Community and Georgic transformation in Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village and Crabbe’s The Village

ABSTRACT

This article examines the idea of “community” in Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village (1770), comparing the poet’s genre and modal practice to George Crabbe’s 1783 poem, The Village. It will study how Goldsmith’s use of the Georgic entails a transformation of the genre and involves numerous instances of modulation, in the process demonstrating the limitations of earlier readings of the poem as pastoral. My discussion of the textually generated Georgic communities of both poems will probe the multifarious meanings of labor in ways that are more broadly conceived than the working of the land. It will conclude with considerations of Thomas Stothard’s series of miniature illustrations of Goldsmith’s and Crabbe’s poems and the artist’s aim to represent the functioning of and threat to Georgic community in the former poem and its destruction in the latter.

KEYWORDS:

• Oliver Goldsmith
• The Deserted Village
• George Crabbe
• The Village
• versions of the Georgic
• Thomas Stothard
• iconic interpretation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Bell (1944: 747–772) and Miner (1959: 125–141) have offered detailed contextualizations of the social realism of The Deserted Village and the centrality of the contexts of the Enclosure Acts for an understanding of the poem.

² Goldsmith’s poem is cited from Lonsdale’s 1969 edition. Line numbers are provided parenthetically.

³ Lonsdale goes further and notes that “in spite of efforts to reduce it [The Deserted Village] to pastoral, georgic, or locodescriptive conventions, there is no precedent […] for a poem in which the poet’s own memory and imagination actively recreate its essential landscape” (Lonsdale 1969: 23).

⁴ See Jung (2003: 38–39).

⁵ Crabbe’s poem will be cited from Dalrymple-Champneys’ 1988 edition. Book and line numbers will be given parenthetically.

⁶ See Crabbe (1947: 105).