Believe me,
Your affectionate Uncle,
Oliver Goldsmith.
Mr. Henry Goldsmith
In Care of Mrs. Hodson,
Athlone,
Ireland.
I find no mention whatever in any document (published or unpublished)
that I have come across of a second son of the Revd. Henry. Oliver at
the time of his brother’s death was at work on the _Deserted Village_
at a summer retreat in a cottage eight miles from the Edgware Road
(Forster II, 124), was visited there in May, 1768, by Cooke, who marks
the date as exactly two years before the poem appeared in print (May,
1770), and tells us that the writing of it, and its elaborate revision,
extended over the whole interval of twenty-four months.
Is it permissible to suggest that Oliver, with his head full of other
things, was a little dubious about the sex of the other child of his
brother, and spoke of a son where he should have said daughter? Writing
to his brother Maurice in January, 1770, with anxious enquiries about
the several members of the family, Oliver says: “Tell me about my
mother, my brother Hodson and his son: _my brother Harry’s son and
daughter_, my sister Johnson, the family of Ballyoughter, what is
become of them, where they live and how they do. You talked of being my
only brother, I don’t understand you--Where is Charles?” (_Memoir_, p.
89.)
Here it will be observed, Oliver makes tender enquiries after Henry’s
“son and daughter.” He says nothing of the widow or of a second son. In
the only letter of Oliver’s to his brother that is now extant, ascribed
by Percy to “about 1759,” Oliver thus refers to the son: “The reasons
you have given me for breeding your son a scholar are judicious and
convincing.... Preach then my dear Sir, to your son not the excellence
of human nature nor the disrespect of riches, but endeavour to teach
him thrift and economy. Let his poor wandering Uncle’s example be
placed in his eyes. I had learned from books to love virtue, before I
was taught from experience the necessity of being selfish.”
I quote from the original holograph letter, not from the somewhat
bowdlerised version of it that Percy printed in the _Memoir_ of 1801,
and that has since been copied in all subsequent biographies.
It remains therefore to consider what happened to those whom Henry left
behind him in 1768 of whom there is any record. There was a widow,
of whose parentage and maiden name, or of the circumstances of her
widowhood nothing seems to be known, his son Henry, and his daughter
Catherine.