I was poking around on the Literature Resource Center and found some interesting tidbits about Goldsmith:
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Oliver Goldsmith's reputation is made up of paradox. His blundering, improvident nature nevertheless won him the loyalty and friendship of figures like Samuel Johnson, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and Edmund Burke. While in society he was a buffoon, his writing testifies to personal charm and an ironic awareness of his own and others' absurdity.
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I am not sure that I would have inferred such an awareness from reading
The Vicar of Wakefield. I suppose that best demonstrates that we always bring something to a text before we ever open the book.
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Critical opinion of his work similarly varies from acceptance of Goldsmith as the sensitive apologist for past values to appraisal of him as an accomplished social and literary satirist. Indeed, his work can operate on both levels, a fact perhaps recognised by the young Jane Austen in her Juvenilia when she took Goldsmith's abridgements of history for young persons as a model for her own exercise in irony.
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!!! Now that I did not expect. I am an adoring fan of Austen and did not know this.
Quotes taken from: Oliver-Morden, B. C. "Oliver Goldsmith: Overview."
Reference Guide to English Literature, edited by D. L. Kirkpatrick, 2nd ed., St. James Press, 1991