13 - To Ralph Griffiths, [London, January 1759]

Summary

Ralph Griffiths (1720?–1803) was Goldsmith's first bookseller, with whom he had a fraught relationship. Griffiths established the Monthly Review in 1749, and erected over the door the sign of the Dunciad, the reference to Alexander Pope’s excoriating satire and an indication that his reviewers would be unforgiving in their assessments. Griffiths worked closely with his wife Isabella, who also wrote for and helped to edit the Monthly. Mrs Griffiths was a critic of Goldsmith's work, and had a tendency to interfere with it, as recorded by Percy: ‘In this Thraldom he lived 7 or 8 months Griffith and his wife continually objecting to everything he wrote & insisting on his implicitly submitting to their corrections.’

Goldsmith had begun to work for Tobias Smollett's Critical Review – which was, in Griffiths's view, an adversary – in late 1758. Though estranged, Goldsmith was looking for work from Griffiths at the same time, agreeing to do four reviews in return for Griffiths acting as security for a new suit which Goldsmith required to present himself at an ill-fated interview at Surgeons’ Hall for a medical position in India. Goldsmith promised to return the suit or furnish the written material; however, he pawned the clothing and Griffiths's books, ostensibly to aid his landlord's wife, after his landlord was jailed for debt. When Griffiths heard of this affair, he wrote angrily to Goldsmith demanding the suit, books or money, in such a threatening manner as to have provoked the letter below, in which Goldsmith seeks to explain himself. The letter may have had a softening effect on Griffiths. Though he would authorize William Kenrick's brutal and personal attack on the Enquiry in the Monthly Review of November 1759 (see Introduction, xxxvi–xxxvii), Griffiths would contract Goldsmith to translate Memoires de Milady B. in 1760; and the review of The Citizen of the World in the Monthly Review in June 1762 contained a somewhat mealy-mouthed apology to the ‘lively and ingenious’ author:

we were surprized to hear that this Gentleman had imagined himself in any degree pointed at, as we conceive nothing can be more illiberal in a Writer, or more foreign to the character of a Literary Journal, than to descend to the meanness of personal reflection. It is hoped that a charge of this sort can never be justly brought against the Monthly Review.