APOLOGY: “DODSLEY’S LIFE SHOULD BE WRITTEN”

James Boswell reports of his and Samuel Johnson's visit in March 1776 with Thomas Warton, in Warton's chambers in Trinity College, Oxford: “I said Mr. Robert Dodsley's life should be written, as he had been so much connected with the wits of his time, and by his literary merit had raised himself from the station of a footman.” Both Johnson and Warton were well qualified to contribute toward a biography of the late poet, playwright, and bookseller, and Warton mentioned Dodsley's Muse in Livery, the volume of poems that had made the domestic servant known to literary London. “I doubt whether Dodsley's brother would thank a man who should write his life,” Johnson warned; “yet Dodsley himself was not unwilling that his original low condition should be recollected. When Lord Lyttelton's Dialogues of the Dead came out, one of which is between Apicius, an ancient epicure, and Dartineuf, a modern epicure, Dodsley said to me, ‘I knew Dartineuf well, for I was once his footman.’”¹

“Lives can only be written from personal knowledge,” Johnson laments in his life of Addison, a knowledge “which is growing every day less, and in a short time is lost forever.”² Discussing Dodsley with Warton and Boswell, Johnson stressed that “they only who live with a man can write his life with any genuine exactness and discrimination; and few people who have lived with a man know what to remark about him.”³ Having had a continuous friendship with Dodsley for a quarter of a century, Johnson knew him intimately, but so lessened is that knowledge now that only a few paragraphs of correspondence, legal contract, and anecdote survive. Attempting a biography nearly three hundred years after Dodsley's birth, I am acutely conscious of what theologians of the eighteenth century would call the decay of evidence.

As Thomas Gray notes in a poem Dodsley published, the annals of the poor are “short and simple,” often no more than birth and death dates recorded in obscure parish registers. This paucity of early history is endemic for figures who later rose to eminence but wrote no autobiography. For example, nothing is known of the early life of publisher Joseph Johnson,⁴ and of printer William Strahan, “the only scrap of information he himself left of his early years” was the date and place of his birth.⁵ Dodsley left less, and until the discovery in 1910 of his name in an old manuscript-book kept by a parish clerk in Mansfield, his birth was surrounded “by a certain mystery which seemed likely to remain unsolved for all time.”⁶ The early short biographies of Dodsley that occur in biographical dictionaries, in histories of Mansfield or Nottinghamshire, or as prefaces to collections of his verse in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries give at most scattered sentences of admitted conjecture concerning his youth.

The only full biography of Dodsley and the only reliable, if scant, source of information on Dodsley's genealogy and youth was published by Ralph Straus in 1910. A careful researcher, Straus had the advantage of obtaining from a descendant—Mrs. Robert Dodsley of Skegby Hall, Mansfield—“almost every one of the facts relating to Dodsley's birth and family” that appear in his biography.⁷ James E. Tierney, an equally meticulous researcher, in preparing his 1988 edition of Dodsley's correspondence, could discover no new information on the early years and no letters to or from Dodsley until Dodsley was nearly thirty, forcing Tierney to conclude that “Ralph Straus's biography seems to have exhausted available evidence on Dodsley's pre-London days.”⁸

The large majority of Dodsley's correspondence has not survived, another incalculable loss to a biographer. The cumulative result is that the extant correspondence, although invaluable, does not give anything like a proportioned picture of Dodsley's career or personal life. As Tierney readily admits, there are many “lean years … especially during the early part of his career. In fact, the years 1739 through 1742 offer but a single letter, despite the fact that Dodsley negotiated for at least 69 publications during the period.”⁹ Dodsley was thirty when he wrote his first extant letter, and from his birth to age forty, only three of his letters survive. The large majority of extant letters (288 of 428 pages in Tierney's edition) are with correspondents outside London during the seven-year period from 1753 through 1759, and most of those are with William Shenstone, to whom Dodsley wrote 81 of his 167 extant letters. From a thirty-year close friendship with Joseph Spence, three letters survive—one from Spence, two from Dodsley; from a twenty-five-year intimacy with Samuel Johnson, only two, each a short paragraph written by Johnson; from Alexander Pope, three inconsequential paragraphs. Amazingly, no personal letter to any family member survives. Regardless of the explanations for the absences, Tierney apologizes, “still an editor frets to offer an edition of correspondence where so much is known missing.”¹⁰

What is not missing from the historical record is sometimes in error. Henry Richard Tedder's entry on Dodsley in the Dictionary of National Biography correctly complains that most biographical commentary on Dodsley is “full of errors” and recommends the short life prefixed to the selection of Dodsley's poems in Alexander Chalmers's 1810 edition of the English poets, asserting that Chalmers knew Dodsley personally.¹¹ Even this caveat contains a representative error. Chalmers was only five years old when Dodsley died in 1764, and he knew not Robert but Robert's younger brother James, heir to Robert's bookshop. Modern scholars continue to confuse the two. In Authorship in the Days of Johnson, A. S. Collins conflates the brothers when he asserts that whereas “Dodsley gave 220 guineas for [Edward] Young's Night Thoughts in 1742, he gave [Thomas] Percy in 1765 300 guineas for his Reliques.”¹² This same conflation occurs at various points in the multivolume editions of Thomas Percy's letters and Horace Walpole's correspondence.¹³ Lord Chesterfield's biographer correctly identifies Robert when discussing Johnson's notorious letter to Lord Chesterfield but incorrectly thinks it is Robert who purchases and publishes Chesterfield's letters ten years after Robert's death.¹⁴ Indicatively, a 1985 article identifies Robert as the recipient of a letter written in 1775, eleven years after his death,¹⁵ and both the 1979 Oxford History of English Literature for The Mid-Eighteenth Century and the 1989 Oxford British History of the period—A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727-1783—continue the conflation.¹⁶ A recent biography of Thomas Gray avoids confusion by indexing only a nonspecific “Mr Dodsley,”¹⁷ and an edition of Isaac Reed's diaries confuses Robert and James in the text and indexes a never-existent “Ralph Dodsley.”¹⁸ Analogous errors have infiltrated even the best library catalogues, “sometimes marring even those of our most sophisticated research libraries.”¹⁹ Inevitably, such errors are replicated when library catalogues are used as the data base for bibliographical projects such as the Eighteenth-Century Short Title Catalogue.

This cumulative confusion is, however, simultaneously hindrance and incentive for the biographer, for—after all the limitations are admitted—the resources for undertaking a new biography are compelling. Shortly after Tedder's DNB article, Ralph Straus published the only biography of Robert Dodsley that is more than a brief sketch. Using his wide knowledge of publishing in the eighteenth century and quoting extensively from the letters to and from Dodsley preserved in the British and Birmingham Libraries, he presents a suggestive basis for further research. Moreover, using primarily newspaper advertisements, he provides a dated bibliography of Dodsley's own works and a much longer bibliography of books Dodsley published that were written by others. Both his beginnings have been superseded recently. Straus prided himself upon having seen nearly two hundred letters to or from Dodsley,²⁰ and part of the authority of his biography consisted in lengthy quotations from that correspondence. James Tierney's edition prints twice the number of letters seen by Straus, some in various drafts, others complete for the first time. Moreover, in annotating the letters, Tierney verified Straus's datings, using some newspapers not consulted by Straus. Straus's biography and Tierney's edition of the Correspondence—both the letters and the annotations—have been invaluable to my researches and are informing presences throughout this work.

In the same way that Tierney's edition of Dodsley's correspondence provides a much richer repository for the biographer than the extracts in Straus's biography, so do the available resources for eighteenth-century scholarship dramatically supplement the sources Straus had to hand in 1910. Scholarly editions of the works and correspondences of many of Dodsley's authors or intimate friends have been completed, Pope, Johnson, and Horace Walpole among them. Bibliographical resources are enormously increased, including access to the on-line Eighteenth-Century Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) and to microform collections such as The Eighteenth Century, Early British Periodicals, Early English Newspapers, and English Literary Periodicals, which give the researcher a diversity of eighteenth-century publications of which Straus could not even dream.

Equally important, recent scholarship on publishing and on “the history of the book” makes it possible to reconceive Dodsley's importance. Boswell's suggestion that Dodsley's life ought to be written contains two justifications: that he knew so many of the illustrious writers of his age and that he rose to prosperity from an inauspicious origin. Previous writers have concentrated on the first, for Dodsley had significant connections with Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, Edward Young, Mark Akenside, William Shenstone, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, David Garrick, Joseph and Thomas Warton, William Collins, Thomas Gray, the earl of Chesterfield, Horace Walpole, Oliver Goldsmith, Edmund Burke, Laurence Sterne, and Thomas Percy, to name some of the most eminent. “If poets are classed by rigorous examination, he will not be able to maintain a very elevated rank,” Chalmers opined at the conclusion of his brief biography in 1810, but “the connections he formed with many of the most eminent literary characters of his time, have given such a cast of popularity to the name of Dodsley, that it was not thought proper to refuse him a place among his poetical friends.”²¹

A hundred years later, Straus followed this model by making Dodsley a pervasive but subordinate character in his own biography. Chapters titled “Dodsley and Dr. Johnson,” “Dodsley, Gray, and Horace Walpole,” and “At the Age of Retirement: Burke, Goldsmith, and Sterne” indicate that even Straus finds Dodsley most interesting because of his connections with other writers. “Literary historians,” R. W. Chapman argues, “have naturally focused their attention on the famous writers, and nearly all they tell us of the publishers is in relation to these writers' work.”²² Representatively, the review of Dodsley's Correspondence in the Times Literary Supplement suggests that the real utility of Tierney's collection of letters to and from Dodsley will be as material toward a biography of Dodsley's friend William Shenstone.²³ An analogous review in The Age of Johnson laments that Dodsley had not “an iota of the divine Boswellian itch or genius” or he might have brought his betters to life for us in his letters.²⁴

No person knowledgeable about eighteenth-century English publishing denies that Robert Dodsley is the most important bookseller of his age.²⁵ However, in literary history's enthusiasm for the author, even the most influential booksellers have seemed insignificant. Straus concludes his biography by dismissing Dodsley as a “mediocrity” and a “serviceable bourgeois personality … in love with books and bookish people.”²⁶ Even some present scholars of “the history of the book” continue to characterize booksellers as “neutral marketplace forces” of no independent consequence, interesting only for the numbers in their ledgers; others dismiss them as dimly unaware of the forces of literacy and literature raging around them, as when Alvin Kernan contrasts bookseller Dodsley to author Johnson as having “no understanding” of a paradigm shift from an older world of polite letters, which was oral, aristocratic, amateur, court-centered, and controlled by patronage and state censorship, to a new print-based order, which is market-centered and democratic with lapsed censorship and a copyright law protecting books as property.²⁷ …

Neither mediocrity nor dunce, Dodsley tells us most about his age when he is not subordinated as a pygmy publisher among literary giants. Recent scholars have complained that we have no authoritative “history of print” or of “publishing” during the eighteenth century. In fact, there are several very good surveys detailing printing and bookselling practices during Dodsley's age. What is lacking, however, is a compelling picture of the emergence of booksellers as the dominant patrons in letters, succeeding the aristocracy. This emergence is related to shifts in literacy, education, economics, and politics, but a vital history of the shift is inseparable from the life histories of individual booksellers.

Dodsley was the most important publisher of his period, patron to almost every midcentury poet still read today. His own six-volume Collection of Poems established a canon that is still compulsory. Through his various anthologies and periodicals and by his publication of individual works, Dodsley's bookshop became the focus for a shift in sensibility from neoclassicism to romanticism. Yet, for all his importance, Dodsley has remained a figure subordinate to his colleagues, a figure indistinguishable from his less talented brother even to the best scholars of eighteenth-century life and letters.

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CREATING CANONS: 1741-1748

THE PUBLICK REGISTER

Dodsley's celebrity as footman bard, as dramatist, as chronicler, and as martyr in the fight for a free British press overcame whatever initial disadvantages he suffered from not being a member of the Stationers' Company. By 1740 he was known internationally as “Pope's publisher,” and he was inundated with manuscripts and proposals from authors and from other booksellers. Like Pope, he was conscientious about all the physical attributes of a book from layout, type, ink, and paper to sewing and binding. When Dodsley published a second edition of the Aeneid, Christopher Pitt wrote expressing his pleasure at the quality of both “the Letter and the Paper” but expressing regret over some mangling in John Hughs's shop by “the Workmen of the Press,” supposing that “these faults crept in during your Absence from the Town.”²⁸

His dealings with aspiring poet John Brown illustrate Dodsley's usual role in the progress of an unknown author into print. From Carlisle, Brown mailed a manuscript of a poem, Honour, wanting to sell, but Dodsley evaded committing himself to purchase the copyright. “I wish you had told me directly,” Brown wrote, “whether you are willing to purchase the Copy of the Poem I sent You, upon any Terms, or not. If you are, I desire you will let me know what you can give: If you are not, pray inform me particularly upon what Terms you will print, and sell it, upon The Author's Account.” Dodsley agreed to have the poem printed with the Tully's Head imprint but at Brown's expense. If it sold well, Dodsley would profit; if it failed, Brown would have borne the costs. Brown responded: “The Terms upon which you propose to print the Poem are reasonable enough: But I did not think the Expense of Print Paper Advertising & c: would have risen quite so high.” To curtail expenses, Brown proposed printing the poem in quarto rather than folio. Brown left the matter of when to publish to Dodsley's discretion, since the publisher knew best “which is the properest” time for maximum sales.

If possible, Brown requested, Dodsley should “have a printed copy sent down by way of Proof, as I cannot expect that You in the hurry of Business should revise it with that Care, as an Author does his own Productions.” He thanked Dodsley for his compliments on the poem, but asked Dodsley to get a critical reading from one of his authors. “I should think my self much obliged to you, if you could procure me any Emendations or various Readings from any person who has Abilities in this Way: I see you are Mr. Pope's Bookseller; but am afraid this is too great a Favour to be expected from Him.” Brown appended a list of alterations, which Dodsley followed exactly in having the poem printed. On the day before Christmas 1743, four days after Dodsley published Honour, Brown sent instructions for disposition of copies. “A Day or two after you receive this,” he wrote, “there will be thirty five Copies of my little Poem called for all stitched in Marble; two of them on fine Paper: Likewise one Copy of your Poem, wch I desire may be covered the same Way.” Brown then listed the names and addresses of those persons in London to whom Dodsley was to send complimentary copies and concluded with a plea that Dodsley inform him of his muse's fate: “Pray let me hear what Progress it is like to make as soon as you can judge of it.”²⁹

Honour shows Dodsley's involvement in the publication of an uncomplicated text from Tully's Head. From first look at the manuscript to final disposal of bound copies, he coordinated everything. He read the manuscript and assessed its merit and marketability; he negotiated the financial arrangements with the author, with special attention to disposal of copyright and with rights to reprint; with attention to cost and quality of work, he subcontracted the actual printing but specified type, ink, and paper, which he purchased separately and provided to the printer; before printing he worked with the author as a manuscript editor and during printing acted as proofreader; he arranged publicity for the book in the periodicals and in lists of “books printed for R. Dodsley,” issued separately or included in other books from Tully's Head; he sold the printed work in his bookshop and oversaw its wider distribution to the trade; and he arranged the sewing and binding of copies according to purchasers' instructions. At the center of the eighteenth-century renaissance in printing were the booksellers, and among them, Dodsley aspired to produce the finest books.

As importantly, Dodsley's shop served as literary loci. Twenty-eight-year-old clergyman and sometimes lecturer John Brown had written to Dodsley from distant Carlisle in an attempt to join a literary circle centered at Tully's Head. Acknowledging Dodsley as Pope's bookseller, he had hoped that Dodsley would call him to the attention of other Tully's Head authors. A well-known author in his own right, as Brown acknowledged in his request for Dodsley's latest poem, Dodsley offered a location for the association of authors. Tully's Head was large, with abundant room for feasting friends or authors down from the universities or from as far afield as Carlisle. The physical space of Tully's Head gave London print life a local habitation, and in hopes of joining that life, aspiring authors from Oxford and Cambridge and Dublin and Edinburgh pinned their hopes on a bookseller in Pall Mall.

As Dodsley's reputation increased, so did his ambitions. In 1740, every enterprising bookseller was envious of Cave's spectacular success in the 1730s with his monthly Gentleman's Magazine. Cave had tried to entice fellow booksellers to join him in publishing, as he coined the usage, a “magazine” of essays and articles supplemented with noteworthy news. His colleagues in the trade at first rejected the project as too risky, but in the wake of a year's spectacular success, those same booksellers launched the rival London Magazine in April 1732.³⁰ Eight years after his initiation of the Gentleman's Magazine, Cave gloated that eleven defunct or languishing rivals had attempted without success to steal his market. Periodicals were attractive undertakings: they had low start-up costs, but a successful periodical could be phenomenally remunerative, the source of immediate profit, and when collected later into volumes, a continuing income. Booksellers could use periodicals to test public response to other projects or authors and to puff those that met encouragement. There were also nonpecuniary incentives, including providing a forum for and projecting an image of the sponsoring bookseller.

No other bookseller approached Dodsley's fertility in imagining and executing literary projects,³¹ and so Dodsley decided to contest the market with Cave: on 3 January 1741, he began The Publick Register; Or, the Weekly Magazine. Cave's magazine came out monthly, and Dodsley thought that a smaller, more frequent issue of much the same format would appeal to readers as more timely. Printed in dual columns on four half-sheets, the sixteen-page octavo pamphlet offered a miscellany of essays, poems, literary criticisms, and “news, foreign and domestick.” There was an avid appetite for news, especially outside London, and Dodsley's would be weeks fresher than Cave's. Moreover, Dodsley's threepenny combination of literary miscellany and newspaper was consciously upscale, excluding demeaning advertisements for quack remedies and promising that contributions would maintain a high standard, consisting of original works by the best authors rather than the reprints and hackwork that were the common staples of Cave's failed competitors.³²

Dedicated “To the Most Puissant and Sovereign Empress Novelty,” the Publick Register provided all it promised. Pope gave Dodsley an unpublished song by John Gay and short poems of his own for the first three issues, and Lords Peterborough and Chesterfield also contributed, among many others. Everything looked promising when, in the tenth number, Dodsley printed a bantering, congratulatory poem addressed to him as editor. The anonymous correspondent asks Dodsley, “what you mean, / By engaging so late, in a new magazine?” His competitor Cave has exhausted every “cunning contrivance,” and now only genuine originality can sustain a new periodical. Even an editor distinguished by “your satirical wit” can hardly expect his periodical to last a year, for

                    a weekly performance will certainly drain
In a quarter or two, the most volatile brain.
Then doubtless, you've many good friends, by the bye,
On whom you depend for a frequent supply:
And some, let me tell you, are forward to hope,
That your work now and then will be season'd by P—pe.(33)

Irritated by the formidable literary forces ranged against his Gentleman's Magazine, Cave played the serpent in Dodsley's garden in two respects. First, he discouraged his trade colleagues from advertising Dodsley's upstart. Second, Cave pointed out to the authorities that the Publick Register was technically a newspaper and should be required to pay the appropriate “stamping,” a widely detested duty imposed by the government on every newspaper.³⁴ Dodsley faced the dilemma of either raising the price of his periodical or discarding the news. Number 12 (21 March 1741) carried no news, explaining the reason and promising to supply the deficiency with “something more entertaining” than “such News, as the greates Part of our Readers must have seen before in the Daily and Evening Papers.”³⁵ In an allusion to the Gentleman's Magazine, Dodsley pretends surprise that “as some other pamphlets of a like nature have been permitted for several years, that we, who are the latest in offense, should be the earliest in punishment.”³⁶

In the next issue (28 March), Dodsley included the first installment of “An Historical and Geographical Description of all the Counties in England,” by the “Geographer to his Majesty.” A month later, faced with falling sales outside London, he reintroduced four pages of news but shortened the Register by two pages to compensate for the extra expense of stamping one half-sheet. In the following issue, Dodsley stole a dodge from Cave and imitated Johnson's device of reporting the debates in Parliament by thinly disguising them. Yet neither these “Memoirs of a certain Society” nor any of Dodsley's other innovations sufficed to make the periodical profitable, and the twenty-fourth issue was the last—partly, Dodsley explained, because of the stamp tax but mostly because of “the ungenerous Usage I have met with from one of the Proprietors of a certain Monthly Pamphlet, who has prevail'd with most of the common News-Papers not to advertise it.”³⁷

In 1741, despite the cessation of the Publick Register, Dodsley's name was very much before the public. The Chronicle pamphlets were being republished, and both The Toy-Shop and The King and the Miller of Mansfield were being regularly performed, sometimes at both Covent Garden and Drury Lane, the two major theaters. On Friday, 3 April, Dodsley offered playgoers another humble protagonist in his ballad-opera The Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green.³⁸ Modeled directly on John Daye's The Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green (1659), Dodsley's “new Dramatick Tale” and “Ballad Farce” opened as an afterpiece with Julius Caesar at Drury Lane, but in spite of having the popular Kitty Clive in the role of the beggar's daughter Bessy, the play failed. On Saturday, it was replaced with Dodsley's King and the Miller of Mansfield. The following Tuesday, The Blind Beggar was available for a shilling from Thomas Cooper's bookshop, and its songs were reprinted separately, but there was no attempt to revive it on stage. It is an index of the popularity of Dodsley's other works that there were Dublin and Glasgow editions and a French translation.³⁹ Dublin bookseller Oliver Nelson advertised Dodsley's Blind Beggar as “Wrote on the same plan with [Samuel Richardson's] Pamela, viz. Virtue attack'd and triumphant.”⁴⁰ Even if Dodsley's sentimental and moralizing tale of aristocratic abuse and the inevitable triumph of proletarian virtue offers modern scholars “an interesting … enunciation of new social codes,”⁴¹ only the songs—set to music by Thomas Arne—charmed his contemporaries. When lecherous Lord Ranby argues that a woman is better off as an adored mistress than as a servile wife, Bessy melodiously reproves him:

As death alone the marriage knot unties,
          So vows that lovers make
Last until sleep, death's image, close their eyes,
          Dissolve when they awake;
And that fond love which was to-day their theme,
Is thought to-morrow but an idle dream.(42)

OLD PLAYS

After the disappointing failure of his second attempt at ballad-opera, Dodsley's dramatic energies were temporarily redirected into editing. In February 1741, he had published a translation of Luigi Riccoboni's history of European theater.⁴³ His interest in a similar history of British drama grew, along with a collection he was accumulating of early English plays, until, two years after the closing of his Blind Beggar, Dodsley was ready to announce one of his grandest projects. In the 24-26 March 1743 London Evening Post, Dodsley advertised that, “As all our Old PLAYS, except Shakespeare's, Johnson's and Beaumont and Fletcher's, are become exceeding scarce and extravantly [sic] dear, I propose, if I can procure 200 Subscribers, to select from such of our Dramatic Writers, as are of any considerable Repute, about Forty or Fifty Plays.”

Six years earlier, The British Theatre, in ten volumes, had offered “Twenty Tragedies and twenty Comedies, selected from the most celebrated Authors” from Shakespeare to Colley Cibber, but had included no pre-Restoration dramatist other than Shakespeare.⁴⁴ Dodsley knew the neglected richness of earlier drama, then moldering toward extinction, and it was only necessary to create a market for it. Selecting one or two of the best plays from each author to show the “Manner” of each and “the Humour of their Times,” Dodsley's advertisement promised to “print them in a handsome Manner, in Pocket Volumes, and at so cheap a Rate that they shall not exceed Six-pence each Play.” He proposed to print subscribers' names but, innovatively, to require no prepayment: “that such as are willing to encourage it may not run any Hazard, I desire no Money but upon the Delivery of the Book.” Subscriptions were to be taken not only at Tully's Head but “by the Booksellers of London, Oxford, Cambridge and Bath, to whom a handsome Allowance will be given.”

Within a few days, Dodsley had the requisite number of subscribers. The London Evening Post for 14-16 April contains a note dated 28 March from Tully's Head, Pall Mall: “Mr. R. DODSLEY begs leave to acquaint the Publick, that having got 200 Subscribers to his Proposal for printing a select Collection of old Plays, the Work will certainly go on, and be put to Press with all the Expedition that the Difficulty of making a proper and judicious Choice will admit.” A concluding note invites “Country Booksellers” who are willing to take four or six sets, “with a handsome Allowance,” to send their names to be added to the growing list of subscribers. Before publication, Dodsley had commitments for nearly eight hundred sets and a dazzling list of 489 subscribers from the earls of Abercorn and Ashburnham to the archbishop of York.

Using a bound octavo volume of blank sheets, Dodsley listed the title of each prospective inclusion at the top of a page and left the three following sheets blank for relevant information as he accumulated it.⁴⁵ His surviving handwritten “Plan of the Preface” explains his intentions: “To give a short History of the rise & progress of the English stage till the Death of Charles the 1st when Plays were suppressed”; “To point out some of the principal Beauties & defects of the old Dramatick Writers”; “To expatiate on the many difficulties that attend the giving a correct Specimen of so many different Authors”; “To show the methods I have taken for that purpose”; and “To apologize for my self.” The bibliographical difficulties of establishing authoritative texts turned out to be nightmarish, and because he could not always obtain first editions but frequently had to use editions in which “the Orthography was generally moderniz'd to the time in which it was printed,” he had to abandon his original intention of illustrating the history of the English language by printing each exactly as it first appeared. He was able scrupulously to preserve the “very original Orthography” of the first six plays and Gorboduc but was thereafter forced to attempt to impose consistency on a heterogeneous collection of editions.

Dodsley compares creating a consistent and authoritative text to “travelling cross Roads without a Guide: or worse: for the false Pointings are as puzzling as if false guiding Posts were set up.” Dodsley desires that those irritated by the “unintelligible Passages which will be found up & down in this Collection … to consider that whereas this is a first Attempt to correct these Authors; I am travelling as it were in the dark, in an unfrequented Road, without a Guide.” Moreover, he apologizes, “It is more difficult to give a correct Specimen of so many Authors than a correct Edition of any one Author.” Once an author's manner is known, he argues, “It will very often help to rectifie or discover the meaning of corrupted or intricate Passages whereas the reading of so many different Stiles & Manners of writing, will be apt, without great Care, to confound & mislead the Judgment.”⁴⁶

The first ten volumes were published in February 1744.⁴⁷ In the first volume, Dodsley asserts that he possesses the “Harleian Collection of old Plays, consisting of between 6 and 700.” Exactly when Dodsley purchased the plays is unknown, but he subsequently sold many of the early editions to one of the subscribers to his Select Collection of Old Plays: David Garrick.⁴⁸ Dodsley also had at his disposal the extensive theatrical collection of Sir Clement Cottrell Dormer, a courtier friend of Pope and patron of Dodsley, to whom the edition is dedicated. “Your obliging Readiness to communicate the Stores of which you were possess'd,” Dodsley writes, ensures the preservation of works “which but for your Generosity had faln with their Authors into utter Oblivion.” In a postscript to the introduction, Dodsley announces his determination to add two “supplemental Volumes” to include plays that, in hindsight, he realizes will make the collection “more acceptable to the Public.”⁴⁹ He issued two more volumes in March 1745, for a total of sixty-one plays.

Dodsley recognized that most of the plays that comprised the dramatic inheritance of his country had become “fugitive pieces,” extremely hard to find.⁵⁰ “My first End,” Dodsley says, “was to snatch some of the best pieces of our old Dramatic Writers from total Neglect and Oblivion,” and this he accomplished. Dodsley conceived of his editing as a patriotic act demonstrating the history of British drama and establishing an enduring canon beyond Shakespeare. His historicism appears clearly in the advertisement Tully's Head prepared for the “Pocket Volumes” published at two guineas for the twelve-volume set: “A COLLECTION of OLD PLAYS, from the earliest Account of the English Stage to the Death of Charles the First. Selected, according to the Order of Time, from our best DRAMATICK AUTHORS, serving to shew the gradual Improvement of our Language, and the Taste, Humours, and Manners of the Times in which they were written.”⁵¹

Dodsley's collection made an immediate and lasting contribution to study of the drama, both by his own introductory “historical Deduction,” concerning the “Rise and Fall of the English Stage,” and by preserving and making the plays available. A glance at the contents of Dodsley's twelve volumes proves how influential his collection was in establishing a canon from which future anthologizers would select. Among the plays that Dodsley rescued were Thomas Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, Thomas Heywood's Woman Kill'd with Kindness, Christopher Marlowe's Jew of Malta, John Marston's Malcontent, and Cyril Tourneur's Revenger's Tragedy. There have been very few plays and virtually no authors reprinted in collections of early British drama since Dodsley's time that do not appear first in his Select Collection. His volumes have rarely, if ever, been out of print in the 250 years since their initial appearance, and “the collection was and is a landmark in the history of the English printed drama.”⁵²

NEW “WITS & POETS”

The years when Dodsley was constructing and seeing to the printing of his canon of old plays were also the years when Tully's Head became the undisputed center for the publishing of the “new” poetry. Returning from Europe with materials toward a study of the relation between Roman art and poetry, Joseph Spence lived in London from 1741 to 1748.⁵³ As their friendship grew, Dodsley sought his advice and assistance on various projects, from judgment of unsolicited manuscripts to what dramatists to exclude from his Select Collection. They went regularly to Twickenham to visit Pope, both enjoying walks in his gardens and on his lawn fronting the Thames.⁵⁴ Another lover of gardens joined Dodsley's circle in 1741. The reclusive and melancholy William Shenstone generally divided his time between composing poetry and developing the grounds of his Leasowes estate into a gardening wonder, but when he wished to publish his Judgment of Hercules, his neighbor George Lyttelton suggested he go to London and see Mr. Dodsley.

Having taken Pope's concern for correctness to extremes, an anxious Shenstone came to London in 1741, where Dodsley allowed him to work closely in the editing of proofs and see for himself the inevitable “errors in the press … which neither sagacity nor vigilance itself, I now see, can prevent.” Dodsley's own celebrity as an author is vividly captured in Shenstone's report of the response to his poem. Loitering in a coffeehouse, Shenstone watched two well-dressed men ask for a copy of his Hercules. After commending the lines praising Lyttleton, which Shenstone says they repeated “forty times” and finally memorized, they decide: “Upon my word, it is fine: I believe it is Pope's; but how comes Pope,” they wondered aloud, “to praise himself there?” Nonetheless, they conclude that, without doubt, “it was written by Mr. Pope or Mr. D[odsley].” Either attribution pleased Shenstone.⁵⁵

Other memorable authors were finding a home at Tully's Head. On Monday, 31 May 1742, two weeks after issuing Shenstone's School-Mistress, Dodsley advertised THE COMPLAINT; or, Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality.⁵⁶ Edward Young pursued originality almost obsessively, jumping from genre to genre, and as Dodsley told Benjamin Victor, Young wanted his name concealed to try the “force” of the blank verse of his Night Thoughts.⁵⁷ The force was great. Dodsley quickly issued a second edition of “Night the First” and published initial editions of the second and third “Nights” before the end of the year. An avid admirer of An Essay on Man, Dodsley saw the potential of Young's “emulation” of Pope's great philosophical poem and purchased the copyright to the first six “Nights” of what quickly became one of the most popular poems of the century.

Sadly, as the poem grew in length, its lines declined in power. “Will this man never have done complaining?” a woman asked the learned Elizabeth Carter, a friend of Johnson whose translation of Epictetus Dodsley published. Shenstone ridiculed Young's latest “relapse” into yet another long “Night” and diagnosed Young's melancholy verbosity as retention of wind: “I … would advise him to take rubarb in powder, with a little nutmeg grated amongst it, as I do.”⁵⁸ Dodsley advised Young to conclude and put the individual “Nights” together in a profitable collected edition. After the sixth “Night,” with Young adamant to extend his epic lamentation, Dodsley declined to issue subsequent “Nights.” Young got another publisher, but as Dodsley had predicted, the remaining “Nights” were received coldly. When Young finally called it quits and was ready to issue a full collected edition in 1750, Dodsley rejoined the venture and remained Young's publisher thereafter.⁵⁹

In July 1742, barely a month after he issued Young's first installment of Night Thoughts, Dodsley published the volume of Pope's Works “Containing the Dunciad, Book IV. And the Memoirs of Scriblerus. Never before printed.” It was the climax of yet another Popian conspiracy with his bookseller. On 20 March, Thomas Cooper had issued a version of “Book IV” as The New Dunciad: As it was Found in the Year 1741, without Dodsley's name on the title page, although Dodsley was obviously Pope's intermediary with Cooper.⁶⁰ Two weeks after Dodsley's issue of the Dunciad, the laureate son of the Queen of Dulness, Colley Cibber, published his counterblast, the Letter from Mr Cibber, to Mr Pope (24 July). Cibber suggests how ungrateful Pope and his publisher are, since it was through Cibber's response to Pope's request that Dodsley's King and the Miller of Mansfield was first produced: “For you may remember, sometime before that Piece was acted, I accidently met you, in a Visit to the late General Dormer … There you join'd with that Gentleman, in asking my Advice and Assistance in that Author's behalf.”⁶¹

Much else was going on at Tully's Head during those months. As his edition of Pitt's Aeneid indicates, Dodsley was ambitious to make Tully's Head a center for the publication of classic works even when it might mean considerable financial risk. In 1741, he had published a translation of Boccaccio's Decameron, advertising it in the General Advertiser for 28 April as so “delicate and decent … that even the Ladies need not be afraid of reading or having these ingenious Novels.” “It is now upwards of 100 Years since a Translation of these excellent Novels was attempted in English,” another advertisement explains, “the language of which is so obsolete and uncouth, that it is almost unintelligible.”⁶² In April 1742, Dodsley had organized a joint publication with the Tonsons of a two-volume edition of Charles Jarvis's translation of Don Quixote. Dodsley himself had purchased the copyright from Jarvis's recent widow, and he had Pope specified in the contract with the Tonsons as referee in case of dispute.⁶³

A month later, on 3 June, the articles of agreement between Henry Baker and Dodsley for the publication of The Microscope Made Easy had been witnessed by attorney Daniel Highmore and James Dodsley. This is the first mention of Robert's brother in London. Dodsley badly needed his eighteen-year-old brother's assistance: business was increasing furiously, Robert's gout was acting up, and, mostly, he needed a respite from seeing to every detail of other people's publications so that he might pursue some projects of his own, especially his Select Collection of Old Plays. He was also actively writing. The popularity of the songs in The Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green encouraged him, in November 1742, to publish a connected series of twelve songs entitled Colin's Kisses. Set to music by John Oswald, these popular pastorals were frequently reprinted in anthologies until the end of the nineteenth century.⁶⁴

On one trek to Twickenham in the summer of 1743, Dodsley took a manuscript he had recently received from a young physician in Newcastle. Johnson tells the story:

I have often heard Dodsley relate that when the copy [of Mark Akenside's Pleasures of the Imagination] was offered him, the price being demanded for it, which was a hundred and twenty pounds, being such as he was not inclined to give precipitately, he carried the work to Pope, who, having looked into it, advised him not to make a niggardly offer; for “this was no everyday writer.”⁶⁵

Two years earlier, Dodsley had published the theoretical Introduction toward an Essay on the Origin of the Passions demonstrating that passions “are all acquir'd, and that they are no other than association of ideas,”⁶⁶ and a dissenting doctor's dissertation on The Pleasures of the Imagination was precisely the kind of philosophical poem for which Dodsley could solicit Pope's support with enthusiasm, the more so since Akenside's only separately published poem had been a jingoistic attack on Walpole titled variously The British Philippic: A Poem, in Miltonic Verse. Occasion'd by the Insults of the Spaniards and The Voice of Liberty, a vein Dodsley was to encourage with the later issue of Akenside's Epistle to Curio in November 1744.⁶⁷

When published in January 1744, although Johnson claimed he could never read it through, The Pleasures of the Imagination made Akenside famous. Playing off of Joseph Addison's Spectator essays on the “Pleasures of the Imagination,” the twenty-two-year-old physician brought a first-hand acquaintance with human physiology to his extensive readings in philosophy and literature to produce a description of the interrelatedness of perception, imagination, and ethics that makes most of the arguments for the “harmonizing” potency of the poet that Samuel Taylor Coleridge was to make much later in Biographia Literaria. On 26 March 1745, Dodsley published ten of Akenside's odes together, the productions of “another of these tame geniuses,” Horace Walpole remarked cattily.⁶⁸

POPE'S PASSING

At an art auction in 1744, nineteen-year-old Joshua Reynolds saw Pope's “extraordinary face … not merely a sharp keen countenance but something grand, like Cicero's.”⁶⁹ Dodsley's treks to Twickenham must have seemed, in effect, journeys from Tully's Head to the embodiment of Marcus Tullius Cicero. Pope's generosity to a table servant had opened the literary world to Dodsley; thus, he saw, with great sadness, Pope's increasing feebleness as his “long disease” moved toward its termination. As Pope's deputy to the book trade, Dodsley felt increasingly responsible for his patron's memory. A slender volume that Dodsley edited and published on 13 October 1743 had begun his deliberate creation of the “Legendary Poet” Pope. In Verses on the Grotto at Twickenham, Dodsley reprinted, as the title piece, verses Pope had published earlier in the Gentleman's Magazine, but the real impetus for the volume was to initiate a hagiography. The sixth item in the pamphlet is Dodsley's own “Prophecy,” entitled “The Cave of Pope,” which foretells worshippers visiting the shrine at Twickenham hoping for a relic of their departed saint:

When dark Oblivion in her sable Cloak
          Shall wrap the Names of Heroes and of Kings;
And their high Deeds, submitting to the Stroke
          Of Time, shall fall amongst forgotten Things;
Then (for the Muse the distant Day can see)
          On Thames's Bank the Stranger shall arrive,
With curious Wish thy sacred Grott to see. …

From age to age, Dodsley predicts, posterity “with pious Hand the Ruin shall repair” and “enquiring Sages” visit the site:

With aweful Veneration shall they trace
          The Steps which thou so long before hast trod;
With reverend Wonder view the solemn Place,
          From whence thy Genius soar'd to Nature's God.
Then, some small Gem, or Moss, or shining Oar,
          Departing, each shall pilfer, in fond hope
To please their Friends, on every distant Shore,
          Boasting a Relick from the Cave of POPE.(70)

At the time his tribute to Pope was issued, Dodsley was hobbled by gout, and in late November 1743, he published a sixpenny poem dedicated to his physician, “as a publick Testimony of Gratitude for the Happiness of being relieved from intolerable Pain and tedious Confinement, and restored to ease and the Use of my Limbs.” A few months later, Pope—in pain himself—told Spence that he wondered that human vanity could coexist with illness; the same sentiment begins Dodsley's allegorical ode:

To scourge the riot and intemperate lust,
          Or check the self-sufficient pride of man,
Offended Heaven sent forth, in vengeance just,
          The dire inexorable fury, Pain.(71)

Dodsley recovered; Pope did not. As Pope neared death, Dodsley was regularly with him.⁷² Pope confided to Spence that he had begun to have “visions,” and Dodsley was sitting with him on one occasion when Pope suddenly demanded, “What great arm is that I see coming out of the wall?”⁷³ On 30 May 1744, Dodsley's patron died. Verses in the London Magazine commemorated the passing of Europe's greatest poet:

Seal up the book, all vision's at an end,
For who durst now to poetry pretend?
Since Pope is dead, it must be sure confessed
The Muse's sacred inspiration's ceased;
And we may only what is writ rehearse:
His works are the apocalypse of verse.(74)

A couplet in the Gentleman's Magazine, “Spoken Extempore on the Death of Mr. Pope,” said succinctly:

Vice now may lift aloft her speckled head,
And front the sun undaunted: Pope is dead!(75)

Spence witnessed the will wherein Pope gave William Warburton “the Property of all such of my Works already printed, as he hath written or shall write Commentaries or Notes upon, and which I have not otherwise disposed of, or alienated; and all the Profits which shall arise after my Death from such Editions as he shall publish without future Alterations.” All Pope's “Manuscripts and unprinted Papers” were left to Lord Bolingbroke “either to be preserved or destroyed.”⁷⁶ Dodsley waited a decent interval before talking with the executors concerning subsequent publication of Pope's works, only to be told that Bolingbroke had not yet examined the parcel containing Pope's unpublished papers.⁷⁷ At roughly the same time, in August 1744, the younger Thomas Sheridan had arrived in London with Swift manuscripts that had been among the papers of Sheridan's late father. When he offered to sell them to Dodsley, the bookseller saw a way to insinuate himself into the ongoing publication of Swift's Miscellanies and to future collected editions of Swift's Works. He paid Sheridan fifty pounds, asserted his copyright to Swift's Sermons in the Stationers' Register, and began printing for November 1744 release.

In the interval after Pope's death, while he was negotiating for the literary remains of his friend and of Swift, Dodsley thought about his own works and decided to gather the best of them together unobtrusively as soon as the two final volumes of his Select Collection of Old Plays were finished. Accordingly, on 7 April 1745, Tully's Head published Trifles … By R. Dodsley. Beneath an engraving of a small songbird on the title page was imprinted, “The least, the lowest of the tunefull Train.”⁷⁸ The title page of the 350-page, five-shilling volume also listed its contents: The Toy-Shop, The King and the Miller of Mansfield, The Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green, Rex & Pontifex, The Chronicle of the Kings of England, The Art of Preaching, and The Right of Mankind to do what they will, asserted, “With several others, not more Considerable.” The equally inconsiderable included Sir John Cockle at Court and several shorter poems Dodsley thought worth preserving, including “Modern Reasoning,” “Pain and Patience,” “An Epistle to Stephen Duck,” and the lyrics of Colin's Kisses. Nothing is reprinted from Servitude and very little from A Muse in Livery; Beauty is also discarded.

In a Swiftian dedication “To the Worthy Patron and Encourager of all Human Projects and Designs, TO-MORROW,” Dodsley begs indulgence for his “want of that assistance and improvement which a liberal education bestows” and asserts that public popularity rather than any assurance of his work's intrinsic merit emboldens him to collect them together, for whatever ends posterity determines. As if to stress their popularity, the title page of The Toy-Shop, which faces the the dedication, announces “The Eleventh Edition.” Trifles significantly begins, not with the play, but with Dodsley's preface vindicating his authorship in the face of claims “that this piece is not my own, but from a better hand.”⁷⁹ One motive for collecting his works was formally to claim authorship in the face of contemporary allegations that an uneducated ex-footman could not have written so well. In 1745, Dodsley probably most wanted to make clear that he and not Pope or Chesterfield was the author of the egalitarian Chronicle of the Kings of England, the longest and, at the time, most popular piece in the collection.

The strong anticlerical and antimonarchical strains of the Chronicle are amplified in the two new works listed on the title page, and Dodsley probably listed them there to stress the coherent democratic and antisacramental ideology of Trifles. Two months earlier, Dodsley had published Rex & Pontifex anonymously, characterizing his short masque as “An Attempt to introduce upon the Stage a new Species of Pantomime.” It was, he explains, “intended for the Stage; but other Avocations preventing the Author from taking upon himself the Trouble of bringing it on, if either of the Managers think it for their Purpose, they are very welcome to it.” Dodsley was certainly busy with many matters, but it is unlikely that any theater would have had the effrontery to stage Dodsley's allegorical denunciation of the malign conjunction of monarchy and priestcraft. A chorus of priests intones the first “Air” to the attentive figure Tyranny:

Kings the Rights of Priests defending,
          More securely hold their own;
Priests to Kings Assistance lending,
          Merit Succour from the Throne:
Then give Us supreme Dominion
          Over Conscience and the Soul;
You shall Rule (by our Opinion)
          Lives and Goods without controul.

With the “stupid Herd” and “the Muses and the Liberal Arts” securely bound in their religious and political fetters, “the Civil and Ecclesiastical Powers … embrace.” At that moment, however, the Goddess of Liberty enters accompanied by Philosophers and waves her magic wand over the illusory figure of Imposture; “and the Goddess of TRUTH, array'd in Robes of White, yet drest with the greatest Plainness and Simplicity, arises” to sing with her sister, Liberty, a paean to enlightenment and the liberation of the liberal arts.⁸⁰

In Dodsley's collection, Rex & Pontifex initiates an avalanche of ridicule against priestcraft. The Art of Preaching follows immediately, and several other poems are devoted to debunking the craft of a self-serving clergy. In his “Epistle to Stephen Duck,” Dodsley contrasted his own ineptitude to the polish of Matthew Prior's verse, and in “An Epigram, occasion'd by the Word one Prior, in the Second Volume of Bishop Burnet's History,” Dodsley explodes in Prior's defense:

ONE PRIOR!—and is this, this all the fame
The Poet from th' historian can claim!
No; PRIOR's verse posterity shall quote,
When 'tis forgot ONE BURNET ever wrote.(81)

Immediately before narrating the exploits of English kings, “from The Norman Conquest unto the present Time,” Dodsley places his “jest” on “The KINGS of Europe”:

Why pray, of late, do Europe's kings
          No jester in their courts admit?
They're grown such stately solemn things.
          To bear a joke they think not fit.
But tho' each court a jester lacks,
          To laugh at monarchs to their face;
All mankind behind their backs
          Supply the honest jester's place.(82)

In all of Trifles, only one monarch survives Dodsley's jesting unscathed. The bookseller's more pious contemporaries perceived a “deist threat” emanating from Caroline's court, and the good goddesses in Rex & Pontifex intentionally resemble the lately deceased philosopher on a throne.⁸³ Like Pope, Dodsley had been saddened by the queen's death in 1737, and Rex & Pontifex is an ambitious revision of Dodsley's “Entertainment … for her Majesty's Birth-Day,” which he had published in A Muse in Livery. Dodsley includes only two epitaphs in Trifles, and one is to Caroline as “Patroness of the Wise / And Friend of the Good”:

          Religion, plain and simple,
          Dignify'd her mind,
Despising forms and useless pageantry.

Her death is “an universal loss,” Dodsley laments. The philosophers in Rex & Pontifex are found in human form in the only other epitaph, “On the Death of Mr. Pope.” Dodsley's Trifles includes four poems praising Pope, concluding with his lament at the passing of a poetic age:

          Who now shall dare to lift the sacred rod,
                    Truth's faithful guard, where vice escapes the law?
          Who now, high-soaring to the throne of God,
                    In nature's moral cause his pen shall draw?
          Let none pretend; he's gone, who had the art,
With sounds to sooth the ear, with sense to warm the heart.(84)

THE MUSEUM

The life of a bookseller is, from one perspective, a list of books, and following page 350 of Trifles, Dodsley appends ten pages listing “Books Printed for R. Dodsley.” Even this selective list shows remarkable variety from the sublime (The Pleasures of Imagination. A Poem, in three Books, The Enthusiast; or, the Lover of Nature. A Poem, and Odes on several Subjects) to the mundane (The Sailor's Companion … Also the Duty of Privateers, with Instructions relating to Captures, The Geography of England … shewing the chief Towns, Parks, Rivers, and Roads, and Adam's Luxury, and Eve's Cookery “design'd for the Use of all who would live cheap, and preserve their Health to old Age”). Dodsley lists a number of works on education, including The Child's new Play Thing, “intended to make the Learning to read a Diversion instead of a Task”; The History of Greece: By way of Question and Answer, “for the Use of Schools”; and The common Errors in the Education of Children, and their Consequences. The list ends with books that “speedily will be published,” beginning with Dr. Swift's Works, Volume the 12th “containing his three Sermons, with some Letters and Poems never before published.” Acknowledged as Pope's publisher, Dodsley relished the prestige of adding Swift to his Tully's Head list.

In the years following Pope's death, Dodsley kept his association with his friend in the public mind by publishing a series of tributes characterizing the Pope he and Spence knew and situating Pope appropriately in the pantheon of British poetry. Believing that Pope was the peer of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton, he had a frontispiece engraved for William Mason's Musaeus: A Modody to the Memory of Mr. Pope, in Imitation of Milton's “Lycidas” that depicts the three former greats greeting Pope upon his entry into the Elysian Fields. Although the illustrations for A Plan of Mr. Pope's Garden, As it was left at his Death (December 1745) are attributed to Pope's gardener, the text is Dodsley's and includes his “Cave of Pope” as well as a reprint of the description of Pope's death from Thompson's Sickness, which Dodsley also published earlier that year.

Tutored by Pope, Dodsley had a strong sense of literary works as valuable property, the responsible use of which could free authors from the servile indignities and artistic compromises of patronage. By then, Dodsley was known for always offering reasonable and often generous terms to authors, but he was also known for demanding that competitors respect his rights once purchased. In December 1744, Dodsley had been irritated that John Wesley's three-volume Collection of Moral and Sacred Poems, published earlier that year in Bristol, had, without permission, reprinted the first five “Nights” of Young's Complaint and over twenty poems from The Miscellaneous Works … of Mrs Elizabeth Rowe, to both of which Dodsley owned copyright. When Dodsley complained, Wesley responded on 12 December, acknowledging his malefaction but adding petulantly that “I shd have look'd upon it as a favour, had you given me any intimation thereof, at any time after my publishing ye Proposals.” In fact, Wesley's published proposal for the collection of poems had not included a list of works, and in February 1745, Wesley grudgingly paid Dodsley fifty pounds and signed a note pledging to respect his rights in future. “Having inadvertently printed, in a Collection of Poems, publishd by me, in 3 Vols,” Wesley wrote, “some Pieces, which are the Property of Mr Robert Dodsley. … I hereby give him my Word and promise that I will never again print the same, in that or any other Manner.”⁸⁵

Dodsley knew that prosperity accrued to the copyright owner, and the list appended to Trifles makes clear that, while Dodsley was strengthening his connection in the public mind with Pope, Swift, and Young, he was simultaneously acquiring rights to new poems. His quarrel over Wesley's three-volume edition stimulated ambitions in Dodsley to create his own three-volume anthology of poems. With the Select Collection of Old Plays completed, Dodsley began a simple and profitable plan for an edition of new poems. He already owned many copyrights. By establishing a new periodical, one that prided itself on printing only poems never before published, he would be able to augment his holdings in a way that enabled him to publish each selection at least twice, and sometimes four separate times. First, a poem would be printed in his periodical; second, it would be reprinted when the separate issues of the periodical were bound and sold as volumes; and, third, the best poems would finally appear in Dodsley's future Collection of Poems. Finally, any poem sufficiently popular in the periodical or the Collection of Poems would receive a separate edition, just as other poems published by Dodsley in autonomous editions could feed the grander project without ever appearing in the periodical.

Akenside was an inspired choice to edit the Museum, as Dodsley determined to name his second venture into the periodical market. Because of his Pleasures of the Imagination, the previously unknown Akenside was suddenly so famous that an impostor dined well for a season in Dublin by assuming his identity. Moreover, Akenside's heart was not in his medical practice, and he had moved from Northampton to Hampstead late in 1745. Consequently, on 20 January 1746, Dodsley had a contract prepared according to which “Dr Akinside [sic] ingages to Mr Dodsley for six months commencing the 25th of March next … to prepare and have ready for the press, once a fortnight, one Essay, whenever necessary, for carrying on a work to be called The Museum.” Akenside was also to prepare “an account of the most considerable books in English, Latin, French or Italian which have been lately published, and which Mr Dodsley shall furnish,”⁸⁶ thus providing the bookseller a venue to parade his own publications or such extracts or summaries of others as might appeal to his readership or oblige colleagues in the book trade.

Intended “to improve the Mind, polish the Manners, refine the Taste, [and] mend the Heart,” the first issue of Dodsley's Museum: or, the Literary and Historical Register appeared on 29 March 1746.⁸⁷ Priced at sixpence, the forty-page octavo journal was divided into four clearly delineated sections: one or more essays, sometimes in epistolary dress; eight to fifteen pages of poetry; four to fifteen pages of book reviews entitled “Literary Memoirs”; and “Historical Memoirs” of contemporary events in England or Europe, beginning in the first issue with “A succinct History of the Rebellion” in Scotland. Dodsley pledged his periodical would be original but not ephemeral; the Museum, unlike the competing “magazines,” would print only original contributions—never reprints—and would eschew trivia and gossip.

Whereas Cave's Gentleman's Magazine listed notable marriages and reprinted the local bills of mortality, Dodsley's Museum undertook to “register” only the enduring thoughts and actions of its age. From the first, Dodsley intended his periodical not merely to reflect the taste of the age but to create it by providing a fashionable outlet for the best belletristic and historical writing of his period. He was spectacularly successful. During its run of thirty-nine numbers, the Museum established a standard of excellence no other periodical of the age could equal.⁸⁸ The eighteenth-century penchant for anonymity makes it impossible to identify the authorship of even a majority of the contributions, but the list of known authors “reads like a roster of the famous and near-famous authors of the mid-century,”⁸⁹ including Joseph Spence, George Lyttelton, Stephen Duck, Soame Jenyns, Samuel Johnson, David Garrick, future laureate William Whitehead, Horace Walpole, Christopher Smart, William Collins, and both Joseph and Thomas Warton.

The publication of his friend Spence's elaborate Polymetis in February 1747 shows Dodsley's entrepreneurial ingenuity in using his periodical to both advertise a work and apologize for its lateness. Spence had been working for years on his ambitious Enquiry concerning the Agreement Between the Works of the Roman Poets, and the Remains of the Antient Artists. Being An Attempt to illustrate them mutually from one another. Over four years earlier, on 11 January 1743, Spence had announced in the Daily Advertiser that he had five hundred subscribers and would put the printers promptly to work, but as the years passed, subscribers became anxious. “I am often ask'd when Mr Spence's Book will appear,” Christopher Pitt wrote Dodsley. “I think You have enter'd the Names of all the Subscribers in these Parts, who wait with a kind of Impatience to peruse the Work.”⁹⁰ With Dodsley's practical aid, Spence had collected by the time of publication an impressive subscription list of 717 names, headed by the Prince of Wales and including eighteen dukes and most of the Tully's Head crowd from Chesterfield and Lyttelton to Pope, Akenside, and Young. Twenty college libraries subscribed, most from Spence's alma mater, Oxford. “Horatio” Walpole took five copies; his friend, “Horatio” Mann—the king's Resident at Florence—subscribed, as did Edward Wortley Montagu, Lady Mary's husband.⁹¹

Pope had died before Spence was ready to publish, and to forestall criticism that Spence had taken the subscription money but failed to produce his promised text, Dodsley encouraged him to use the Museum both to explain the delay and to stimulate interest for its forthcoming publication. Thus, in the third issue, on 26 April 1746, an anonymous Spence apologized that, although Polymetis “is now almost wholly printed off,” publication must be delayed “till next Winter, by the great Number of Figures that were found necessary to be engrav'd, for the Explaining and Beautifying of the Work.” Moreover, “this Delay has occasion'd his making several considerable Additions to the Work: and particularly, four entire Dialogues at the Close of it.” The apologetic update, which survives in a manuscript draft in Spence's handwriting, summarizes the ten “Books,” promising that “the Sullenness and Austerity of Criticism” will be obviated and the reading rendered “the more easy and palatable” by placing “every thing there is of Learning in the Book” into footnotes, so “all the more difficult Enquiries may be omitted, by every body that does not care to go through the Notes.”⁹² When Polymetis was finally issued on 5 February 1747, Dodsley had it immediately reviewed in his Museum. Whether Spence wrote the laudatory ten-page puff and summary for the 14 February issue is unknown, as is whether he had a hand in the five-page continuation in the 28 February issue, which finds Polymetis “truly remarkable” for its “extensive Learning, Justness of Taste, and happy Clearness.”⁹³ Dodsley's hand is everywhere, acting generously in Spence's behalf, for he did not purchase the rights to the book until eight years later, when he paid two hundred pounds for the copyright and the engravings.

Although only about a third of the 111 essays in the Museum have been definitely attributed,⁹⁴ the preponderance of the essays and reviews are probably Akenside's, as his contract specified. As is typical of the period, the book reviews are tripartite, beginning with a succinct sketch of the author's earlier accomplishments followed by extracts or a summary of the work and concluding with laudatory generalities. Dodsley provided the books for review, and predictably, Tully's Head publications came in for much praise. Nationalistic and deistic, the essays range broadly from philosophy to current social customs. Spence did at least eight of the narrative essays; some of the best satiric essays are among the eighteen by “Philaretes,” pseudonym of John Gilbert Cooper, a prolific Tully's Head author; and the aspiring William Collins, whose Odes Dodsley was shortly to reject, contributed what is perhaps the best critical essay, “Of the Essential Excellencies in Poetry.” As with the essays, only a third of the 142 poems have been attributed, but the list of known authors is astonishing.

The fourth and final section, “Historical Memoirs,” was—like the poems—fodder for subsequent publication. Most of the “Memoirs” were written by John Campbell, as a continuing “View of the Present State of Europe.” In 1750, Dodsley published Campbell's impressive synthesis, the first of six editions during Campbell's life and the initiation of an international fame that caused Catherine the Great to send the historian her portrait. Dodsley's own advertisement for the third edition best draws the connection between Campbell's volume and Dodsley's periodical: The Present State of Europe “Explaining the Interests, connections, Political and Commercial Views of its several Powers. … Originally begun in the MUSEUM, and now at the Desire of some considerable Persons, revis'd and compleated by the same Author. Price bound 6s.”⁹⁵ Another series narrating the Jacobite uprising in the north—published in the Museum as “A Succinct History of the Rebellion”—was published separately almost immediately as A Complete and Authentick History of the Rise, Progress, and Extinction of the Late Rebellion (1747) in order to take advantage of its timeliness. Henry Fielding may have been the author.⁹⁶

Dodsley's Museum was both popular and influential, as the frequent reprintings from its pages in other periodicals testify. As rapidly as Dodsley had sufficient issues to bind and sell as a volume, he did so. Volumes 1 and 2 of the collected Museum were published while the periodical was still putting out new issues every two weeks. Shrewd booksellers recognized that they could increase their profits even on marginal journals by selling them collected and bound when the periodical ceased publication, and following Cave's practice with the Gentleman's Magazine, Dodsley simply took this practice one step further by letting the early release of the bound volumes increase desire for initial separate issues of the ongoing Museum. When he had enough text to fill a third volume, Dodsley discontinued his journal.

When the Museum folded, it was with relish that Cave's preface boasted the continuing dominance of the Gentleman's Magazine, whose demise, Cave says in the preface to his 1747 volume, was “impotently, tho' insolently threatened to be effected, by a combination and subscription, to publish and support a super excellent Magazine, which was entirely to extirpate all others, and then, for the good of the trade, it seems, be generously discontinued.” Relieved, Cave contrasts Dodsley's “work of genius and learning” with all the other “ostentatious compilers” seeking unsuccessfully to invade his market.⁹⁷ Cave's closest imitator and most successful rival was the London Magazine, which had been initiated by a consortium of booksellers in April 1732, just fifteen months after the first issue of the Gentleman's Magazine. On 9 December 1748, fifteen months after Dodsley ended his Museum, he purchased a quarter share in the London Magazine for 350 pounds. On 5 May 1746, before ceasing the Museum, he had purchased a one-fifteenth share in the prosperous London Evening Post for 150 pounds, as his pragmatic influence in the trade expanded.

COLLECTION OF POEMS

Dodsley's Museum enjoyed a unique prestige.⁹⁸ However, unlike Cave's Gentleman's Magazine, Dodsley's Museum was but one temporary increment in his larger publishing ambitions. For Dodsley, the Museum was but the flower of his following year's fruit, a publication for which all students of literature would be “perpetually in his debt.”⁹⁹ On 15 January 1748, four months after Dodsley ended the Museum, he announced the publication of his Collection of Poems. By Several Hands. In Three Volumes.¹⁰⁰

Dodsley had sold two earlier miscellaneous verse collections: The Cupid (1736) and A Collection of Poems on Several Occasions (1747), which contained only poems written prior to 1700.¹⁰¹ Dodsley made clear, in his short “Advertisement” to the first volume of his new Collection of Poems, that he was intentionally creating a canon of contemporary works worthy of perpetuation. “The intent of the following Volumes,” he writes, “is to preserve to the Public those poetical performances, which seemed to merit a longer remembrance than would probably be secured to them by the MANNER wherein they were originally published.”¹⁰² Dodsley also thanked authors who contributed poems “which were never before in print.” Dodsley's aim is clear: not to reprint acknowledged masterworks but to select and preserve the best works of his age, which might otherwise slip into oblivion. When one now thumbs through the Collection of Poems and comes across Gray's “Elegy” or Johnson's “Vanity of Human Wishes,” it requires imagination to remember that they did not always safely repose in meticulously edited collections of their authors' works but first appeared from Dodsley's shop as unbound pamphlets. Dodsley's Collection of Poems kept these poems and others “before the public” until they were collected into editions, and without the celebrity of inclusion in Dodsley's edition, some authors subsequently included in Johnson's and Chalmers's edition of Works of the English Poets might have remained, in Gray's words from volume four, “mute” and “inglorious.”¹⁰³

Dodsley's Collection of Poems became the “classic and influential statement of mid-18th-cent. taste” lauded in the Oxford Companion to English Literature, but it began as the manifestation of the taste of one individual, for despite his polite acknowledgment that the “design” of the collection “was first suggested to the Editor, as it was afterwards conducted, by the opinions of some Gentlemen, whose names it would do him the highest honour to mention,” Dodsley alone decided what would be included.¹⁰⁴ Since Dodsley reprinted so many poems he had published earlier, his anthology is a recapitulation of the history of Tully's Head. Selection was a revisionary process for Dodsley in two respects: as editor he often made substantive “improvements” to individual poems, and he excluded works he had earlier judged worthy of publication. Although he published 142 poems in the Museum, his Collection of Poems reprinted only 28. Dodsley was not just making the most efficient use of his literary properties; he was selectively crafting a canon. Unlike earlier anthologies, he included only poems not collected or easily available elsewhere. Thus, although he held the rights to the six “Nights” of Young's Complaint, he did not reprint any portion of them in the Collection of Poems.

Even though Robert Dodsley had the final say on every inclusion, both his Museum and his Collection of Poems were collaborative enterprises, and the list of collaborators is so dazzling that historians of literature are in danger of deserting Dodsley to wander amid anecdotes of the traditionally great. For example, Horace Walpole acted, to some extent, as intermediary with Dodsley for his reclusive friend Thomas Gray. Dodsley had issued Gray's first published poem, the Eton College ode, on 30 May 1747, and Gray had shortly thereafter sent Walpole his ode “On the Death of a Favorite Cat,” characterizing Dodsley as “padrone” to his first poem and coyly offering to contribute his latest to Dodsley's Collection of Poems, “unless she be of too little importance for his patriot-collection.”¹⁰⁵ Also, Dodsley included twelve poems by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, then residing in Venice. She claimed to be irate and thereafter consistently denounced the intrusive impudence of that “thing Dodsley.”¹⁰⁶ But Dodsley had arranged, the previous November, for Mary Cooper to sell Horace Walpole's edition of Lady Mary's Six Town Eclogues. Speculations attributing her ire to genuine insecurity at having Dodsley thrust upon her “the role of published poet” or, alternately, suggesting her willing complicity with Dodsley and Walpole in fashioning an enduring reputation are equally fascinating and diverting.¹⁰⁷

The anecdotes that inevitably become associated with a collection as important as Dodsley's distract scholars into literary gossip and inadvertently blind them to the significance of the work itself. In fact, Tully's Head was the initial publisher of almost all the poetry of Thomas Gray and Samuel Johnson, and it was Dodsley's Collection of Poems, specifically, that put their poems in the hands of a vast readership, thereby stimulating their contemporary reputations and assuring their subsequent influence. The contrast of the two poets in A Collection of Poems significantly juxtaposes two sensibilities, both finding an advocate in Dodsley. The dignified Juvenalian couplets of Johnson's “Vanity of Human Wishes” harken back to the Augustan days when Pope was a frequent visitor to Tully's Head; in contrast, the Pindaric enthusiasms of Gray's “Bard” remind one that, when Dodsley was ready to issue the final volume of the Collection of Poems, he was simultaneously arranging publication of Joseph Warton's romantic revaluation of Pope's poetry.

Dodsley begins the first volume of his definitive 1758, six-volume edition with sixty-seven pages by Thomas Tickell, followed shortly after by Lady Mary's “Six Town Eclogues”; as the final three poems in his last volume, he prints William Mason's “Ode. On Melancholy,” Gray's “Progress of Poetry,” and Gray's “Bard.” Just as the first volume collects fugitive pieces from Pope's contemporaries, the last concludes with the icon that was to obsess the romantic revolutionaries: an engraving of Gray's bard, the embodiment of poetic resistance to political tyranny, leaping to his death from “the mountain's height.” The deliberate contrast of Tickell's tame and polished couplets with the enthusiasms of Gray's “Æolian lyre” put Dodsley's vision of the progress of poetry into six volumes that were soon to stock the library of every cultured British residence, including that of the British Resident in Venice, where Lady Mary eagerly sought an edition to annotate.

Dodsley's Collection of Poems reveals much about him. Foremost, the “progress of poetry” he records and creates seems to be a textual externalization of an inherent conflict in himself: a bardic footman who had disciplined himself to the predictabilities of art. Like Stephen Duck, the untutored Dodsley learned to imitate his betters, but unlike Duck, he was never domesticated to the status quo. In depending on Queen Caroline's patronage, Duck had become a kept poet; Dodsley maintained his economic independence and became the “patron” of fellow poets. Duck kept the court library; Dodsley edited “patriot-collections.” Gray is provisionally correct in thinking that Dodsley's volumes would reflect his anti-Walpolianism. Many of the major Opposition figures are represented: five poems by Chesterfield close volume 1; thirty-three poems by Lyttelton open volume 2; Robert Nugent, a mainstay in the political wars, has thirty-one poems; and James Thomson, Henry Fielding, and Samuel Johnson are included. The proviso to Gray's characterization, however, is twofold: there are few overtly political poems, and personal ideology is not grounds for exclusion. Dodsley includes ten poems by former ministry apologist Lord Hervey, and Walpole's son was one of Dodsley's collaborators.

The best way to ascertain the ideology of Dodsley's Collection of Poems is to contrast it to similar miscellanies. A few, like John Wesley's, were thematic, but most either depended on miscellaneous novelty (The Delights of the Muses: being a collection of poems never before published [1738]) or on passing off as “modern” already established classics (A Select Collection of Modern Poems. By the most Eminent Hands … Milton, Prior, Dryden [1744]). In 1737, Dodsley had subscribed for six copies of an anthology of the first type: A Collection of Miscellany Poems, Never before Publish'd.¹⁰⁸ The most successful collection before Dodsley's began as a gathering of contemporary poems, but by 1748 it had become the conservative repository of Augustan poetic tradition: Dryden's six-volume Poetical Miscellanies.¹⁰⁹ In 1716 and again in 1727, bookseller Jacob Tonson had revised and reissued the anthology in six uniform volumes. The Dryden-Tonson Miscellanies were Dodsley's real competition and an incentive not to conclude his collection with the third volume. Soon after publication of the first three volumes in January 1748, Dodsley began planning a revision, which he issued later the same year. In March, he told Shenstone, “if you have a single Poem or so that you have a mind should accompany the Schoolmistress, I shall be glad to give it a place in ye 2d Edition, if it is not too long.” Dodsley was encouraged to add a fourth volume to the second edition, but says it “is not likely.” In May he wrote Shenstone that he had sent the second edition to the printer, adding that “as to an additional Volume which I had some thoughts of, I find it will be impossible to furnish enough that will be good.”¹¹⁰ He ended the third, and presumably last, volume with an engraving of Pope, preceded by the only poem of his own Dodsley included, “The Cave of Pope.”

Nonetheless, Dodsley did not finally close the project until he had six volumes to rival Tonson's six. Dodsley's collection was consciously “modern,” creating a canon that did not duplicate any inclusion in the Dryden-Tonson Miscellanies. Moreover, by excluding the readily available works of Pope, Swift, Prior, and the like, Dodsley, intentionally or not, gave his immediate contemporaries a field for experimentation free of the intimidating presences of the past.¹¹¹ With his Collection of Poems, Dodsley bequeathed to subsequent readers both a canon of poetic icons, such as Gray's odes, and the challenge of fresh beginnings. Later poets reading the thirteen sonnets by Thomas Edwards could attempt to “emulate” Edwards rather than merely “imitate” a preexisting perfection. Coleridge would read James Thomson's “Ode on Æolus's Harp” or William Mason's “Ode to an Æolus's Harp” and follow Gray's advice, “Awake, Æolian lyre, awake, / And give to rapture all thy trembling strings,” to create his own “Eolian Harp.” When one reads Francis Fawkes's “Vernal Ode” and “Autumnal Ode,” remembering Keats's later odes “To May” and “To Autumn,” it is easy to believe that Dodsley had created the fields of emulation for English romanticism.¹¹² There is only one sonnet in any edition of Tonson's six volumes and no Spenserian stanza anywhere; in contrast, Dodsley's volumes are filled with the forms literary historians subsequently used to characterize romanticism.¹¹³

There is also a democratic spirit pervasive in Dodsley's volumes that contrasts markedly with Tonson's many fulsome panegyrics to the aristocracy. Moreover, the town and court focus of the Miscellanies is supplanted by Dodsley's romantic relocation of the locus of virtue, health, and beauty to the countryside. This, of course, was the Opposition myth, and its pervasiveness gives some substance to Gray's characterization of Dodsley's “patriot-collection.” The theme that God's goodness beautifies nature whereas man's degeneracy defiles the town appears in poems as aesthetically unlike as Johnson's London and Joseph Warton's Enthusiast: or The Lover of Nature. Dodsley begins volume five with Shenstone's “lone hermit on the mountain … his breast to admiration prone” and closes volume six with Gray's “Bard,” celebrating from his mountain vantage point both poetic vision and political resistance to the tyranny of kings.¹¹⁴ As might be expected, those friends to monarchs—the clergy—are not in evidence in Dodsley's volume; despite the popularity of Christian hymns in the culture at large, what piety appears in the Collection of Poems is deistic and nondenominational.

Dodsley was conscious that literary patronage by the aristocracy was an anachronism, to be interpreted as evidence of poetic servility where it did survive. Increasingly, it was to booksellers such as Dodsley that aspiring authors addressed themselves. Fittingly, Dodsley's Collection of Poems is not dedicated to anyone—unless, like his Trifles, it is dedicated to “TO-MORROW.” This concentration of power in the bookseller's hands makes the details of Dodsley's editing especially interesting. Close scrutiny of his editing of Collins, Gray, and Shenstone suggests that he attempted to “follow where you seemed to point,” as he told Shenstone.¹¹⁵ In other words, although he standardized accidentals such as capitalization to his house style, he usually honored an author's wishes on substantive matters. However, distance and the exigencies of printing resulted in many of Dodsley's revisions being incorporated in the texts of authors without their acquiescence.

He teases Shenstone that, if he is not furnished with more poems for his miscellany, “I shall lose the Fame of being the Muse's Midwife, & my hand for want of practice will forget its obsterick faculties.”¹¹⁶ In preparing text for the press, Dodsley writes only what he deems absolutely necessary, Shenstone complains, “and passes by a thousand points in my letters which deserve an answer.” Nonetheless, Shenstone and others willingly gave Dodsley power to revise. As Shenstone explains to Richard Jago, he has given Dodsley “a kind of discretionary power to select the best readings” from Jago's poems. “How you would approve of this measure I knew not; but I had this to plead in my behalf, that D[odsley] was a person of taste himself; that he had, as I imagined, many learned friends to assist him; that his interest was concerned in the perfection of his Miscellany; and that I submitted my own pieces to the same judgment.” Hoping that Jago can meet Dodsley when he visits Shenstone, the poet writes, “His genius is truly poetical, and his sentiments altogether liberal and ingenuous.”¹¹⁷

Shenstone's estimate of Dodsley's “genius” as an editor is confirmed by the six volumes. When the fourth was published in 1755, the Monthly Review noted that “the merit of the three former volumes of this Collection is sufficiently known; the contents of this new one are not beneath the good company they are introduced into.”¹¹⁸ In 1758, with the publication of the final two volumes, the reviews noted that

Mr. Dodsley, to whom the Lovers of Poetry are greatly obliged for this elegant and valuable Miscellany, informs us, in an Advertisement at the end of the sixth volume,—that having now, by the advice and assistance of his friends, brought this Collection to a competent size, it has been thought proper that the further progress of its growth should be stopped.

The Monthly Review concludes, “This Collection, therefore, is compleated in six volumes; and, perhaps, a more excellent Miscellany is not to be met with in any language.”¹¹⁹

A few months later, the London Magazine printed a celebratory “EPISTLE to Mr. DODSLEY”—“midwife of the teeming brain, / Who know'st to judge, as well as print the strain”—which credits the bookseller with immortalizing Gray, Shenstone, Joseph Warton, and Johnson in volumes that “fire th' enraptur'd mind, / Quell sordid views, and harmonize mankind.”¹²⁰ Posterity may debate his wisdom at this same time in refusing to publish the book of odes Collins offered him, but in selecting a few of Collins's best for his Collection of Poems, Dodsley showed “a discrimination approaching genius.”¹²¹ When comparisons are completed, “it is doubtful if a better anthology of contemporary poetry was ever made.” In this instance, the best was also the best-selling, for it remained “the most popular collection of [its] kind ever produced.”¹²²

When the influence of Dodsley's volumes are added to their intrinsic merit, it is reasonable to argue that no eighteenth-century publication was more significant to the subsequent history of English literature. “There were many celebrated collections of poetry before the middle of the eighteenth century,” William Prideaux Courtney wrote in 1910, “but the most famous of them all consists of the volumes brought out by the industrious and deservedly respected bookseller, Robert Dodsley.”¹²³ In 1989, Arthur Sherbo concurred, adding that no one, to his knowledge, has quarrelled with Courtney's assessment.¹²⁴ In a brief “Postscript” to his final volume, Dodsley concluded with a sense of satisfaction at the “favourable reception” to his work. “From the loose and fugitive pieces, some printed, others in manuscript, which for forty or fifty years past have been thrown into the world and carelessly left to perish; I have here … endeavor'd to select and preserve the best.”¹²⁵ He succeeded, as no one has before or since.

Notes

1. James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), 694-95.

2. Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, intro. Arthur Waugh (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), 1:421-22.

3. Boswell, Life of Johnson, 694.

4. Gerald P. Tyson, Joseph Johnson: Liberal Publisher (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1979), 4.

5. J. A. Cochrane, Dr. Johnson's Printer: The Life of William Strahan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964), 1.

6. Ralph Straus, Robert Dodsley: Poet, Publisher, and Playwright (London: Lane, 1910), 3.

7. Ibid., ix.

8. The Correspondence of Robert Dodsley, 1733-1764, ed. James E. Tierney, Cambridge Studies in Publishing and Printing History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 4. Hereafter cited as Correspondence. Quotations from Dodsley's correspondence are from this edition, unless otherwise specified.

9. Ibid., 54.

10. Ibid., 52. From allusions in extant letters and printed sources, Tierney lists 139 letters he was unable to trace (546-54), certainly a small fraction of those missing.

11. Richard Henry Tedder, “Robert Dodsley,” in Dictionary of National Biography (hereafter cited as DNB), ed. Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee (London, 1885-1900), 5:1079.

12. A. S. Collins, Authorship in the Days of Johnson (London: Routledge, 1928), 34.

13. In The Percy Letters (ed. David Nichol Smith, 9 vols. [Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944-88]), the accuracy varies from volume to volume. The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole's Correspondence (ed. W. S. Lewis, 48 vols. [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937-83]) is much more accurate. A representative error there is the identification of Robert as the recipient of a 1761 letter from Richard Bentley offering to sell his play The Wishes (9:382, as “Dodsley"; 45:750, misidentified in the index as Robert Dodsley). In fact, the letter was to Joseph (listed as untraced in, Correspondence, 557).

14. Samuel Shellabarger, Lord Chesterfield and His World (Boston: Little, Brown, 1951), 378-79.

15. Frances Doherty, “Letter of Christopher Anstey to Robert Dodsley,” Notes and Queries 230 (1985): 237.

16. John Butt, The Mid-Eighteenth Century, edited and completed by Geoffrey Carnall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 111, 663; Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727-1783 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 107, 587, 775.

17. A. L. Lytton Sells, Thomas Gray: His Life and Works (London: Allen and Unwin,1980).

18. Isaac Reed Diaries, 1762-1804, ed. Claude E. Jones (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1946), 321.

19. Correspondence, 3-4.

20. Straus, Robert Dodsley, vii.

21. Alexander Chalmers, “The Life of Robert Dodsley,” in The Works of the English Poets, From Chaucer to Cowper (London: C. Wittingham, 1810). 15:323.

22. R. W. Chapman, “Authors and Booksellers,” in Johnson's England: An Account of the Life and Manners of His Age, ed. A. S. Turberville (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), 2:318.

23. Pat Rogers, “Fellow Men of Letters,” Times Literary Supplement, 14-20 July 1989,770.

24. Betty Rizzo, "The Correspondence of Robert Dodsley, 1733-1764,” The Age of Johnson 4 (1991): 390. Rizzo's low estimate of Dodsley is more strongly expressed than usual in characterizing him as an unwitting and possibly “emotionally impaired” facilitator of “protocapitalist amoral[ism]” and an embodiment of “the corrupting influence of the profit motive” (390, 395, 399). She concludes of Dodsley's correspondence, “Dodsley has neither the compelling mind nor the turn of phrase nor the comic sense, neither the insight into himself or others nor the interest in social detail which might inspire us to read on with literary enjoyment” (388).

25. Robin Myers's judgment is representative: “Robert Dodsley was probably the most important publisher of the mid-eighteenth century” (The British Book Trade from Caxton to the Present Day [London: Andre Deutsch, 19731. 339).

26. Straus, Robert Dodsley, 307, 308.

27. Alvin Kernan, Printing Technology, Letters and Samuel Johnson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 105. Kernan is discussing Johnson's famous letter to the earl of Chesterfield, asserting that Dodsley had “no understanding that he and print had made Johnson's actions possible.” Kernan's valuable study was later published in 1989 as Samuel Johnson and the Impact of Print (new title to same text). Straus is the source for Kernan's characterization of Dodsley (339).

28. Correspondence, 74-75.

29. Ibid., 70-73.

30. Colin Clair, A History of Printing in Britain (London: Cassell, 1965), 164.

31. Most reference books stress Dodsley's publishing projects as his primary contribution to letters. Indicatively, see The Oxford Companion to English Literature, 5th ed., ed. Margaret Drabble (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 280.

32. Jeremy Black, The English Press in the Eighteenth Century (London: Croom Helm, 1987), 19, 64.

33. Straus notes incorrectly that “no contribution came from Twickenham” (Robert Dodsley, 69). Pope's “Epigram” on “lopping Trees in his Garden,” “Epitaph. On Himself,” and “Prologue, For the Benefit of Mr. Dennis” appeared in the first three issues, respectively. Issue 2 also printed Pope's verses “Verbatim from Boileau.” Nonetheless, Straus is the sole source for most subsequent mentioners of the periodical (see Walter Graham, English Literary Periodicals [New York: Thomas Nelson, 1930], 165-66). Few surveys, including British Literary Magazines (ed. Alvin Sullivan [London: Greenwood Press, 1983]), mention Dodsley's first periodical.

34. Clair, History of Printing in Britain, 182. See also Feather, History of British Publishing, 85-89.

35. The Publick Register; Or, the Weekly Magazine 12 (21 March 1741): 1.

36. The authorities did subsequently go after Cave on the same grounds, but he cleverly resisted and was praised by Johnson for his resistance. See Wiles, Serial Publication in England, 58-60.

37. Ibid., 60.

38. Robert Dodsley, The Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green (London: Printed for R. Dodsley, and sold by T. Cooper, 1741).

39. The Songs and Duetto, in The Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green; as perform'd by Mr. Lowe, and Mrs. Clive. … Composed by Thomas Augustine Arne (London: John Cox, 1741); Dublin edition for Oli. Nelson (1741) and Glasgow edition (1758); L'Aveugle de Bethnal Green was included in Choix de petites pieces du Theatre anglais (Paris, 1756); Allardyce Nicoll, A History of English Drama, 1660-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955-60), 2:249.

40. Dublin Journal 20-23 June 1741.

41. Nicoll, 2:249.

42. Dodsley, Trifles, 139.

43. An Historical and Critical Account of the Theatres in Europe … By the famous Lewis Ricoboni (London: T. Waller; and R. Dodsley, 1741).

44. Listed as “this day published” in Common Sense 5, 5 March 1737.

45. Folger Shakespeare Library manuscript D.a.73, also containing Dodsley's handwritten notes toward the introduction to his Select Collection of Old Plays. Collation with the first edition (Folger PR 1241.D7 cage v. 1) shows that the handwritten notes to individual plays are virtually identical to the printed texts.

46. Folger Shakespeare Library Manuscript D.a.73.

47. There is some confusion in Straus about the date of publication for Dodsley's Select Collection of Old Plays (London: R. Dodsley, 1744). Volumes 1-10 were published in February 1744 and volumes 11-12 in March 1745, although all bear the date 1744. Straus says that the first ten volumes appeared on “Feb 1st, 1744-5” (Robert Dodsley, 64) but in his bibliography gives the correct year (314, 326), listing the date of publication as 13 February. There can be no doubt that Straus means 1744 rather than 1745 even in the text, as he notes that Pope died three months after publication (65). See George M. Kahrl and Dorothy Anderson, The Garrick Collection of Old English Plays (London: The British Library, 1982).

48. Dodsley, Select Collection, 1:xl. Garrick came to London with Johnson in March 1737, and he probably met Dodsley when London was being published. Garrick was a guest at dinner parties at Tully's Head, and his collection of plays probably had its genesis in Dodsley's Select Collection project.

49. Dodsley, Select Collection, 1:xl.

50. Under hire from another bookseller at the same time Dodsley was having the plays printed for his Select Collection, Samuel Johnson was drudging through descriptions of the Harleian Miscellany, a task he was to justify, also in 1744, with an essay “On the Origin and Importance of Small Tracts and Fugitive Pieces.”

51. Dodsley's “Rise and Progress” occupies i-xxxix of the first volume and is followed by an eight-page “List of Subscribers”; in the sixteen-page Books Printed for R. Dodsley (London, 1752?), the Select Collection is item 9.

52. Sherbo, Isaac Reed, Editorial Factotum, 44.

53. Wright, Joseph Spence, 69, 39, 159.

54. Dodsley became Spence's sole publisher and purchased the rights to his works. “Of all Dodsley's many friends,” Straus judged, Joseph Spence was “the most loyal and the most devoted” (Robert Dodsley, 43). Yet, what must have been an extensive correspondence between close friends was obliterated. Only three letters survive, having been accidentally interleaved between pages of books.

55. The Letters of William Shenstone, ed. Duncan Mallam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1939), 21.

56. Daily Post 7093, 31 May 1742.

57. Stephen N. Brown, “Edward Young,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, 95:358; The Correspondence of Edward Young, 1683-1765, ed. Henry Pettit (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 143.

58. Harold Forster, Edward Young: The Poet of the Night Thoughts, 1683-1765 (Alburgh Harleston: Erskine Press, 1986), 200.

59. Ibid., 212. Thereafter, Dodsley published—either alone or in partnership with Andrew Millar—all Young's major works, including The Brothers. A Tragedy (1753), The Centaur Not Fabulous (1755), and, most importantly, the romantic manifesto Conjectures on Original Composition (1759). For a textual history of editions of Night Thoughts published during Dodsley's life, see Stephen Cornford's edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 22-32. Sadly, as with Pope, Spence, and Johnson, all but a few lines of the correspondence between Young and Dodsley was destroyed.

60. At the same time, Cooper was being listed as seller or copublisher with Dodsley of works by Shenstone and Young, among others, and the various volumes of Pope's collected Works issued in 1742 were “Printed for R. Dodsley, and sold by T. Cooper.”

61. Cibber, A Letter from Mr. Cibber, 42-43.

62. Straus, Robert Dodsley, 322.

63. Ibid., 323.

64. Colin's Kisses is listed in the London Magazine 11 (1742): 572.

65. Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, 3:412.

66. An Introduction toward an Essay on the Origin of the Passions (London: Printed for R. Dodsley; and sold by T. Cooper, 1741), title page.

67. Mark Akenside, The British Philippic: A Poem, in Miltonic Verse. Occasion'd by the Insults of the Spaniards [also issued with the title The Voice of Liberty] (London: Printed by J. Chaney, for A. Dodd, 1738). Considering the use of Dodd with the Dunciad suggests an earlier connection between Pope, Dodsley, and Akenside than Johnson knows. Robert Mahoney calls Akenside's attack on Walpole's Spanish policy “jingoistic” (“Mark Akenside,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, 109:5).

68. [Mark Akenside], Odes on Several Subjects (London: Printed for R. Dodsley; and sold by M. Cooper, 1745). In 1760, Dodsley published an expanded and much-revised second edition. Walpole's characterization of Akenside is found in a letter to Horace Mann dated 29 March 1745 (Horace Walpole's Correspondence, 19:28).

69. Mack, Alexander Pope, 761.

70. Verses on the Grotto at Twickenham. By Mr. Pope. Attempted in Latin and Greek. To which is added Horti Popiani: Ode Sapphica. Also The Cave of Pope. A Prophecy, [ed. Robert Dodsley] (London: Printed for R. Dodsley; and sold by M. Cooper, 1743), item 6; see also Peter E. Martin, “A New Manuscript of Robert Dodsley's Poem on Pope's Grotto,” The Scriblerian 15 (Spring 1983): 89-92, where he characterizes alterations made during draft stages of the poem as resulting in a tighter, more forceful, and less repetitious finished work (92). Maynard Mack reprints and quotes Dodsley's poem repeatedly in his characterization of Pope's “image” in The Garden and the City: Retirement and Politics in the Later Poetry of Pope, 1731-1743 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969). At least one scholar has characterized the Greek and Latin versions of Pope's verses as “Dodsley's translations.” There is no evidence, however, that Dodsley was fluent in Latin composition, much less in Greek; a more probable candidate would be Spence, whose Anecdotes record Dodsley's deathbed visit to Pope.

71. Pain and Patience. A Poem. By R. Dodsley (London: Printed For R. Dodsley … And sold by M. Cooper, 1742). “1742” is a typesetting error as it was first advertised in the London Daily Post and General Advertiser 2817, 25 November 1743.

72. Straus hypothesizes that “Dodsley's visits to Twickenham must have been singularly regular” (Robert Dodsley, 77).

73. Spence, Anecdotes, 86, 188.

74. London Magazine 13 (1744).

75. Gentleman's Magazine 14 (1744).

76. Mack, Garden and the City, 262-63.

77. Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, 2:200.

78. James Dodsley issued a two-volume “second” edition in 1777. Volume 2 contains works written by Dodsley after 1745, and at least some copies have additional title pages saying “Miscellanies. By the late R. Dodsley.”

79. Dodsley, Trifles, iii.

80. [Robert Dodsley], Rex & Pontifex: Being An Attempt to introduce upon the Stage a new Species of Pantomime (London: Printed for M. Cooper, 1745), 9-10, 12. No writer has ever described or discussed Rex & Pontifex.

81. Dodsley, Trifles, 241.

82. Ibid., 242.

83. Langford, Polite and Commercial People, 237-43.

84. Dodsley, Trifles, 241-42, 226, 184.

85. The Works of John Wesley, ed. Frank Baker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 26:119. See also Correspondence, 82-83.

86. Straus, Robert Dodsley, 82-83; Charles Theodore Haupt, Mark Akenside: A Biography and Critical Study (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1944), 108.

87. The Museum: or, the Literary and Historical Register. Volume the First (London: Printed for R. Dodsley in Pall-mall, 1746), 2.

88. Dodsley's Museum “had an influence and retains a historical importance out of proportion to its relatively brief life” (Carl R. Kropf, “The Museum,” in British Literary Magazines, 241).

89. James E. Tierney, “The Museum, the ‘Super-Excellent Magazine,’” Studies in English Literature 13 (Summer 1973): 507.

90. Correspondence, 75.

91. Polymetis: Or An Enquiry concerning the Agreement Between the Works of the Roman Poets, and the Remains of the Antient Artists. Being An Attempt to illustrate them mutually from one another. In Ten Books. By the Revd. Mr. [Joseph] Spence (London: Printed for R. Dodsley; at Tully's-Head, Pall-Mall, 1747), vii-xii.

92. Museum 1 (1746): 99.

93. Ibid., 2 (1747): 437. See also Wright, Joseph Spence, 84-112.

94. See Charles Ryskamp, “John Gilbert Cooper and Dodsley's Museum,” Notes and Queries, 203 (1958): 210-11; James E. Tierney, “Museum Attributions in John Gilbert Cooper's Unpublished Letters,” Studies in Bibliography 27 (1974): 232-35; and Edward W. Pitcher, “Nathaniel Cotton, The Elder: An Anonymous Contributor to Dodsley's Museum (1746-7) and Wm. Dodd's Visitor (1760),” American Notes and Queries 17 (April 1979): 124-25.

95. Books Printed for R. Dodsley, item 42.

96. See Mabel Seymour, “Fielding's History of the Forty-Five,” Philological Quarterly 14 (1935): 105-25, and Ifan Kyrle Fletcher, “Fielding, Dodsley, Marchant, and Ray. Some Fugitive Histories of the '45,” Notes and Queries 189 (1945): 90-92, 117-20, 138-41.

97. Gentleman's Magazine 17 (1747): introduction.

98. “Modern historians interested in measuring the taste and opinions of the mid-eighteenth century,” Kropf says of Dodsley's Museum, “cannot do better than to consult its pages” (“The Museum,” 241).

99. George Sampson, The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 398.

100. In beginning his survey of poetry for the Mid-Eighteenth Century volume of the Oxford History of English Literature, Butt says that “the most convenient way of examining the state of English poetry at the death of Pope is to turn over the pages of Dodsley's Collection of Poems. By Several Hands” (57); and in his analogous and influential survey, George Sherburn similarly acknowledges Dodsley's anthology as the best revelation of the taste of readers at midcentury (The Restoration and Eighteenth Century [New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1967], 1005).

     Dodsley created the canon of mid-eighteenth-century poetry. Butt's survey uses Dodsley's Collection of Poems in Six Volumes. By Several Hands (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1758) as its basis. Virtually all of his contemporaries that Johnson included in his edition of English poets (cosponsored by Dodsley's brother James) were authors published predominately or exclusively by Tully's Head, including such still-anthologized authors as Akenside, Shenstone, Young, Dyer, and Gray and such forgotten figures as George Lyttelton, Christopher Pitt, and Gilbert West, and every contemporary poet Johnson selected had some direct publishing connection with Robert Dodsley. Every anthology of eighteenth-century British literature used in universities today reprints most of its midcentury poetry from works that either appear in Dodsley's Collection of Poems or were separately published by him. Finally, almost every midcentury poet in the recent two-volume Eighteenth-Century Poets (ed. John Sitter [Detroit: Gale, 1990]) in the Dictionary of Literary Biography series was published by Tully's Head.

101. The Cupid. A Collection of Love Songs, In Twelve Parts (London: Printed by J. Chrichley for R. Dodsley, 1736); A Collection of Poems on Several Occasions. Written in the Last Century by The Earl of Rochester …, ed. R. Cross (London: Printed: And to be had of Mr. Cross at his Lodgings over-against the Rose-Tavern in Russel-street Covent-Garden; and of Mr. Dodsley in Pall-Mall, 1747). Cross was prompter at the Theatre-Royal in Drury Lane.

102. Dodsley, Collection of Poems, 1:1. Deborah D. Rogers cites a 1763 printing of Dodsley's statement as evidence that “Dodsley's Collection was compiled to perpetuate and legitimize neoclassical standards” (Bookseller as Rogue: John Almond and the Politics of Eighteenth-Century Publishing [New York: Peter Lang, 1986], 50). She admits that Almond's collection, while more overtly political, was “ephemeral” (51).

103. Thomas Gray, “Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard,” in Dodsley, Collection of Poems, 4:4. Some of the poems are attributed in the Collection of Poems; however, most identifications of the lesser-known selections come from annotations by James Dodsley in a 1782 edition and, indirectly, from Alexander Chalmers's use of Joseph Warton's annotated copy. Systematic study began when William Prideaux Courtney collected his series of articles on the authors of individual selections (originally published in 1907, in Notes and Queries) in Dodsley's Collection of Poetry: Its Contents and Contributors (London: Humphreys, 1910). R. W. Chapman added more system with an alphabetical list of authors and an index of first lines but used an odd assortment of volumes in “Dodsley's Collection of Poems by Several Hands,” Oxford Bibliographical Society Proceedings and Papers 3, no. 3 (1933): 269-316. Donald D. Eddy summarizes and supplements both in “Dodsley's Collection of Poems by Several Hands (Six Volumes), 1758: Index of Authors,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 60 (1966): 9-30. Eddy uses the first full six-volume edition of 1758, from which “the later editions (1763, 1765, 1766, 1770, 1775, 1782) … show little or no variation” (9). Joyce Fullard attributes an additional poem in “Notes on Catherine Jemmat and a Poem in Dodsley's Collection of Poems by Several Hands,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 69 (1975): 241-42.

     Courtney remains the only source of information on some of the minor contributors. Thus far, there has been no comprehensive bibliographical study of the various editions or of the alterations from edition to edition, although, as Eddy notes, the editions before 1758 differ substantially (10). Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's poems, for example, were shifted from the third to the first volume between January 1748 and a “Second Edition,” eleven months later; in 1748, William King had eight inclusions and in 1758 had none. The 1748 “Second Edition” of the first three volumes is much more expensively printed than the initial issue—on better paper with twenty times the ornamental niceties. The inclusions and arrangement of the first three volumes varied little thereafter. My generalizations are based on the six-volume edition of 1758, that which Dodsley clearly regarded as his definitive creation.

     Harold Forster has brought together interesting bibliographical information on Dodsley's imitators in Supplements to Dodsley's Collection of Poems, Occasional Publication 15 (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1980).

104. Dodsley, Collection of Poems, 1:1.

105. The Correspondence of Thomas Gray, ed. Paget Toynbee and Leonard Whibley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935), 1:290-91.

106. The Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ed. Robert Halsband (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 3:187, 193.

107. Isobel Grundy, “The Politics of Female Authorship: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Reaction to the Printing of Her Poems,” The Book Collector 31 (1982), 37; [Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,] Six Town Eclogues. With Some Other Poems (London: Printed for M. Cooper, 1747). In 1763, Lady Mary's Turkish embassy letters were published in the London Chronicle, a paper in which Dodsley owned a share.

108. A Collection of Miscellany Poems, Never before Publish'd (London: Printed for the Authors, by H. Woodfall, Jun. and sold by W. Warner, at Dryden's Head, next Door to the Rose Tavern, without Temple-Bar, 1737). No scholar has noticed Dodsley's name among the subscribers. Only three subscribers take six copies; nobody else takes more than two. The list of subscribers contains no nobility, nor is there a single poem praising a titled person. Such names as appear, as well as several of the poems included, suggest a connection with the theater world, especially with Drury Lane.

     Since John Rich, the manager who produced The King and the Miller of Mansfield that year, also subscribed, and since pages 180-87 print the ballad of “The King and the Miller of Mansfield,” Dodsley's connection with the miscellany may be related more to his growing celebrity than to his bookselling. Theophilus Cibber, who played Dodsley's king, subscribed for a copy, as did Mrs. [Kitty] Clive who was later to play Dodsley heroines. Considering that Dodsley subsequently called the collection of his own works Trifles, it seems significant that the preface begins, “TRIFLES of this kind are generally esteem'd or disapprov'd, according to the Merit of the Author.”

109. The separate volumes were issued in 1684, 1685, 1693, 1694, 1704, and 1709, the last two after Dryden's death.

110. Correspondence, 122, 124.

111. Despite Pope's absence from the Collection of Poems, Michael F. Suarez argues that Dodsley's first three volumes have the “not-so-hidden agenda” of “canonizing … if not deifying” Pope and his Augustan aesthetic (“Dodsley's Collection of Poems and the Ghost of Pope: The Politics of Literary Reputation,” Publications of the Bibliographical Society of America 88 [1994]: 200).

112. Dodsley, Collection of Poems, 3:4-5, 4:267-68, 6:321, 4:271-74.

113. Raymond D. Havens concludes that “an examination of the meters used in Dodsley's Collection reveals a decided swing towards the newer poetry” and that “these changes in meter mean far more than meter; they imply new models, new conceptions of poetry” (“Changing Taste in the Eighteenth Century: A Study of Dryden's and Dodsley's Miscellanies,” PMLA 44 [1929]: 523-24).

114. William Shenstone, “Rural Elegance,” and Thomas Gray, “Ode: Ruin seize thee, ruthless King,” in Dodsley, Collection of Poems, 5:5, 6:326.

115. Richard Wendorf, “Robert Dodsley as Editor,” Studies in Bibliography 31 (1978): 243.

116. Correspondence, 218.

117. Letters of William Shenstone, 312, 311-12, 292.

118. Monthly Review 12 (May 1755): 382.

119. Ibid., 18 (June 1758): 533, 538. The London Magazine lists volumes 5 and 6 for March (27:154).

120. London Magazine 27 (1758): 534-36.

121. Wendorf's characterization (“Robert Dodsley as Editor,” 240).

122. The characterizations of Havens (“Changing Taste,” 520) and Tedder (DNB, 5:1076), respectively.

123. Courtney, Dodsley's Collection of Poetry, 1.

124. Sherbo, Isaac Reed, Editorial Factotum, 36.

125. Dodsley, Collection of Poems, 6:333.