“More National (to Ireland) than Personal”: James Prior’s Life of Oliver Goldsmith (1837)

No full biography of Oliver Goldsmith (1728–1774) appeared until 1837. It was written by a fellow Irishman, James Prior, who had already published a well-received biography of Edmund Burke. Prior explicitly claimed Goldsmith for Ireland, situating him in a tradition of writers whose lives were not well known and paying attention to other Irish writers in his London circle. Prior’s book was praised for its research but criticized for the accumulation of detail, especially about minor figures. John Forster in 1848 and Washington Irving in 1849 each used Prior’s research to issue biographies of Goldsmith aimed at a wider public. Prior was furious. A controversy ensued in which Prior claimed that the information he had gathered belonged to him. Forster struck back. Public and critics alike responded favorably to Forster, whose version of Goldsmith was judged “real biography” and whose argument that biographers do not have possession of facts seemed common sense. Posterity sided with Forster. But this essay argues that Prior’s anger can be understood differently if we take Irish history into account.