Listen at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00282pq
OLIVER GOLDSMITH
In Our Time (Discussion Program)
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the renowned and versatile Irish writer Oliver Goldsmith (1728 – 1774). There is a memorial to him in Westminster Abbey’s Poet’s Corner written by Dr Johnson, celebrating Goldsmith’s life as a poet, natural philosopher and historian. To this could be added ‘playwright’ and ‘novelist’ and ‘science writer’ and ‘pamphleteer’ and much besides, as Goldsmith explored so many different outlets for his talents. While he began on Grub Street in London, the centre for jobbing writers scrambling for paid work, he became a great populariser and compiler of new ideas and knowledge and achieved notable successes with poems such as The Deserted Village, his play She Stoops to Conquer and his short novel The Vicar of Wakefield.
With
David O’Shaughnessy
Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of Galway
Judith Hawley
Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London
And
Michael Griffin
Professor of English at the University of Limerick
Producer: Simon Tillotson
