The publisher responsible for Dr. Johnson's Dictionary

Robert Dodsley, English playwright and publisher, is also recognised as collector and publisher of one of the pre-eminent collections of poetry from the 18th Century, A Collection of Poems in Six Volumes by Several Hands.

Copyright © 2007 Bruce Tober All Rights Reserved

Robert Dodsley (1703–64) is probably best known as the publisher of that eminent poetry collection. The entirely admirable intent of the set was "to preserve to the Public those poetical performances, which seemed to merit a longer remembrance than what would probably be secured to them by the MANNER wherein they were originally published."

He was also editor of A Select Collection of Old Plays (12 vol., 1744) and with Edmund Burke founded the Annual Register (1758). Of Old Plays, Robert Markley in his 1997 review of Harry M. Solomon's The Rise of Robert Dodsley: Creating the New Age of Print describes it as having "had an enormous influence on the subsequent canon of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama".

The 18th Century was arguably the most revolutionary period in publishing since Johannes Gutenberg invented "movable type printing" some 300 years earlier. And Dodsley was one of the revolution's leaders.

"Alongside a burgeoning market for Greek and Latin texts in the original, translations became popular as well," said Nigel Wilcockson in his 2003 article, 'Publishing the classics: a brief history' in History Today magazine. "Caxton, for example, now best remembered for his editions of Chaucer and Malory, also produced English translations of Aesop's Fables and parts of Virgil's Aeneid. In the following hundred years or so, works of writers such as Euripides, Horace, Ovid, Virgil and Plutarch found their way into English, and by the eighteenth century the steady trickle had become a flood...."

"In addition," Wilcockson explained, "to the production of Latin and Greek texts, the eighteenth century also saw the appearance of libraries of other `great works'. Johnson's own publisher, Robert Dodsley, produced anthologies of plays and poems by `old authors', and in the latter part of the century John Bell, an astonishingly adventurous publisher and editor, issued his Poets of Great Britain Complete from Chaucer to Churchill in 109 volumes..."

No Ordinary Publisher was Dodsley

But he wasn't just your ordinary publisher.

. Dodsley's Poems

Rather he was a friend (and publisher) of Daniel Defoe, Dr Samuel Johnson, Alexander Pope, and many other 18th Century literary luminaries. In addition to those three, he also published works by E. Young , Goldsmith , T. Gray , Akenside , and Shenstone. His circle of correspondents also included: Edmund Burke, the 4th Earl of Chesterfield, David Garrick, Thomas Gray, David Hume, Laurence Sterne, and Horace Walpole, according to Cambridge University Press..

And unlike most publishers today, Dodsley was also a bookseller. And being a relatively successful writer himself, didn't hurt matters. Dodsley, is cited as "London’s leading literary publisher of the mid eighteenth century" by Cambridge University Press in describing its book, The Correspondence of Robert Dodsley.

He began writing poems while working as a footman in the service of the Hon. Mrs Lowther. One of these was "Servitude" published anonymously in 1729, according to a brief sketch of Dodsley written by Margaret Drabble and Jenny Stringer in the 2003 edition of The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature.

It was the success of his first play, "The Toy Shop" (1735), however, that helped establish him in his business ventures almost as much as was the backing of Pope and Defoe. It was Pope whose patronage helped establish Dodsley in business. "Publishing the most eminent poet of his time," said Sarah M. Zimmerman in a 2006 essay in 'Studies in Romanticism'. "Dodsley naturally drew many other poets and gentlemen readers to his business at Tully's Head," she continued.

"The best known of his plays," according to a brief bio of Dodsley in the 1996 edition of The Concise Oxford Companion to the Theatre, "was The King and the Miller of Mansfield (1737), which, with its sequel, Sir John Cockle at Court (1738), was first seen at Drury Lane and frequently revived. It provided the basis for Collé's Partie de chasse d'Henri IV, and became part of the repertory of the 19th-century toy theatre," said the article's authors, Phyllis Hartnoll and Peter Found. "Dodsley also wrote the libretto of a ballad opera , The Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green (1741)."

Johnson's Dictionary

Dodsley's role in Johnson's producing his dictionary could be seen as minor in that he was only one of "seven London booksellers, representing five different firms" who asked him to write the dictionary.

But, said Robert DeMaria, Jr. in his essay, "The Sources of Johnson’s Dictionary", Johnson was anything but "a literary star, although he had a small, solid reputation." DeMaria goes on to cite Dodsley as "the man most responsible for his (Johnson's) selection..."

"In 1746... when he contracted to compile his dictionary," explained Jonathan Yardley in his 2005 essay in The Washington Post. "Amazingly enough, the first great dictionary was basically the work of one man. He was comparatively unknown, a resident of a place called 'grubstreet,' subsequently defined by him as 'originally the name of a street in Moorfields in London, much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries, and temporary poems; whence any mean production is called grubstreet.'"

. Boswell's Johnson

Yardley continued, "He was married, not especially happily, to a woman much his senior and lived a hand-to-mouth existence that seemed likely to stretch into eternity. Then Robert Dodsley, a formidable bookseller, persuaded him to undertake the dictionary and set him on the path to the eclat he enjoys today."

Dodsley "had quite recently engaged Johnson to write both an introduction and a concluding fable for an educational text entitled The Preceptor," DeMaria continued, "and Johnson had worked earlier with a couple of Dodsley’s associates in the trade... Johnson told Boswell that the idea of writing a dictionary had 'grown up insensibly in his mind,' but it is unlikely he would ever have written it if Dodsley and the others had not first conceived of the project and hired Johnson to do it."

A Cobbling Versifier

Bridget Keegan in a 2001 issue of Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation in discussing 'Cobbling Verse: Shoemaker poets of the long eighteenth century' described Dodsley as one such, noting that "the degree of [Dodsley's] success can be measured by the erasure of his laboring-class origins in most criticism devoted to his poetry."

.  Robert Dodsley (courtesy Oak Knoll Books) from a bust engraving by Simon François Ravenet (1706-1774) possibly based on a 1760 portrait attributed to Edward Alcock.

She explained that "Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British laboring-class poets hailed from a wide variety of primary occupations. However, there is one occupation that appears to dominate: shoemaking..." I doubt she intended to include "being a footman in service" as a related occupation, but I like the symmetry. "In Great Britain, nearly fifty shoemaker poets appeared in print," Keegan continued, "some repeatedly, during the period extending from the late seventeenth to the late nineteenth century. Even if those whose association with the trade is either dubious or brief were excluded, the phenomenon appears extensive enough to warrant examining why this particular trade cultivated so many poets." And she goes on to do so

And she's not alone. William J. Christmas in his article "Introduction: an eighteenth-century laboring-class tradition." in another 2001 issue of Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation explored similar territory. "It seems a safe (though perhaps not yet commonplace) assertion," Christmas explained, "that a distinct laboring-class poetic tradition emerged as a significant feature of eighteenth-century literary culture. The origins of this tradition might be traced back to the early seventeenth century, though Ben Jonson managed to rise above his bricklaying background, relegating the facts of his laboring life to mere footnote mention even in his own lifetime, and John Taylor, the self-styled 'King's Water-Poet' who produced reams of loyalist verse throughout the Civil War period, is now little read."

"John Bancks attempted to capitalize on his brief stint as a weaver's apprentice at Reading with a short book of poems titled The Weaver's Miscellany (1730)..." Christmas continued, "Though he never gained aristocratic support, Bancks continued to flood the market with verse, producing his own Poems on Several Occasions in 1733, and a two-volume Miscellaneous Works (1738) that went to a second edition the following year, thus casting his lot with an increasingly literate London society willing to pay for what it read. Robert Dodsley, who had published his poetic advice to footmen, 'Servitude', in 1729, returned to print with... 'The Muse in Livery' (1732), that also made explicit references to the thresher at court...."

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