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Brothers of the Quill - Oliver Goldsmith in Grub Street (Hardcover)
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Brothers of the Quill - Oliver Goldsmith in Grub Street (Hardcover)
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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 emigres: 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.
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