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''The Traveller; or, a Prospect of Society'' (1764) is a philosophical poem by
Oliver Goldsmith. In
heroic verse
Heroic verse is a term that may be used to designate epic poems, but which is more usually used to describe the meter(s) in which those poems are most typically written (regardless of whether the content is "heroic" or not). Because the meter typi ...
of an
Augustan style it discusses the causes of happiness and unhappiness in nations. It was the work which first made Goldsmith's name, and is still considered a classic of mid-18th-century poetry.
Synopsis
The dedication to ''The Traveller'' sets out Goldsmith's purpose:
I have endeavoured to shew, that there may be equal happiness in states, that are differently governed from our own; that every state has a particular principle of happiness, and that this principle in each may be carried to a mischievous excess.
He begins the poem by extolling the happiness of his brother Henry's simple family life. Then, from a vantage-point in the Alps, he surveys the condition of the world. Every nation, he says, considers itself the happiest, but this is only because each nation judges by its own standards. In fact, happiness is probably equally spread, though in different forms which tend to be mutually exclusive.
Then Goldsmith turns to consider various countries individually. Italy is naturally fertile and was formerly successful in commerce, but has since been overtaken by other countries. The remaining great works of art and architecture only inspire a childish love of show in the Italians. The Swiss have poverty, but also equality. They love home-life and simple things, but have no nobility of soul. France is a nation motivated by honour, and is therefore too prone to vanity. In Holland industry has brought prosperity, but
Britain's free constitution has led to a lack of social cohesion, the rich defending their own liberties by oppressing the poor. Those who have escaped this problem by fleeing across the Atlantic have found a harsh and dangerous land in America. The poem concludes with the thought that happiness lies within:
Composition
Goldsmith began writing ''The Traveller'' in 1755 while he was travelling in Switzerland. His travels in Europe in that and the following year gave him much material to draw on, but he seems to have let the poem drop. He resumed it in 1763, by which time he was living at Canonbury House in
Islington, and completed it in 1764. Most of the last few lines of the poem was contributed by Goldsmith's friend
Dr. Johnson. Goldsmith chose not to dedicate ''The Traveller'' to some powerful or wealthy patron, as was the normal practice of the time, but to his brother Henry, the ill-paid curate of an Irish parish.
Publication
''The Traveller'' was first published on 19 December 1764 by
John Newbery
John Newbery (9 July 1713 – 22 December 1767), considered "The Father of Children's Literature", was an English publisher of books who first made children's literature a sustainable and profitable part of the literary market. He also supported ...
, though the year was given on the imprint as 1765. It was the first of Goldsmith's books to feature his name on the title-page. Goldsmith received only £21 for ''The Traveller'', but the publisher must have made a good deal more, since a second edition appeared in March 1765, a fourth in August 1765 (only eight months after the first), and a ninth before Goldsmith's death in 1774. The author continued to revise the poem for the rest of his life, so that the ninth edition contained 36 new lines not in the first.
Sources
The style of ''The Traveller'' stands in the tradition of verse in
heroic couplet
A heroic couplet is a traditional form for English poetry, commonly used in epic and narrative poetry, and consisting of a rhyming pair of lines in iambic pentameter. Use of the heroic couplet was pioneered by Geoffrey Chaucer in the ''Legend of ...
s that had dominated English poetry for the previous hundred years. In particular, it owes a debt to
Dryden
''
John Dryden (; – ) was an English poet, literary critic, translator, and playwright who in 1668 was appointed England's first Poet Laureate.
He is seen as dominating the literary life of Restoration England to such a point that the per ...
and
Pope
The pope ( la, papa, from el, πάππας, translit=pappas, 'father'), also known as supreme pontiff ( or ), Roman pontiff () or sovereign pontiff, is the bishop of Rome (or historically the patriarch of Rome), head of the worldwide Cathol ...
, to whose poems it has often been favourably compared.
From an early date much attention has been paid to Goldsmith’s sources for the plan and subject-matter of the poem. Many who knew Goldsmith personally, having no great opinion of his abilities, believed that ''The Traveller'' owed much to the conversation of Dr. Johnson, as may well be the case, or even that Johnson had written a substantial part of it for him.
Joseph Addison
Joseph Addison (1 May 1672 – 17 June 1719) was an English essayist, poet, playwright and politician. He was the eldest son of The Reverend Lancelot Addison. His name is usually remembered alongside that of his long-standing friend Richar ...
's ''Letters from Italy'' has a rather similar theme, insofar as it is a piece of travel-writing describing the Italian landscape and character in verse. Other names that have been mentioned include
Richard Blackmore
Sir Richard Blackmore (22 January 1654 – 9 October 1729), English poet and physician, is remembered primarily as the object of satire and as an epic poet, but he was also a respected medical doctor and theologian.
Earlier years
He was born ...
's ''The Nature of Man'',
James Thomson's ''Liberty'', and
Thomas Gray
Thomas Gray (26 December 1716 – 30 July 1771) was an English poet, letter-writer, classical scholar, and professor at Pembroke College, Cambridge. He is widely known for his '' Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,'' published in 1751.
G ...
's fragment on "The Alliance of Education and Government". There are also one or two verbal resemblances to
Samuel Garth
Sir Samuel Garth FRS (1661 – 18 January 1719) was an English physician and poet.
Life
Garth was born in Bolam in County Durham and matriculated at Peterhouse, Cambridge in 1676, graduating B.A. in 1679 and M.A. in 1684. He took his M.D. an ...
's "Claremont" and
Matthew Prior
Matthew Prior (21 July 1664 – 18 September 1721) was an English poet and diplomat. He is also known as a contributor to ''The Examiner (1710–1714), The Examiner''.
Early life
Prior was probably born in Middlesex. He was the son of a Noncon ...
's "Written at Paris in the Beginning of Robe's Geography". More recent research has shown that the philosophy of ''The Traveller'' owes much to
Buffon's ''Histoire naturelle'' and
Montesquieu
Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu (; ; 18 January 168910 February 1755), generally referred to as simply Montesquieu, was a French judge, man of letters, historian, and political philosopher.
He is the princi ...
's ''Esprit des lois''.
Critical reception
''The Traveller'' was the poem which made Goldsmith's reputation. Dr. Johnson, so
Boswell reports, said that "there had not been so fine a poem since Pope's time", and he went on to write a brief but laudatory article on it in the ''
Critical Review''. Two months after publication the ''St. James's Chronicle'' praised "the beauties of this poem" as "great and various", and this opinion was seconded by the ''
Gentleman's Magazine
''The Gentleman's Magazine'' was a monthly magazine founded in London, England, by Edward Cave in January 1731. It ran uninterrupted for almost 200 years, until 1922. It was the first to use the term '' magazine'' (from the French ''magazine' ...
'' and in large measure by the ''
Monthly Review'', though the ''Monthly''’s reviewer also took Goldsmith to task for his
Tory
A Tory () is a person who holds a political philosophy known as Toryism, based on a British version of traditionalism and conservatism, which upholds the supremacy of social order as it has evolved in the English culture throughout history. The ...
suspicion of commerce. Readers of all ages soon began to discover ''The Traveller''’s merits. The 17-year-old
Charles James Fox
Charles James Fox (24 January 1749 – 13 September 1806), styled ''The Honourable'' from 1762, was a prominent British Whig statesman whose parliamentary career spanned 38 years of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. He was the arch-riv ...
admired the poem; a few years later the even younger
William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth (7 April 177023 April 1850) was an English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication '' Lyrical Ballads'' (1798).
Wordsworth's ' ...
read ''The Traveller'', and was influenced by it when he wrote his earliest surviving poem, "Lines Written as a School Exercise". The poem's critical reception continued high, though it often suffered by comparison with his ''The Deserted Village''. The bibliographer
Egerton Brydges
Sir Samuel Egerton Brydges, 1st Baronet (30 November 1762 – 8 September 1837) was an English bibliographer and genealogist. He was also Member of Parliament for Maidstone from 1812 to 1818.
Educated at Maidstone Grammar School and The King ...
preferred ''The Traveller'':
The sentiments are always interesting, generally just, and often new; the imagery is elegant, picturesque, and occasionally sublime; the language is nervous, highly finished, and full of harmony.
But many followed the poets
Thomas Campbell and
Leigh Hunt
James Henry Leigh Hunt (19 October 178428 August 1859), best known as Leigh Hunt, was an English critic, essayist and poet.
Hunt co-founded '' The Examiner'', a leading intellectual journal expounding radical principles. He was the centre ...
in rating ''The Deserted Village'' higher. Campbell said ''The Traveller''’s field of contemplation was rather desultory, while Hunt complained that some feeble lines gave it the air of having been
interpolated
In the mathematical field of numerical analysis, interpolation is a type of estimation, a method of constructing (finding) new data points based on the range of a discrete set of known data points.
In engineering and science, one often has a n ...
. The publisher
Henry Bohn claimed that ''The Traveller'' "combines the highest beauties of ethic and descriptive poetry."
Lord Macaulay
Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay, (; 25 October 1800 – 28 December 1859) was a British historian and Whig politician, who served as the Secretary at War between 1839 and 1841, and as the Paymaster-General between 1846 and 1 ...
's opinion was that
In general oldsmith'sdesigns were bad, and his execution good. In ''The Traveller'', the execution, though deserving of much praise, is far inferior to the design. No philosophical poem, ancient or modern, has a plan so noble, and at the same time so simple.
The novelist
William Black, on the other hand, while highly praising the poem's mellifluous qualities, admitted that "the literary charm of ''The Traveller'' is more apparent than the value of any doctrine, however profound or ingenious, which the poem was supposed to inculcate". More recent academic criticism continues to assert the poem's claims to respectful attention. Arthur Humphreys considered it "a true and thoughtful poem";
Boris Ford
Richard Boris Ford (1 July 1917, in Simla, India – 19 May 1998, in London, England), was a literary critic, writer, editor and educationist.
Early life
The son of an Indian Army officer, Brigadier Geoffrey Noel Ford, and his Russian wife Ekate ...
noted "the judicious tone, the unruffled movement, the urbane and fluent control of the couplet", which "established him as a great Augustan poet"; and Angus Ross thought that ''The Traveller'' proved him a poet with an individual voice, citing particularly its "genuine and deep note of feeling".
Footnotes
References
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External links
Full textat
Eighteenth Century Collections Online
Full textat the
Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, ...
"The Philosophical Traveller as Social Critic in Oliver Goldsmith's ''The Traveller'', ''The Deserted Village'' and ''The Citizen of the World''" M.A. thesis by Megan Kitching
from ''
The Cambridge History of English and American Literature
''The Cambridge History of English and American Literature'' is an encyclopedia of literary criticism that was published by Cambridge University Press between 1907 and 1921. Edited and written by an international panel of 171 leading scholars and ...
''
{{DEFAULTSORT:Traveller
Works by Oliver Goldsmith
1764 poems
Philosophical poems
18th-century Irish literature
English poems
Irish poems