The Deserted Village

Title page of the first edition

The Deserted Village is a poem by Oliver Goldsmith published in 1770.

Background

Oliver Goldsmith by Sir Joshua Reynolds (c. 1770)

Goldsmith grew up in the hamlet of Lissoy in Ireland. In the 1760s, Goldsmith travelled extensively around England, visiting many small settlements. In this period, the enclosure movement was at its height.

The poem is dedicated to the artist Sir Joshua Reynolds. Reynolds and Goldsmith were close friends, and were both founding members, along with Samuel Johnson, of a dining society called The Club. Reynolds had helped to promote Goldsmith's play The Good-Natur'd Man to the actor and theatre manager David Garrick, and had facilitated Goldsmith's appointment as the historian of the Royal Academy.

The Deserted Village condemns rural depopulation and the actions of the rich. This was a subject that Goldsmith had tackled in his earlier poem The Traveller; or a Prospect of Society (1764), which also the corrupting influence of extreme wealth. Goldsmith also set out his ideas about rural depopulation in an essay entitled "The Revolution in Low Life", published in Lloyd's Evening Post in 1762.

There is no single place which has been identified as the village of the poem's title. While personal references in the poem give the impression of referring to the village in which Goldsmith grew up, the poem has also been associated with Nuneham Courtnay in Oxfordshire. In "The Revolution in Low Life", Goldsmith had condemned the destruction of a village within 50 miles (80 km) of London in order to construct a fashionable landscape garden. Goldsmith reported that he had personally witnessed this scene in 1761. In the same year, Nuneham Courtnay was removed to make way for Nuneham Park. Its owner—Simon Harcourt, 1st Earl Harcourt—moved the village 1.5 miles (2.4 km) away. There are a number of other concordances between Nuneham Courtnay's destruction and the contents of the The Deserted Village. As Nuneham Courtnay, only an old woman was allowed to remain living in her house—Goldsmith's poem features an old woman who returns to the village, and she is depicted on the title page of the first edition. The position of both villages, on a hill near a river, was similar, and both had parsons who enjoyed gardening.

However, Robert Seitz has argued that while "The Revolution in Life" greatly strengthens the case for identifying the deserted village as English, Goldsmith saw in this unnamed village "only what he wished to see", using to fit a set of political and social ideas which were "made up largely of elements absorbed in Ireland".

Analysis

Structure, prosody and influences

The poem has 430 lines, divided into heroic couplets. This form features an "AABBCC..." rhyme scheme, with ten-syllable lines written in iambic pentameter. It is an example of georgic and pastoral poetry.

Goldsmith was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and had read Latin poetry since childhood. He would, therefore, have been aware of the criticisms made by classical writers such as Juvenal and Pliny of the displacement of the rural poor by the rich. Furthermore, in the eighteenth-century the decline of the Roman empire was attributed to the growth of luxury and pride in Rome. Goldsmith, in emphasising the danger that England faced from its increase in wealth, was drawing an obvious parallel.

Synopsis

The poem opens with a description of a village named Auburn, written in the past tense.

Sweet Auburn! loveliest village of the plain;

Where health and plenty cheered the laboring swain,

Where smiling spring its earliest visit paid,

And parting summer's lingering blooms delayed (lines 1–4).

The poem then moves on to describe the village in its current state, reporting that it has been abandoned by its residents with its buildings now ruined.

Sunk are thy bowers in shapeless ruin all,

And the long grass o'ertops the mouldering wall;

And trembling, shrinking from the spoiler's hand,

Far, far away thy children leave the land

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,

Where wealth accumulates, and men decay (lines 47–52)

After nostalgic descriptions of Auburn's parson, schoolmaster and alehouse, Goldsmith moves on to make a direct attack on the usurpation of agricultural land by the wealthy:

... The man of wealth and pride

Takes up a space that many poor supplied;

Space for his lake, his park's extended bounds,

Space for his horses, equipage, and hounds:

The robe that wraps his limbs in silken sloth

Has robbed the neighboring fields of half their growth (lines 275–300)

The poem later moves on to condemn the luxury and corruption of the city, and describes the fate of a country girl who moved there as follows:

Where the poor houseless shivering female lies.

She once, perhaps, in village plenty blessed,

Has wept at tales of innocence distressed;

Her modest looks the cottage might adorn,

Sweet as the primrose peeps beneath the thorn:

Now lost to all; her friends, her virtue fled,

Near her betrayer's door she lays her head,

And, pinched with cold, and shrinking from the shower,

With heavy heart deplores that luckless hour,

When idly first, ambitious of the town, 335

She left her wheel and robes of country brown. (Lines 326–36)

Goldsmith then states that the residents of Auburn have not moved to the city, but have emigrated overseas. He describes these foreign lands as follows:

Far different there from all that charmed before

The various terrors of that horrid shore;

Those blazing suns that dart a downward ray,

And fiercely shed intolerable day (lines 345–8)

The poem mentions "wild Altama", a river in Georgia, an American colony founded by James Oglethorpe to receive paupers and criminals from Britain. As the poem nears its end, Goldsmith concludes with the following warning, before reporting that even Poetry herself has fled abroad:

Even now the devastation is begun,

And half the business of destruction done;

Even now, methinks, as pondering here I stand,

I see the rural virtues leave the land.

Down where yon anchoring vessel spreads the sail (lines 395–9)

Social commentary

The Deserted Village condemns rural depopulation, the enclosure of common land, the creation of landscape gardens and the pursuit of excessive wealth. In Goldsmith's vision, wealth does not necessarily bring either prosperity or happiness. Indeed, it can be dangerous to the maintenance of British liberties and displaces traditional community.

Sebastian Mitchell has argued that Goldsmith employs "deliberately precise obscurity" in the poem, concealing the reason for the village's demise.<ref="Mitchell 129">Mitchell 2006, p. 129.</ref> While this may detract from the authority of Goldsmith's social critique, it also allows the reader to project their own concerns onto the poem.<ref="Mitchell 129"/> Bell comments that while Goldsmith criticises enclosure in an indirect manner, he does not attribute Auburn's decline to it. However, Bell also argues that commerce is clearly the "arch-villain of the piece", and it is the riches that a small minority have accumulated from international trade that allow rural people to be displaced from their lands so that country estates can be created. Furthermore, Alfred Lutz has commented that Goldsmith's attacks on landscape gardening have a wider political significance, because enclosure's defenders sometimes compared enclosed fields to gardens.

Mitchell also argues that criticism which focuses solely on the poem's historical accuracy misses its wider commentary on late-eighteenth-century social issues, particularly the question of "urban estrangement".

Publication history

The poem was completed in 1769, and first published on 26 May 1770 as a quarto pamphlet. Six further editions followed in the same year.

Critical reception

Eighteenth-century reception

Alfred Lutz has argued that the poem generated two different types of reception. Firstly, some readers admired Goldsmith's economic and social arguments, or at least reflected upon them in their own writings. Political radicals, such as Thomas Spence and John Thelwall quoted The Deserted Village in their own works, as did a number of other writers. Secondly, readers and critics ignored the political content of the poem, focussing instead on Goldsmith's idyllic descriptions of Auburn. This second type of reading was the most common. Sebastian Mitchell states that some modern critics have seen the poem as appearing at a turning point in British culture, when public social and political opinions, and private emotional dispositions, diverged. With the publication of texts such as Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations (1776) shortly after The Deserted Village, political and economic discussion increasingly became the preserve not of poetry, but of a "scientific" version of political economy.

In the United States, a different reading occurred—while the English Auburn may have been deserted, the new world offered opportunities for the recreation of Goldsmith's idyll.

Early critics also questioned the validity of Goldsmith's argument about rural depopulation and decline. In 1770, for instance, Thomas Comber argued that the population of rural England was not decreasing, and that enclosure could increase farmers' demand for labourers. Modern economic historians have supported Comber's comments about depopulation. George Crabbe's poem The Village (1783) was written as a riposte to what its author saw as the excessive sentimentality of Goldsmith's verse. In his poem, Crabbe describes the hardships of the rural poor, in a way that Goldsmith did not. Furthermore, Crabbe's poem encourages the interpretation of Goldsmith's bucolic depiction of old "sweet Auburn" in The Deserted Village as being a representation of the status quo in 1770, rather than a depiction of an idealised past through which current moral decline can be highlighted. The Deserted Village is, in this interpretation, "depoliticised"—an act that was reinforced by nineteenth-century interpretations produced by Thomas Babington Macaulay and two of Goldsmith's biographers.

The poem also generated other responses in verse. While Crabbe emphasised the misery and poverty of rural life, Robert Bloomfield's The Farmer's Boy (1800) returned to the theme of the rural idyll, but without Goldsmith or Crabbe's political criticism. The Deserted Village was a major influence on Bloomfield, as was Alexander Pope's pastoral poetry.

Later reception

The poem's reception in the Victorian era was largely positive. It also attracted considerable critical attention in the twentieth century.

Cultural references

The poem has influenced the production of several notable cultural works. In 1825, Goldsmith's great-nephew—also called Oliver Goldsmith—a response to his relative's poem, entitled The Rising Village.

The first half of line 51 from the poem ("Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey") has given a title to several books and films, including Ill Fares the Land (2010) by Tony Judt.

A single line from The Deserted Village is inscribed on the plinth of a statue of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in Saxon Dress. The marble original with plinth is in the Royal Collection, and a copy of the sculpture is in the National Portrait Gallery in London. The words on the plinth are "ALLURED TO BRIGHTER WORLDS, AND LED THE WAY" from lines 163-76 of the poem.

In Ireland the village described in the poem is thought to be Glasson village, near Athlone. Signage around the village points out the association with Oliver Goldsmith. In American popular culture, and specifically that of Alabama, the poem's first line "Sweet Auburn, Loveliest village of the plain" is the basis for the term "Auburn Plainsman/Plainsmen" which is used to refer to an Auburn University student and is also the source for the name of the University student Newspaper, The Auburn Plainsman.

Notes and references

References

• John A. Dussinger, 'Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?–1774)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004.
• Batey, Mavis (1968). "Nuneham Courtenay; an Oxfordshire 18th-century Deserted Village" (PDF). Oxoniensia. 33: 108–124.

Further reading

• ((cite jstor|3816638}}

External links

• First edition on Archive.org