Oliver Goldsmith apparently once experienced a similar situation to the one presented in She Stoops to Conquer—travelers mistaking a private residence for an inn—with comic results. In terms of his personality, more generally, as Goldsmith rose from his roots in provincial Ireland (in the mid-1700s) to notoriety in London intellectual society, he couldn't scrape the mud from his boots, so to speak. His writings ranged from news "hacking," as a low-rent commercial scribe, to the copious output of a gifted prose (and poetic) stylist. He earned the approbation and support of his contemporaries, such as biographer Samuel Johnson and the dramatist/producer David Garrick. Johnson asserted about Goldsmith, "No man was more foolish when he had not a pen in his hand, and more wise when he had."
As his professional stock rose, however, his personal image never evolved. While Goldsmith was established within London's literary sphere, he was...
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an incorrigible oddball, utterly lacking in the social graces. And, by all accounts, he was not an attractive man, to put it kindly. It's not a stretch to presume that someone with such a contradictory profile of bumpkin-ism and erudition would have been cursed with acute self-consciousness. This, in turn, would hobble him in his interactions with the fairer sex.
Sir Charles Marlow, in She Stoops to Conquer, is, in contrast to his author, a gentleman. He, too, however, becomes flummoxed and tongue-tied in the presence of women. Commenting that he's incapable of small talk, he says, "A single glance from a pair of fine eyes has totally overset my resolution. I can't say fine things to them. They freeze, they petrify me."
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Marlow's most interesting personality trait, what the plot of this play hinges on, is his shyness and lack of confidence around women of his own class and a sharply contrasting boldness and lack of painful self-consciousness around lower class people, men and women. Because she learns that Marlow can relate to women of the lower classes in a way he can't to upper-class women, Kate Hardwick pretends to be a barmaid so he will woo her. Many have said that Goldsmith shared with Marlow the trait of being socially inept around the upper classes. "His conversational mishaps were memorable things," says the Encyclopedia Britannica, noting the contrast between his "fluency" in writing and the way this fluency "deserted" him in polite society. However, Goldsmith, like Marlow, could be a wild man when he felt comfortable, similar to the rude Marlow who offends Mr. Hardwick because he thinks Kate's father is an innkeeper.
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