The Deserted Village and Goldsmith's Social Doctrines

The Deserted Village is avowedly a didactic poem. Goldsmith wrote it as a solemn warning to England that the fate of Auburn was merely an example of what might happen to every other village of the land. But modern critics have touched upon this theme only very lightly, and where they have gone into it at all, their interpretations have in some cases led to a misunderstanding of the poet's analysis. On the premise that Goldsmith wrote and his contemporaries read the poem as a treatment of current social issues rather than just as a description of a simple rural community, I propose here to re-examine it as a social document. In so doing, I shall raise and attempt to answer three questions on which there seems to be no general agreement among scholars but which must be answered satisfactorily if we are to comprehend fully The Deserted Village. These questions are (1) just what message was the poet really trying to transmit to his readers? (2) how completely does the poem express his actual convictions? and (3) what inspired him to consider the condition he was describing as not merely unfortunate but fatal to the health of the nation?