In this paper, we analyze the language of the novel The Goldsmith's Gold by Augusta Šenoa, which was published in 1871. This is the time when the linguists of the Zagreb Philological School are active and when the growing influence of the school of Croatian Vukovaca is felt, whose grammatical reflections will take precedence at the end of the 19th century. In the first part of the paper we present the Croatian language picture of the 19th century; the activities of the Illyrians and philological schools. In the second part, we pay attention to the life and work of August Šenoa, whose work marked an entire period that we call Šenoa's time and / or protorealism. In the central part of the paper we analyze the language of the novel Goldsmith's Gold, first on the orthographic level, followed by phonological, morphological and partly syntactic and lexical analysis. We observe the language in the context of grammatical and orthographic solutions of the Zagreb Philological School and some solutions of the Croatian Vukovac School. We conclude that the language of the novel is mostly written in accordance with the solution of the Zagreb School of Philology, which is confirmed by morphological spelling, writing the refleks jata is ie and je, genitive suffix -ah in nouns, unsyncretized suffixes in dative, locative and instrumental plural nouns and syntactic features such as writing proti + dative and Slavic genitive, use of preposition to the dative of the goal, direction of verb action and direction of movement... In some examples, Šenoa's departure from these solutions is visible: and srce and otac. (44; 92).