Читать книгу Art in Theory - Группа авторов - Страница 105

Born into an Irish Protestant family, Oliver Goldsmith went on to become a key participant in literary London life in the late eighteenth century, being invited by no less a figure than Samuel Johnson to participate in ‘The Club’, the coterie of artists and writers around Johnson himself which included Reynolds, Burke, Boswell and later Garrick and Gibbon. His course, however, was anything but smooth. Having failed to establish himself in a conventional career, he went off on a sort of pastiche Grand Tour, where he supported himself by busking and giving occasional English lessons. Having arrived in London in 1756, he considered India, but failed in that enterprise as well. What he could do was write, ending up as a Grub Street hack while trying to establish a literary reputation. A popular genre at the time, largely French in origin, was that of letters home written by an imaginary foreigner, the primary example being Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (cf. IIA4). Over a hundred of Goldsmith’s ‘Chinese Letters’ satirizing various aspects of English life and culture were published in instalments in the Public Ledger between January 1760 and August 1761. Their success led to them being republished in book form as The Citizen of the World in May 1762. In Letter XIV, Goldsmith doubles the satire by turning to the fashion for chinoiserie itself: poking fun at the cognoscenti who know – or think they know – more about China than a ‘real’ Chinese. His protagonist, Lien Chi Altangi, is writing to his friend Fum Hoam, ‘First President of the Ceremonial Academy of Pekin’. The extracts are taken from The Miscellaneous Works of Oliver Goldsmith M. B., vol. 2, edited by James Prior, London: John Murray, 1837, pp. 51–4.