IN 1757, a year after arriving in England, Oliver Goldsmith wrote a gloomy letter to his brother-in-law back home in Ireland. Despite Goldsmith’s Trinity College education in Dublin and medical studies at Edinburgh, “being born an Irishman was sufficient to keep me unemployed”.

At least, Goldsmith joked, nothing was “more apt to introduce the gates of the Muses than poverty”. As many writers know, the prose tends to flow more easily when you’re broke. Happily, the London literary scene quickly recognised Goldsmith’s talents. To survive in the crowded 18th-century Republic of Letters, Norman Clarke observes, “the trick was to be, and be seen to be, on the side of genius”. Goldsmith mastered both aspects of the trick with ease.

Early on, he did not earn fortunes. He was a hack, writing across genres and “always in the saddle”, but his literary philosophy was inspiring. Goldsmith wanted to be a truly professional writer, living by his wits instead of relying on the whims of a patron. He encapsulated a new “model of authorship that held the promise of independence”. He also relished lambasting a culture in which the idle chatter of a few luminaries defined “good” literary taste: “a great man says, at his table, that such a book is no bad thing. Immediately, the praise is carried off by five flatterers to be dispersed at twelve different coffee houses”. Plus ça change...

Clarke describes Goldsmith as “a shrewd operator, a survivor with a ruthless streak” and the man clearly did not lack ambition. He quickly realised that “reviewing and criticism was not the route to the kind of consequence he sought”. He needed a hit and it arrived with his celebrated poem The Traveller in 1764. Invitations to smarter parties began to arrive, more salubrious digs were secured and, while Goldsmith only had a decade left to live, he managed to cram in some impressive literary achievements: The Vicar of Wakefield, She Stoops to Conquer, and now-neglected but very lively histories of Rome, Greece and Britain among them.

These were times of “wearing fine silk suits and entertaining extravagantly”, and even though Goldsmith died heavily in debt, Clarke does not see such expenditure as frivolous. It was, she suggests, Goldsmith’s way of advertising that he was no longer a drudge, that he had made it.

And yet, as Clarke also reveals, it was during this period that Goldsmith acquired something very close to the kind of benefactor he had earlier denounced. Goldsmith’s biographers have “had remarkably little to to say” about the MP Robert Nugent, “possibly out of a sense of embarrassment that Goldsmith had a patron at all given his well-known views”. The extent to which Nugent’s opinions seeped into Goldsmith’s later works remains an open question.

As for whether Goldsmith was well suited to polite society, the jury seems to be divided. One contemporary lamented that Goldsmith “appeared in company to have no spark of that genius which shines forth so brightly in his writings”. Joshua Reynolds, by contrast, admitted that Goldsmith could make a fool of himself – he would “sing, stand upon his head, dance about the room” and defend ludicrous opinions “like a tiger” – but those who laughed at him “were still desirous of meeting him again the next day”.

Goldsmith had, at least, come a long way from the “penniless Irishman” who had arrived in England, “ragged, dirty, hungry, tired”, back in 1756. His status as an Irishman is crucially important, though it can easily be overlooked. As Clarke explains, there are only veiled references to Ireland in Goldsmith’s writings and in Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson there is not a single overt reference to Goldsmith’s nationality.

It is worth digging a little deeper, however. Clarke skilfully explores how, during the early London years, Goldsmith gravitated to the company of his fellow Irish émigrés who had a profound effect on his opinions and literary development. Clarke concludes that whenever Goldsmith tackled issues like “imperialism and the extremes of wealth and poverty in England he was invariably, at some level, thinking about Ireland”.

For James Joyce, even The Vicar of Wakefield was, beneath the sweet surface, an Irishman’s commentary on the “extreme putridity” of the English social system. Perhaps Clarke’s splendid book will send us all back to that novel and the other works that no-one seems to bother with any more.

Brothers of the Quill by Oliver Goldsmith in Grub Street by Norma Clarke is published by Harvard University Press, priced £25