Wild and Wilder

Irish Times

29-05-2025

Sunk are thy bowers in shapeless ruin all, and the long grass o'ertops the mouldering wall.
Ok, that's a slight exaggeration of Trinity College Dublin's rewilding project, now in full bloom. The walls are not mouldering, yet, and the campus is hardly a deserted village.
Even so, if he could see his bronze likeness on a plinth in the front lawn, reading a book, Oliver Goldsmith might be a little worried about the rise of the wildflower meadow beneath him, suggesting as it does the university's reclaim by nature.
Or maybe he would be more exercised by the pious myth of the statue itself, which depicts a devoted scholar, oblivious to the world around him. This was far from the truth of his Trinity education: an altogether wilder experience, in more ways than one.
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A lowlight of Goldsmith's college days was his involvement in a student riot in 1747. That began with the 'pumping' of a bailiff at the campus cistern. Trinity at that time was a self-declared sanctuary from debt collectors, so bailiffs found on the premises were liable to rough treatment.
But emboldened by their actions, the students then decided to storm a local Bastille. According to one Goldsmith biographer, they joined 'the rabble of the town in an attempt to force Newgate and liberate the prisoners'. Gaolers fired in defence and three people died.
After that escapade, the feckless Oliver belatedly knuckled down to study and won the only prize of his college career. Unfortunately, he celebrated with a wild party, which drew the attentions of an even wilder senior academic: Theaker Wilder (1717 – 1778), to be exact.
Latter-day apologists for Wilder might consider him 'a bit of a character'. Others would prefer the term 'psychopath'. Goldsmith, to whom he was tutor, called him a 'learned savage'.
Born in the family castle at Abbeyshrule, Co Longford, Wilder was known to 'treat students of the subordinate class with peculiar harshness'. Goldsmith (who lived in what one friend called 'squalid poverty') fell into the subordinate category although in this case he may have been insubordinate too.
They first exchanged angry words, then Wilder hit him. And so offended was the budding literary genius that next morning he decided to quit college and emigrate to America. He set out for Cork with this object, before his resolve weakened and he stayed in Ireland.
En route to Cork, he had sold some of his clothes to survive but still went hungry for 24 hours until receiving 'a handful of grey peas, given him by a girl at a wake'. Returning to Trinity, he reached an uneasy truce with the tutor and finished his studies, two years late.
Other ways in which Wilder distinguished himself included adding to the torture of one unfortunate bailiff, who was enduring the traditional punishment at the cistern. In a mock appeal for clemency, the passing academic cried out: 'Gentlemen, gentlemen, for the love of God, don't be so cruel as to nail his ears to the pump'.
The option of nailing the bailiff's ears may not have occurred to his persecutors until then. Now they took the hint and fastened one of the man's ears to the pump with a 'tenpenny nail'.
Although a man of the cloth, Wilder was also a pioneer of a well-known academic tradition: sexual harassment. Where other senior fellows deported themselves with decorum, according to the historian John Edward Walsh, Wilder once confronted an attractive young woman in a narrow passageway where she couldn't pass.
After admiring her beauty for a moment, 'he laid his hands on each side and kissed her'. To this he added an 18th century version of victim blaming. 'Take that, miss, for being so handsome,' he said.
But Trinity academics in those days were laws unto themselves. They were also extremely well paid for their privilege, funded by the 200,000 acres of land the university owned, much of it confiscated during the plantations.
Writing a century later, Thomas D'arcy McGee marvelled that 'some of Trinity's senior fellows enjoy higher incomes than Cabinet ministers…and junior fellows, of a few days' standing, frequently decline some of her thirty-one church livings with benefices which would shame the poverty of scores of continental, not to say Irish, Catholic archbishops'.
As for comparisons with careers in the military, D'arcy McGee went on, 'majors and field officers would acquire increased pay by being promoted to the rank of head porter, first menial, in Trinity'.
Oh well, that was then. No doubt many academics in today's Trinity live on mere pittances by comparison, their fortunes having declined in inverse proportion to the grass on the front lawn.
Perhaps predictably, Wilder came to a bad end. By then rector of a parish in Donegal, he was 'killed in a drunken riot' in one version, or in another by an unspecified accident on the way home from a pub.
His once-suffering student had predeceased him. But Goldsmith (1728 – 1774) achieved great fame, if not fortune, in his short lifetime. And 251 years later, he is being celebrated again this weekend in his native Abbeyshrule and Ballymahon.
Senator Michael McDowell will open the latest Oliver Goldsmith Festival (olivergoldsmithfestival.com) on Friday. Other speakers during the weekend include yours truly, on a subject I hope I'll have thought of by then.