Evangelical Lambertikirche, though dating from the 13th century, has been so transformed in the last century (1874–1886) as to show no trace of its antiquity. The palaces of the grand-duke and the old town-hall are Renaissance buildings of the 17th and 18th centuries. Among the other prominent buildings—all modern—are the palace of the heir apparent, the new town-hall, the theatre, the law-courts, the gymnasium, the commercial school, the three hospitals and the new Roman Catholic church. The grand-ducal picture gallery in the Augusteum includes works by Veronese, Velasquez, Murillo and Rubens, and there are collections of modern paintings and sculptures in the two palaces. The public library contains 110,000 volumes and the duke’s private library 55,000. There is also a large natural history museum and a museum with a collection of antiquities. The industries of Oldenburg, which are of no great importance, include iron-founding, spinning and the making of glass, tobacco, gloves, soap and leather. A considerable trade is carried on in grain, and the horse fairs are largely frequented. According to popular tradition Oldenburg was founded by Walbert, grandson of the Saxon hero, Widukind, and was named after his wife Altburga, but the first historical mention of it occurs in a document of 1108. It was fortified in 1155, and received a municipal charter in 1345. The subsequent history of the town is merged in that of the grand-duchy.
See Sello, Historische Wanderung durch die Stadt Oldenburg (Oldenburg, 1896); and Alt-Oldenburg (Oldenburg, 1903); and Kohl, Die Allmende der Stadt Oldenburg (Oldenburg, 1903).
OLDFIELD, ANNE (1683–1730), English actress, was born in London, the daughter of a soldier. She worked for a time as apprentice to a sempstress, until she attracted George Farquhar’s attention by reciting some lines from a play in his hearing. She thereupon obtained an engagement at Drury Lane, where her beauty rather than her ability slowly brought her into favour, and it was not until ten years later that she was generally acknowledged as the best actress of her time. In polite comedy, especially, she was unrivalled, and even the usually grudging Gibber acknowledged that she had as much as he to do with the success of the Careless Husband (1704), in which she created the part of Lady Modish, reluctantly given her because Mrs Verbruggen was ill. In tragedy, too, she won laurels, and the list of her parts, many of them original, is a long and varied one. She was the theatrical idol of her day. Her exquisite acting and lady-like carriage were the delight of her contemporaries, and her beauty and generosity found innumerable eulogists, as well as sneering detractors. Alexander Pope, in his Sober Advice from Horace, wrote of her—
“Engaging Oldfield, who, with grace and ease,
Could join the arts to ruin and to please.”
It was to her that the satirist alluded as the lady who detested being buried in woollen, who said to her maid—
“No, let a charming chintz and Brussels lace
Wrap my cold limbs and shade my lifeless face;
One would not, sure, be frightful when one’s dead,
And—Betty—give this cheek a little red.”
She was but forty-seven when she died on the 23rd of October 1730, leaving all the court and half the town in tears.
She divided her property, for that time a large one, between her natural sons, the first by Arthur Mainwaring (1668–1712)—who had left her and his son half his fortune on his death—and the second by Lieut.-General Charles Churchill (d. 1745). Mrs Oldfield was buried in Westminster Abbey, beneath the monument to Congreve, William, but when Churchill applied for permission to erect a monument there to her memory the dean of Westminster refused it.
OLD FORGE, a borough of Lackawanna county, Pennsylvania, U.S.A., on the Lackawanna river, about 6 m. S.W. of Scranton. Pop. (1900) 5630, of whom 2494 were foreign-born (principally Italians). It is served by the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western and the Lehigh Valley railways. The principal public buildings are the town-hall and the high school. The borough is situated
in the anthracite coal region, and the mining of coal is the principal industry, though there are also various manufactures. Old Forge was settled in 1830 and incorporated as a borough
in 1899.
OLDHAM, JOHN (1653–1683), English satirist, son of a Presbyterian minister, was born at Shipton Moyne, near Tetbury, Gloucestershire, on the 9th of August 1653. He graduated
from St Edmund Hall, Oxford, in 1674, and was for three years
an usher in a school at Croydon. Some of his verses attracted
the attention of the town, and the earl of Rochester, with Sir
Charles Sedley and other wits, came down to see him. The
visit did not affect his career apparently, for he stayed at Croydon
until 1681, when he became tutor to the grandsons of Sir
Edward Thurland, near Reigate. Meanwhile he had tried, he
says, to conquer his inclination for the unprofitable trade of
poetry, but in the panic caused by the revelations of Titus
Oates, he found an opportunity for the exercise of his gift for
rough satire. Garnet’s Ghost was published as a broadside in
1679, but the other Satires on the Jesuits, although written at
the same time, were not printed until 1681. The success of these
dramatic and unsparing invectives apparently gave Oldham
hope that he might become independent of teaching. But his
undoubted services to the Country Party brought no reward
from its leaders. He became tutor to the son of Sir William
Hickes, and was eventually glad to accept the patronage of
William Pierrepont, earl of Kingston, whose kindly offer of a
chaplaincy he had refused earlier. He died at Holme-Pierrepoint,
near Nottingham, on the 9th of December 1683, of smallpox.
Oldham took Juvenal for his model, and in breadth of treatment and power of invective surpassed his English predecessors. He was original in the dramatic setting provided for his satires. Thomas Garnet, who suffered for supposed implication in the Gunpowder Plot, rose from the dead to encourage the Jesuits in the first satire, and in the third Ignatius Loyola is represented as dictating his wishes to his disciples from his death-bed. Oldham wrote other satires, notably one “addressed to a friend about to leave the university,” which contains a well-known description of the state of slavery of the private chaplain, and another “dissuading from poetry”, describing the ingratitude shown to Edmund Spenser, whose ghost is the speaker, to Samuel Butler and to Abraham Cowley. Oldham’s verse is rugged, and his rhymes often defective, but he met with a generous appreciation from Dryden, whose own satiric bent was perhaps influenced by his efforts. He says (“To the Memory of Mr Oldham,” Works, ed. Scott, vol. xi. p. 99):—
“For sure our souls were near allied, and thine
Cast in the same poetic mould with mine.”
The real wit and rigour of Oldham’s satirical poetry are undeniable, while its faults—its frenzied extravagance and lack of metrical polish—might, as Dryden suggests, have been cured with time, for Oldham was only thirty when he died.
The best edition of his works is The Compositions in Prose and Verse of Mr John Oldham . . . (1770), with memoir and explanatory notes by Edward Thompson.
OLDHAM, THOMAS (1816–1878) British geologist, was born in Dublin on the 4th of May 1816. He was educated there at Trinity College, graduating B.A. in 1836, and afterwards studied engineering in Edinburgh, where he gained a good knowledge of geology and mineralogy under Jameson. On his return to Ireland in 1839 he became chief assistant to Captain (afterwards Major General) Portlock, who conducted the geological department of the Ordnance Survey, and he rendered much help in the field and office in the preparation of the Report on the Geology of Londonderry, &c. (1843). Subsequently he served under Captain (afterwards Sir Henry) James, the first local director of the Geological Survey of Ireland, whom he succeeded in 1846. Meanwhile in 1845 he was appointed professor of Geology in the university of Dublin. In 1848 he was elected F.R.S. In 1849 he discovered in the Cambrian rocks of Bray Head the problematical fossil named Oldhamia. In 1850 he was selected to take charge of the Geological Survey of India, which he organized, and in due course he established the Memoirs, the Palaeontologia Indica and the Records, to which he contributed
