Goldsmith’s trademark as a writer was his sense of humor. He was both an ironist, as demonstrated by The Vicar of Wakefield and its associated poetry, and a satirist, as demonstrated by The Citizen of the World, a series of letters supposedly written by a Chinese tourist critiquing England. Goldsmith’s friend and fellow writer Samuel Johnson deemed Goldsmith’s The Traveller the best poem since the death of famed satirist Alexander Pope (1688-1744), and although The Traveller in particular is not satiric, the comparison between Pope and Goldsmith is an apt one. Perhaps Pope’s most famous poem was The Rape of the Lock (1712), a mock-heroic poem about a man who cut a lock of a woman’s hair without her permission. Pope parodies the language and tone of mythological epics and applies them to a comparably trivial social misdemeanor, humorously satirizing what he saw as an overreaction to social taboos. While Goldsmith’s “An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog” does not directly reference or criticize any real event or idea, the poem does similarly parody another genre for the sake of humor.

Another writer who preceded Goldsmith in the genre of satire was the Anglo-Irish poet and pamphleteer Jonathan Swift (1667-1745).