The Citizen of the World

The Citizen of the World
Joshua Reynolds · Public domain · source
Name	The Citizen of the World
Author	Oliver Goldsmith
Country	Kingdom of Great Britain
Language	English
Genre	Satire, Epistolary
Publisher	The Public Advertiser
Pub date	1760–1762
Media type	Periodical essays

Contents

The Citizen of the World is a series of satirical letters written by Oliver Goldsmith under the persona of a fictional Chinese traveller, published in the British periodical press in the early Georgian era. The work appeared amid debates involving figures such as Samuel Johnson, David Garrick, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne and contributed to public conversations shaped by institutions like the Royal Society and the British Parliament. Its circulation intersected with print culture exemplified by the London Evening Post, the Public Advertiser, the Daily Advertiser and networks linking readers in Bath, Somerset, Dublin, Edinburgh, Oxford and Cambridge.

Background and Publication

Goldsmith composed the letters while engaged with London literary circles that included Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, Joshua Reynolds, Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Charles Jennens. The essays first appeared serially in the Public Advertiser and later collected by publishers connected to John Newbery, William Strahan, Thomas Cadell and John Bell. The work reflects influences from earlier satirists and travellers such as Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Laurence Sterne, Henry Fielding and the travel narratives of Marco Polo and Sir John Mandeville. Goldsmith’s persona echoed the cosmopolitan curiosity associated with the Grand Tour, debates about the Seven Years' War, the expansion of the British Empire, and the commerce networks linking Lisbon, Amsterdam, Calcutta, Canton and Boston. Contemporary printers and book-sellers in Fleet Street, Paternoster Row and Covent Garden facilitated its diffusion among readers in salons presided over by figures like Hester Thrale, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Beau Nash.

The collection is framed as letters by a Chinese observer, whose travels and observations cast a satirical eye on London society, addressing institutions and personages such as King George II, George III (as Prince), William Pitt the Elder, Charles James Fox, Edmund Burke and John Wilkes. The narrator’s encounters invoke settings ranging from the Westminster Abbey precincts through the markets of Smithfield to the drawing-rooms of Somerset House and theatres like the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane and Covent Garden Theatre. Episodes recount interactions with characters resonant of types found in works by Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett, and allude to events such as the Gin Act debates, the aftermath of the Battle of Quebec (1759), and the public spectacle of the Coronation of George III. Through epistolary devices familiar from Clarissa-era writers and the novels of Samuel Richardson, the letters progress from comic misapprehension to pointed moral critique without a single continuous plotline.

Goldsmith explores themes of cultural relativism, identity, and hypocrisy by directing the gaze of a foreigner at figures including Samuel Johnson, David Garrick, Laurence Sterne, Oliver Cromwell (in historiography), and contemporaries such as James Boswell. The satire interrogates practices associated with institutions like the Court of Chancery, the East India Company, the Bank of England and the Royal Navy, and critiques fashions visible in locations like Mayfair. Literary techniques draw on the satirical traditions of Jonathan Swift, rhetorical strategies from Horace, and cosmopolitan philosophies traceable to Montesquieu and Voltaire. Critics have read its humour alongside the aesthetic debates involving Edmund Burke’s theories and the sentimentalism of Laurence Sterne, while political readings connect the text to controversies around figures such as William Pitt the Younger and events like the American Revolution.

Initial reception among periodical readers and reviewers in outlets such as the London Chronicle, the St. James's Chronicle and the Gentleman's Magazine praised its wit even as partisan commentators aligned with Lord Bute, William Pitt the Elder, John Wilkes or Edmund Burke contested its jibes. The work influenced novelists and essayists including Jane Austen, Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Thomas de Quincey and later essayists like William Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt. Its epistolary vantage shaped travel satire in works by Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley and informed colonial critiques encountered in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. The Citizen of the World's circulation extended to print networks in Philadelphia, New York City, Quebec City, Calcutta and Sydney, affecting colonial literary cultures and fermenting debates among reformers such as John Howard and William Wilberforce.

The letters inspired theatrical adaptations staged at venues like Drury Lane Theatre and Covent Garden Theatre and were adapted into schoolroom excerpts used in classics curricula at institutions such as Eton College, Harrow School, Trinity College, Cambridge and King's College, London. Later anthologies edited by figures like Thomas Macaulay, William Makepeace Thackeray and George Saintsbury cemented Goldsmith’s reputation alongside contemporaries Samuel Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith’s other works like The Vicar of Wakefield and She Stoops to Conquer. The epistolary persona anticipated cosmopolitan narrators in novels by James Fenimore Cooper, Gustave Flaubert, Henry James and E. M. Forster, and its satirical method continues to be taught in departments at University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, Princeton University, Harvard University and Yale University.

Category:18th-century British literature