(Oliver’s Mother.)
The death of the Revd. Charles Goldsmith in 1747 made a considerable
change for the worse in the fortunes of his widow and her children.
“The wealth of the family, never great or well husbanded, necessarily
suffered a serious diminution: the means of the widow were little
more than sufficient to provide the necessaries of life for the other
branches of the family: remittances to Oliver therefore ceased, and his
prospects became darker than ever” (Prior I, 73, 74).
Ann Goldsmith had to remove in her straitened circumstances to a
cottage at Ballymahon, and there Oliver seems to have idled away his
time between 1749 to 1751, when he drifted off with the intention
of going to America. Probably things were not made very comfortable
for him at home. Anyhow the mother appears to have been disgusted
and disappointed at his waywardness, and spoke to him sharply when
he returned penniless. He does not seem to have again resided at
Ballymahon, but to have gone to stay with his brother Henry, and
afterwards with his constant friend and benefactor, Uncle Contarine,
before he went off to Edinburgh, never to see his mother again. When
writing from the Scottish capital on 16 September, 1753, to his boon
companion, Robert Bryanton of Ballymahon, Oliver says in a postscript:
“Give my service to my mother if you see her: for as you express it in
Ireland, I have a sneaking kindness for her still.” After his return
from his Continental wanderings, he writes twice to his brother-in-law
Daniel Hodson about his mother. On 27 December, 1757, he says: “My
mother too has lost Pallas! My dear Sir, these things give me real
uneasiness, and I should wish to redress them.” And in November, 1758,
he writes to Hodson: “Pray tell me how my mother is since she will not
gratify me herself and tell me if in anything I can be immediately
serviceable to her.” (This and other similar phrases in the letters
of 1757 and 1758 are omitted from the 1801 publication as relating to
“private family affairs.”) In Oliver’s letter to his brother Henry of
February, 1758, he says: “My mother I am informed is almost blind: even
tho I had the utmost inclination to return home, I could not behold her
in distress without a capacity of relieving her from it, it would be
too much to add to my present splenetic habit.”
Later still in January, 1770, Oliver begs his brother Maurice to give
him particulars about the family: “Tell me about my mother, my brother
Hodson and his son, ... what is become of them, where they live and
what they do.” Mrs. Goldsmith died in Ireland later in the same year,
and in Mr. William Filby’s tailor’s bills against Goldsmith is the
entry of £5:12:0 for “a suit of mourning” (doubtless for her) dated 8
September, 1770 (Prior I, 233).