Community and Georgic transformation in Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village and Crabbe’s The Village

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the idea of “community” in Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village (1770), comparing the poet’s genre and modal practice to George Crabbe’s 1783 poem, The Village. It will study how Goldsmith’s use of the Georgic entails a transformation of the genre and involves numerous instances of modulation, in the process demonstrating the limitations of earlier readings of the poem as pastoral. My discussion of the textually generated Georgic communities of both poems will probe the multifarious meanings of labor in ways that are more broadly conceived than the working of the land. It will conclude with considerations of Thomas Stothard’s series of miniature illustrations of Goldsmith’s and Crabbe’s poems and the artist’s aim to represent the functioning of and threat to Georgic community in the former poem and its destruction in the latter.