Oliver Goldsmith

Oliver Goldsmith was born on 6 July 1794 in St. Andrews, New Brunswick, the son of Loyalists Henry and Mary (Mason) Goldsmith. He was also the grand-nephew and namesake of the famous Oliver Goldsmith (about 1730-1774), Anglo-Irish author of The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), The Deserted Village (1770) and She Stoops to Conquer (1773). Henry Goldsmith worked as a civilian in the British Army Commissariat at Halifax, where he eventually found employment for his son. By 1810 the young Oliver Goldsmith had tried a variety of occupations before beginning his career in the British civil service.

In 1818, after a harrowing trip from England to Halifax via the United States, during which Goldsmith almost lost his life in a shipwreck off the Maine coast, he began an appointment to the Commissariat in Halifax that would last 23 years. There, Goldsmith applied himself to work, to improving his education, to amateur theatre and to the pursuit of poetry. Modelled on his great-uncle's famous poem The Deserted Village, Goldsmith wrote The Rising Village, the poem for which he has received acclaim as the first native-born English-Canadian poet to achieve more than a local reputation. The poem was published first in London in 1825. A second edition appeared in 1834, published by John McMillan of Saint John, N.B. Composed as a spiritual counterpoint to the melancholy Deserted Village, the Rising Village commemorates the early struggles and progress of the Loyalists in their new home. It was a story that Goldsmith knew well through the experiences of his own parents in St. Andrews, N.B.

In 1833 Goldsmith was transferred to Saint John. Here he plunged into what he called the city's "agreeable society" and made many friends, especially through his active membership in the Mechanics' Institute and the Albion Masonic Lodge. In 1844 he was given a promotion and ordered to take up his post in Hong Kong, then a new British colony and naval station. On 23 April a committee of prominent citizens presented Goldsmith with an official address in which they expressed deep regret that they had to "bid adieu to an esteemed and respected citizen and a long tried and valued friend" (Autobiography, p. 56). Other groups that Goldsmith held membership with also paid tribute to him and bade him farewell. The send-off culminated in a general outpouring of well wishes from the community as Goldsmith departed.

Goldsmith arrived in Hong Kong on 3 September 1844, and started work the next day. After two years, Goldsmith sent to his old friends at the Mechanics' Institute in Saint John a gift of Chinese curiosities. These were warmly received by the Institute and immediately put on display. An announcement in the Courier of 25 July 1846 itemized the gift with accompanying apologies from the donor for his westernized terminology: a compass, a cash table for counting Chinese currency, money scales, two sets of chopsticks, two razors, a looking glass, an umbrella, a pair of men's shoes for dry weather, a pair for wet weather, a pair of women's shoes, two calculating tables, a foot-rule, three sets of scales and weights and a collection of musical instruments (a flute, two trumpets, a pair of castanets, six guitars, one dulcimer). In the years since 1846, most of these artefacts had lost their identities, but recent research has led to the rediscovery of many.

After four years of strenuous work in the heat of Hong Kong, Goldsmith succumbed to exhaustion and the effects of sunstroke, which he experienced during the summer of 1847. Dispirited and forlorn, he was forced to relinquish his post and return to England, almost exactly 30 years after receiving his assignment to Halifax in 1818.

Before retiring in 1855, Goldsmith went on to serve in Newfoundland and Corfu, in due course rising to the position of Deputy Commissary General. Back in Saint John, his friends continued to follow his career. Both his posting to Corfu and a breakdown in his health from "the arduous and responsible duties of Commissary at Corfu" were reported in the Courier, and when news of his death on 23 June 1861 reached them, his brethren at the Albion Lodge held a Lodge of Sorrow, a ceremony rarely held in Saint John. Thus, the bonds of friendship lingered on as have the other remnants of Oliver Goldsmith's memorable life: his poetry, his autobiography and the Chinese artefacts which were his legacy to the New Brunswick Museum.