Is it permissible to suggest that Oliver, with his head full of other things, was a little dubious about the sex of the other child of his brother, and spoke of a son where he should have said daughter? Writing to his brother Maurice in January, 1770, with anxious enquiries about the several members of the family, Oliver says: “Tell me about my mother, my brother Hodson and his son: _my brother Harry’s son and daughter_, my sister Johnson, the family of Ballyoughter, what is become of them, where they live and how they do. You talked of being my only brother, I don’t understand you--Where is Charles?” (_Memoir_, p. 89.)
Here it will be observed, Oliver makes tender enquiries after Henry’s “son and daughter.” He says nothing of the widow or of a second son. In the only letter of Oliver’s to his brother that is now extant, ascribed by Percy to “about 1759,” Oliver thus refers to the son: “The reasons you have given me for breeding your son a scholar are judicious and convincing.... Preach then my dear Sir, to your son not the excellence of human nature nor the disrespect of riches, but endeavour to teach him thrift and economy. Let his poor wandering Uncle’s example be placed in his eyes. I had learned from books to love virtue, before I was taught from experience the necessity of being selfish.”
I quote from the original holograph letter, not from the somewhat bowdlerised version of it that Percy printed in the _Memoir_ of 1801, and that has since been copied in all subsequent biographies.
It remains therefore to consider what happened to those whom Henry left behind him in 1768 of whom there is any record. There was a widow, of whose parentage and maiden name, or of the circumstances of her widowhood nothing seems to be known, his son Henry, and his daughter Catherine.
It was in all probability Mrs. Henry Goldsmith of whom Johnson wrote to George Steevens on 25 February, 1777, as recorded by Boswell in Volume III, Chapter III:
“Mr. Steevens ... joined Dr. Johnson in Kind assistance to a female relation of Dr. Goldsmith, and desired that on her return to Ireland she would procure authentic particulars of the life of her relation. Concerning her is the following letter: