Understanding the Political Alignment of Samuel Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith
If you're wrestling with this classic history or literature exam question, you're not alone. It shows up in AP English, British history surveys, and various competitive exams in India and the UK. Let me cut through the noise. The short answer: Tories. Samuel Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith, the two most prominent literary figures of mid-18th century England, both held political sympathies that aligned most closely with the Tory party, as opposed to the Whigs who dominated much of the intellectual and political establishment of the era. Samuel Johnson was openly and consistently Tory. He served as a propaganda writer for the government during the Jacobite rising of 1745, penning The Adventurer essays that defended the Hanoverian succession and attacked rebel sentiment. His Lives of the Poets and his general editorial positions in The Rambler reflected a deep suspicion of radicalism, a respect for established authority, and a belief in social order. He was awarded a royal pension by King George III in 1762, a clear signal of the government's regard for his loyalist writings.
Oliver Goldsmith was less politically combative but shared Johnson's general orientation. Born in Ireland, Goldsmith moved in the same literary circles and was a close friend of Johnson. His work The Citizen of the World (1760-1761) offered gentle satire on contemporary manners and politics without the fervent Tory polemic Johnson produced. Goldsmith's The Bee and his play The Good-Natur'd Man reflect a more moderate, often Whig-leaning sensibility on certain issues, but overall his political instincts sat closer to the Tory position than to the radical Enlightenment whiggishness of contemporaries like Richard Brinsley Sheridan or the younger William Godwin. Here's where it gets messy, and where I've seen people lose marks: Johnson and Goldsmith weren't party machines. They wrote for patronage, they shifted on specific issues, and Johnson in particular could be fiercely critical of Tory leaders when he felt they compromised principle. In 1770s, Johnson's relationship with the government became more ambivalent. His Letters of Malachus Graecus attacked Lord Bute, a Tory prime minister, with considerable venom. So "nearest those of Tories" is the best answer for an exam, but the reality was more nuanced than a simple label. In practice, when I've helped students with this, the trap is assuming that because Goldsmith was Irish and wrote about social reform, he must have been a Whig. Irish birth doesn't equal Whig sympathy in the 1760s-70s. The Whigs were the party of the Protestant establishment and parliamentary reform; many Irish Protestants leaned Whig, but Goldsmith, an Anglican clergyman's son who studied at Trinity College Dublin and then Oxford, wasn't moving in those reformist circles. His circle was Johnson's circle, and that was a Tory-leaning one.
One specific edge case that trips people up: Johnson's famous opposition to the American Revolution. Many students assume this makes him a Whig because "opposition to government overreach" sounds liberal. But Johnson's position was thoroughly Tory — he believed in the supreme authority of Parliament, opposed concessions to the colonies, and argued from a position of hierarchical order. His Thoughts on the Late Changes respecting America (1775) is a key text here. Reading it makes clear that his conservatism, not his liberalism, drove his stance. The Whigs of this period, by contrast, were more sympathetic to the American cause, more inclined toward religious toleration (especially for Protestant dissenters), and generally more supportive of commercial and colonial expansion on terms that favored the mercantile class. The Tories were the party of the established church, the monarchy, traditional hierarchy, and skeptical of rapid change — positions both Johnson and Goldsmith inhabited more comfortably. If you're writing this for an exam, stick with Tories. If you're writing a paper, spend a paragraph on the nuances I mentioned above and you'll stand out. The Johnson-Goldsmith friendship itself is worth noting — they were core members of the Literary Club, which included Edmund Burke (a Whig) and Joshua Reynolds, and the group's political conversations were far more varied than a simple Tory/Whig binary would suggest. That complexity is exactly why this question keeps appearing on tests.
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