"The Little Republic" of the Family: Goldsmith's Politics of Nostalgia

"The Little Republic" of the Family: Goldsmith's Politics ofNostalgia James P. Carson Oliver Goldsmith is generally thought to be a Tory supporter of a strong monarchy and an uncompromising critic of republicanism . Despite this reputation, he would be a republican himselfif Britain were a different kind of country—that is, if Britain were a smaller, more homogeneous, and more unified nation. Goldsmith would agree with the ideal ofa republican state ofsmall dimensions that Rousseau describes in his dedication "To the Republic of Geneva" in A Discourse on Inequality. a society ofwhich the dimensions were limited by the extent of human faculties, that is to say, by the possibility of being well governed; a society where everyone was equal to his job so that no one was obliged to commit to others the functions which belonged to him; a state where, every individual being acquainted with every other, neither the dark manoeuvres of vice nor the modesty ofvirtue was concealed from public gaze andjudgement.1 Not onlywould Goldsmith favour the transparency ofa small republic where virtue and vice could never be disguised or confused, but he 1 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse on Inequality (1754), trans. Maurice Cranston (1984; reprint, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), p. 57. 1 would like to thank Henry L. Fulton for his detailed and helpful comments on an earlier draft ofthis essay. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 16, Number 2,January 2004 174 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURYFICTION would also favour a republic like ancient Rome, where the popular element was dominant, over one like medieval and Renaissance Venice, where the aristocracy took the leading role. Goldsmith writes in the tradition ofclassical republicanism, in which the autonomous citizen demonstrates his virtue by refusing to delegate his public capacities to others and in which the ideal government is a mixture of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy—the three pure forms of government that, in the absence of an appropriate balance, will degenerate into tyranny, oligarchy, and mob rule. Whereas Patricia Meyer Spacks asserts that Charles Primrose uses the incorrect term when he describes his family as the "little republic to which I gave laws,"2 the word republicdoes describe accurately his and Goldsmith's ideal ofgovernmentfor a small polity. In Spacks's view, the vicar, who takes on a "right of absolute control," would be better termed the little monarch of his family, while in his political ideology "the idea ofkingship" is "farmore importantthan thatofliberty."3 On the contrary, itis precisely because Goldsmith's fundamental concerns are liberty and equality that he parries Edmund Burke's rhyming accusation that "Here's our monarchy man growing Republican" with die retort "I'm forMonarchy to keep us equal."4While takingseriously Burke's accusation, we can bestunderstand Goldsmith's republicanism in The VicarofWakefield through an examination ofhis history writing of the 1760s, primarily History ofEngland in a Series ofLettersfrom a Nobleman toHis Son (1764) . Since seventeenth-century and eighteenthcentury British thinkers assessed constitutional politics in the context of the history of the ancient republics and the Roman empire, this article also considers Goldsmith's novel in relation to the political positions he enunciates in his Roman History (1769). Oliver Goldsmith, TIu Vicar of Wakefield, ed. Arthur Friedman (1974; reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 24. References are to this edition. Patricia Meyer Spacks, "'Always at Variance': Politics ofEighteenth-CenturyAdolescence," A DistantProspect:Eigltteenth-Century Views ofCltildliood (LosAngeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1982), p. 14. Timothy Dykstal concurs with Spacks's view; indeed, Dykstal's work initially brought her essay to my attention: see "The Story ofO: Politics and Pleasure in The Vicar of Wakefield," English Literary History 62 (1995), 331, 341. Marshall Brown, who likewise takes the view that Primrose "surely exemplifies" familial tyranny, further contends that Primrose is a "confused ... politician." Preromanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), p. 162. Cited in Howard J. Bell, Jr, "The Deserted Village and Goldsmith's Social Doctrines," Publications ofthe Modem LanguageAssociation 59 (1944), 760. POLITICS OF NOSTALGIA175 Analyses of the relationship between Goldsmith and the novel's first-person narrator, Charles Primrose, have dominated criticism of The VicarofWakefield. Critics have displayed a marked tendency to find an ironic distance between Goldsmith's views and, for example, Primrose's...