The Amenities of Book-Collecting and Kindred Affections

by A. Edward Newton

certainly not that of the clergyman of whom I am about to speak.

And now, without further delay, I introduce William Dodd. Doctor Dodd, he came to be called; subsequently, the “unfortunate Doctor Dodd,” which he certainly considered himself to be, and with good reason, as he was finally hanged.

William Dodd was born in Lincolnshire, in 1729, and was himself the son of a clergyman. He early became a good student, and entering Clare Hall, Cambridge, at sixteen, attracted some attention by his close application to his studies. But books alone did not occupy his time: he attained some reputation as a dancer and was noted for being very fond of dress. He must have had real ability, however, for he was graduated with honors, and his name appears on the list of wranglers. Immediately after receiving his Arts degree, he set out to make a career for himself in London.

Young Dodd was quick and industrious: he had good manners and address, made friends quickly, and was possessed of what, in those days, was called “a lively imagination,” which seems to have meant a fondness for dissipation; with friends to help him, he soon knew his way about the metropolis. Its many pitfalls he discovered by falling into them, and the pitfalls for a gay young blade in London in the middle of the eighteenth century were many and sundry.

But whatever his other failings, of idleness Dodd could not be accused. He did not forget that he had come to London to make a career for himself. He had already published verse; he now began a comedy, and the death of the Prince of Wales afforded him a subject for an elegy. From this time on he was prepared to write an ode or an elegy at the drop of a hat. The question, should he become author or minister, perplexed him for some time. For success in either direction perseverance and a patron were necessary. Perseverance he had, but a patron was lacking.

While pondering these matters, Dodd seemed to have nipped his career in the bud by a most improvident marriage. His wife was a Mary Perkins, which means little to us. She may have been a servant, but more likely she was the discarded mistress of a nobleman who was anxious to see her provided with a husband. In any event, she was a handsome woman, and his marriage was not his greatest misfortune.

Shortly after the wedding, we hear of them living in a small establishment in Wardour Street, not then, as now, given over to second-hand furniture shops, but rather a good quarter frequented by literary men and artists. Who supplied the money for this venture we do not know; it was probably borrowed from someone, and we may suspect that Dodd already was headed the wrong way—or that, at least, his father thought so; for we hear of his coming to London to persuade his son to give up his life there and return to Cambridge to continue his studies.

Shortly after this time he published two small volumes of quotations which he called “Beauties of Shakespeare.” He was the first to make the discovery that a book of quotations “digested under proper heads” would have a ready sale. Shakespeare in the dead centre of the eighteenth century was not the colossal figure that he is seen to be as we celebrate the tercentenary of his death. I suspect that my friend Felix Schelling, the great Elizabethan scholar, feels that anyone who would make a book of quotations from Shakespeare deserves Dodd’s end, namely, hanging; indeed, I have heard him suggest as much; but we cannot all be Schellings. The book was well received and has been reprinted right down to our own time. In the introduction he refers to his attempt to present a collection of the finest passages of the poet, “who was ever,” he says, “of all modern authors, my first and greatest favorite”; adding that “it would have been no hard task to have multiplied notes and parallel passages from Greek, Latin and English writers, and thus to have made no small display of what is commonly called learning”; but that he had no desire to perplex the reader. There is much good sense in the introduction, which we must also think of as coming from a young man little more than a year out of college.

As it was his first, so he thought it would be his last, serious venture into literature, for in his preface he says: “Better and more important things henceforth demand my attention, and I here, with no small pleasure, take leave of Shakespeare and the critics: as this work was begun and finish’d before I enter’d upon the sacred function in which I am now happily employ’d.”

Dodd had already been ordained deacon and settled down as a curate in West Ham in Essex, where he did not spare himself in the dull round of parochial drudgery. So passed two years which, looking back on them from within the portals of Newgate Prison, he declared to have been the happiest of his life. But he soon tired of the country, his yearning for city life was not to be resisted, and securing a lectureship at St. Olave’s, Hart Street, he returned to London and relapsed into literature.