Every day, I have to figure out what to write about. Sometimes, it’s obvious. Something I read, somewhere I went, something I remember, some place I ate, something on the news.

But sometimes, it isn’t obvious at all and I say: take a deep breath …… and go.

I started thinking about people who illustrate books, and how their works don’t hang in galleries. I’ve thought about this before, and one time I ……. well that was then, this is now.

I picked up a rather old book I have, a simple book, not something worth a lot of money (at all), but with really nice illustrations. The book is a 1912 edition of The Deserted Village by Oliver Goldsmith, and the illustrations were done by a man named William Lee Hankey.

I looked Hankey up and there he was, right on Wikipedia where he should be. He was an English painter and book illustrator, who was born in 1869 and lived until 1952. He painted portraits and landscapes, lived in England and France, and was very well respected. I think his work is beautiful. You can look him up, if you want to.

He made these illustrations sometime around 1900, but Goldsmith wrote the book in the 1770s. I have had this book quite a while, and have no idea where I bought it (or stole it, or found it), but I never paid any real attention to it. It just sat in a closet. Until today.

Now I know Goldsmith as the author of The Vicar of Wakefield (another book I have not read) and She Stoops to Conquer (a play I have not seen), but really don’t know much about him. I knew nothing about The Deserted Village, which is a lengthy poem whose lines end with rhymes (e.g., dear/year; race/place; power/hour; prize/rise; etc, from page 14 of my edition), and which is pretty easy to follow. It is both an elegy for times which are passing, and concern for what is coming. This makes it pretty contemporary.

Goldsmith remembers the England of his youth, the rural villages, the pleasant life, active communities. They are now disappearing and the Village of Auburn has been totally deserted, its buildings falling to ruin. The reason? Goldsmith blames it on the Enclosure Laws, which took and privatized communal lands used for grazing and planting, and created large estates for the gentry, at the expense of the rural peasantry. With no land to farm or graze, with jobs scare and money scarcer, the rural towns, he says, were fast vanishing, their residents fleeing from England, many going all the way to the New World, impoverished farmers going to English colonies such as newly opened Georgia, in North America.

What kind of a country does such a thing? What kind of a country favors the gentry, the nobility, the wealthy, over the masses? What kind of a country lets the rich get richer, the wealth gap between rich and poor expanding more than ever before?

The villages will not be restored. The country will be changed forever. The displaced poor will never be able to recreate the lives they once had, whether they remained in England or left for other places.

So, the poor-rich gap is not a 20th or 21st century development. People were worried about it in the 18th century. But apparently unable to arrest its progress.

Goldsmith’s political positions are not fully known. He was not a politician. He is known as having a strong leaning towards nostalgia. He favored old fashioned values over change,a small self-reliant homogeneous community over a larger, more diverse kingdom. As he said: “I love everything that’s old – old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wines.”

As to Hankey, living until his mid-80s gave him a lot of time to make art. And a lot of his artwork is available to purchase. His paintings are generally in the $5,000 to $10,000 range. His etchings are mainly about $300 to $750, although some are more and some less. I found one I liked for only $195. A bargain.

“Ask me no questions, I’ll tell you know lies”? Actually, it was “ask me no questions, I’ll tell you know fibs”. Perhaps the most famous line of ….. Oliver Goldsmith?

Or how about: “He who fights and runs away, lives to fight another day.” Or: “All is not gold that glitters….”