Literary Plagiarism and Scientific Originality in the “Trans-Atlantic Wilderness” of Goldsmith, Aikin, and Barbauld

This essay enhances our understanding of Oliver Goldsmith’s poem “The Deserted Village” (1770) by attending to other works in his oeuvre, especially his History of the Earth and Animated Nature (1774). Goldsmith’s natural history particularly drew ideas from the naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, who famously portrayed Europe as a location of original biological forms, and the western hemisphere as departing from those origins, investing humans with the ability to alter themselves by altering their environment. Tracing similarities between calls for poetic novelty through scientific description in the works of Goldsmith and John Aikin, this essay displays how conceptions of biological, racial, and literary originality and degeneration also affected Anna Barbauld’s later repetition of Goldsmith’s themes in her poem, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (1812).