theatre in Kilkenny.

At the age of 13, Banim enters Kilkenny College and devotes himself specially to drawing and miniature painting. He pursues his artistic education for two years in the schools of the Royal Dublin Society, and afterwards teaches drawing in Kilkenny, where he falls in love with one of his pupils, a 17-year-old girl named Anne. His affection is returned, but her parents disapprove of their relationship and send her out of town. Anne dies two months later of tuberculosis. Her death makes a deep impression on him and his health suffers severely and permanently.

In 1820 Banim goes to Dublin and settles finally to the work of literature. He publishes a poem, The Celt’s Paradise, and his play Damon and Pythias is performed at Covent Garden in 1821. During a short visit to Kilkenny he marries, and in 1822, in conjunction with Michael, plans a series of tales illustrative of Irish life, which should be for Ireland what the Waverley Novels are for Scotland. The influence of his model is distinctly traceable in his writings.

Banim then sets out for London, and supports himself by writing for magazines and for the stage. A volume of miscellaneous essays is published anonymously in 1824, called Revelations of the Dead Alive. The first series of Tales of the O’Hara Family appears in April 1825, which achieves immediate and decided success. One of the most powerful of them, Crohoore of the Bill Hook, is by Michael Banim.

In 1826, a second series is published, containing the Irish novel, The Nowlans. Banim’s health has given way, and the next effort of the “O’Hara family” is almost entirely the production of his brother Michael. The Croppy, a Tale of 1798 (1828), a novel of the Irish Rebellion of 1798, is hardly equal to the earlier tales, though it contains some wonderfully vigorous passages.

The Mayor of Windgap, and The Ghost Hunter (both by Michael Banim), The Denounced (1830) and The Smuggler (1831) follow in quick succession, and are received with considerable favour. Most of these deal with the darker and more painful phases of life, but the feeling shown in his last, Father Connell, is brighter and tenderer. Banim, meanwhile, suffers from illness and consequent poverty. In 1829, he goes to France, and while he is abroad a movement to relieve his wants is set on foot by the English press, headed by John Sterling in The Times. A sufficient sum is obtained to remove him from any danger of actual want.

Banim returns to Ireland in 1835, taking up residence in Dublin. On meeting him again in August, Michael Banim finds his brother’s condition to be that of a complete invalid. He is often in pain and has to use opiates to sleep, but during the short intervals between the attacks of his illness, he is able to enjoy conversation and the company of his brother and friends. In September he returns to Kilkenny and is received with an address from the citizens of Kilkenny showing their appreciation of him, and a subscription from them of £85. After a short stay in his childhood home, he settles in Windgap Cottage, then a short distance from Kilkenny. He passes the remainder of his life there, dying on August 13, 1842.

Michael Banim acquires a considerable fortune which he loses in 1840 through the bankruptcy of a firm with which he had business relations. After this disaster he writes Father Connell (1842), Clough Fionn (1852), and The Town of the Cascades (1862). He dies at Booterstown.

An assessment in the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition (1911) reads:

“The true place of the Banims in literature is to be estimated from the merits of the O’Hara Tales; their later works, though of considerable ability, are sometimes prolix and are marked by too evident an imitation of the Waverley Novels. The Tales, however, are masterpieces of faithful delineation. The strong passions, the lights and shadows of Irish peasant character, have rarely been so ably and truly depicted. The incidents are striking, sometimes even horrible, and the authors have been accused of straining after melodramatic effect. The lighter, more joyous side of Irish character, which appears so strongly in Samuel Lover, receives little attention from the Banims.”