‘Full well they laughed with counterfeited glee
At all his jokes, for many a joke had he;’
a. Who is referred to as ‘they’?
Poem: The Village Schoolmaster by Oliver Goldsmith
Answers
Answer:
Commentary
This is an extract from a longer poem by Oliver Goldsmith called “The Deserted Village”, one of the best known poems of the eighteenth century. To some extent this passage, the portrait of an agreeable village school-teacher, needs to be set in context.
The village Goldsmith is writing about he calls “Auburn”: it probably wasn’t a single real village, but was an imaginary ideal one, created nonetheless from villages he has observed. The village he imagined is now deserted because all the people have emigrated, the main reason being the “enclosure” or (as we would now say) privatization of their land by rich people. There was a lot of land in eighteenth-century England that was either owned in common, or which didn’t have clear ownership, or which was just “waste” land. Gradually lots of it was taken into private ownership and fenced off, and in this process poor people could lose their precarious livelihoods or be displaced to towns, or in this case overseas. What was actually going on is much disputed by historians, usually because of their political differences, but what Goldsmith thought was going on is clear from what he says elsewhere in the poem: “Those fenceless fields the sons of wealth divide” (307).
Goldsmith returns to the village that he knew as vibrant and alive, and finds it deserted and overgrown. He remembers the good things of village life, including this affectionate if humorous portrait of the schoolmaster.
The schoolmaster is a big presence in the village. In an age when literacy and numeracy were powerful things, when many were illiterate and innumerate, then the “rustics”, the ordinary working-class people of the village, look up to the school-teacher. He seems a kind of god. The children are quite scared of him. They laugh at his jokes, even if they are not funny. The adults are impressed with the way he can survey fields (“lands he could measure”, 17) and how he can work out boundaries or the times of holy-days like Easter. He can even do more complex calculations (“gauge”, 18). Of course, this is all ironic: the school-teacher isn’t that knowledgeable – he just seems very knowledgeable to the “gazing rustics” (22).
Answer:
They is referred to the students in the village school