Last Wednesday was half term and a gloriously sunny day so my parents and I went to Bempton Cliffs in Yorkshire to see the nesting seabirds.
The place was packed with guillemots, razorbills and kittiwakes. We saw gannets performing their strange bowing, head-shaking and beak-fencing behaviours, and we also looked for puffins. Those adorable, colourful beaked fellas are really quite hard to see. They’re smaller than many of the other birds, have a tendency to nest deeper in the crevices and didn’t gather the same way the others did, scattered among the rest. I hear this isn’t the case in ‘puffin islands’ like Anglesey and Lundy, but it was the case at the cliffs in Bempton.
We looked and looked, enjoying the antics of all the other birds, the bright, blue sky and the turquoise sea and eventually our patience had results, we saw puffins. A few were chilling on the cliffs, whilst others flew around, their hurried flapping noticeable against the more relaxed flying of the other birds. It was pretty magical.
Oliver Goldsmith, in his An History of the Earth and Animated Nature describes puffins, and it seems, unlike some of the other entries, that he might have even seen some before. He says that, “words cannot easily describe the form of the bill of the puffin,' before giving a paragraph on the size, shape and colour of it, warning that it “bites most terribly”.
Goldsmith describes how the birds nest in burrows and holes situated up large cliffs but that they aren’t terribly good flyers and sometimes need to make several tries to fly up to their nests. He also describes how a small number of puffins appear to scout out an area before the larger force comes (maybe it was these scouts we saw).
He says how puffins descend on Anglesey, kicking rabbits out of their burrows and making a nuisance. He then talks about a subject which never ceases to amuse me in his natural history book, whether puffins make good food or not. He describes the meat as rank, unless well salted and pickled and says how the church exempted the puffin from being described as meat on feast days.
Moving away from the description of puffin-meat, he celebrates their indefatigability, that after being preyed on and hunted by humans and other animals, they always come back in as many numbers as before.
I love reading An History of the Earth and Animated Nature for the odd and outdated details some of the entries contain, like the description of their meat, but (if Goldsmith’s sources are correct) I did also learn a little of the hard life of a puffin.
It was a pleasure to meet a few.
It’s a pleasure to see some recent thoughts on Goldsmith’s History of Animated Nature! I apologise if this isn’t the place, but I’m a university student currently doing a dissertation on Oliver Goldsmith and the influences behind the Goldsmith ‘legend’, and I’d love to hear if you had any opinion on how the History of Animated Nature may have influenced his legacy (reading through Rousseau’s Critical Heritage, 1974, has definitely given me some suggestions). I’ve been perusing your YouTube channel and your older Goldsmith Season posts every now and again over the last few years (even my friends joke that I’m entering ‘Goldsmith Season’ whenever I expand the Goldsmith book collection), and you certainly have a lot of knowledge and insight! Once again, I apologise if this isn’t the place, but if you had any opinion on this topic, or else any general thoughts on Goldsmiths and what books you believe would be the most helpful in my endeavour, please share!
ReplyDeleteHope you have a fantastic day :)
Thanks for the comment.
DeleteI often go to Goldsmith's 'Animated Nature' when I have an animal encounter and want to find a way to squeeze it into the general purview of the blog. I did the same when I went to see Capybaras.
I think it's interesting that 'Animated Nature', like his history of the Roman Empire both remained active textbooks for over a century after their publication. (I think the Roman book was a school textbook into the 20th Century). Personally, I think they show how good Goldsmith was at compiling information and presenting them in an entertaining and easy to read manner. In many ways those works were typical Grub Street hackwork and many similar compilations never survived the end of the century but his did.
If those works do feed into his myth, I think it's the myth that Goldsmith summed up by Garrick's mock epitaph, "Here lies Nolly Goldsmith, for shortness called Noll, Who wrote like an angel, but talked like poor Poll". It's the myth that he was an bit of an idiot in real life who somehow wrote uniquely readable and worthwhile texts. That his hackwork compilations continued to be read is proof of the quality of the texts.
(That said, my copy of 'Animated Nature' really uses Goldsmith's text as a vehicle for some lovely painted illustrations and, I don't think, was intended to be read).
I think this myth is false, I think Goldsmith was not an idiot. 'Brothers of the Quill' by Norma Clark does a good job in showing how canny he was commercially and how well he navigated Grub Street, using other Irish writers as context.
Personally, I think Goldsmith had his reputation as an idiot because he had a self-mocking sense of humour that didn't register with people like Boswell. I think the key to his personality can be summed up in a quote from a letter to his sister, "I may sit down and laugh at the world, and at myself - the most ridiculous object in it". I think this ability to see the absurdity in life made him seem flippant and lightweight to his more serious contemporaries. That's just what I feel though.
Oh - and read 'The Fame Machine', and article in 'The Bee' magazine he did, that's a really interesting look at what Goldsmith thought of fame, longevity and his own place.
Hope it helps.