‘Critical Reception before 1900’ presents the early history of Goldsmith’s critical reception and surveys concerns which recur in critical treatments. Two themes in particular recur. The first is that of an elegant versatility that fails to sustain its genius. A second critical theme sees apparently autobiographical episodes in Goldsmith’s works flow in to fill the gaps in his biography. Anecdotes of his character proliferated after his death in 1774, and 200 years later G. S. Rousseau would declare Goldsmith’s life to be the major obstacle to in-depth criticism of his writings. From the early nineteenth century a fondly sentimentalized authorial figure dominated responses to Goldsmith’s fiction and to the landscapes of his major poems. Some critics did consider the sociopolitical and moral arguments of Goldsmith’s works: his critiques of luxury and his comparative surveys of human happiness remained active in his familiar appeal to Victorian readers.

Ideas of gender, sexuality, and subjectivity were in flux throughout the eighteenth century. This chapter places Goldsmith’s comedies She Stoops to Conquer and The Good Natur’d Man at the heart of contemporary gender debates. The theatre was a significant site for the negotiation of gender where women’s sensitivity, modesty, and gentility were touted as positive social forces capable of reforming men and improving manners by conditioning women to please others. Goldsmith’s plays can be seen as part of the ‘feminization debate’ – British discourse which trumpeted the progressive effects of women on modern society while seeking to condemn perceived transgressions of an increasingly binary gender order.

Satire and Sentiment’ proposes that the commingling of sentimental and satiric modes in Goldsmith’s oeuvre enables him to negotiate the tension between moral ideals and intractable historical structures, using the movement between sentimental and satiric registers to interrogate the difficulty of living in the face of the political, social, and economic changes in Great Britain during the second half of the eighteenth century. Focusing on novels like The Vicar of Wakefield, ‘spy narratives’ like The Citizen of the World, poems like The Traveller and The Deserted Village, and plays like She Stoops to Conquer, the chapter investigates what might be termed the performative dimension of sentimentality and satire in narrative, poetic, and dramatic forms.

Since enjoying a successful premiere run in London in 1773, Oliver Goldsmith’s comedy She Stoops to Conquer has been a fixture on stages across the world. In North America and Australia, it has remained a mainstay on the stages of both bigger and smaller cities since the late eighteenth century (e.g., in the case of the USA, there have been eight significant Broadway and Off-Broadway revivals since 1905). And A. Lytton Sells has written of the play’s perennial popularity on the French stage. By contrast, Sells informs us that Goldsmith’s other full-length play, The Good Natur’d Man (1768), ‘never appealed much to the French’. It did not appeal much to theatre producers and companies in the other countries just mentioned either. This chapter provides an overview of the stage histories of Goldsmith’s two major dramatic works, giving particular emphases to British and Irish stage histories.

This chapter explores contexts for Goldsmith’s career as a playwright, such as competition between Covent Garden and Drury Lane theatres that were factors in the moderate success of The Good Natur’d Man in 1768 and the surprise runaway hit that was She Stoops to Conquer five years later. These plays are considered in the light of how the Seven Years’ War, which greatly expanded the British empire, challenged conceptions of Britishness at home and abroad. Goldsmith’s comedies respond to the perceived effeminization of culture in the 1770s, associated with the possibility corrupting influence of luxury and commerce as a result of imperial expansion. This influence was manifested in new kinds of fashionable sociability such as the masquerade with its uppity women, and the phenomenon of the male ‘macaroni’. Goldsmith also tests the conventions of the comedy of manners in how he deploys minor characters in The Good Natur’d Man and the cross-class appeal of Tony Lumpkin in She Stoops to Conquer.