And this brings me to a point where I must explain my peculiar interest in this thoroughgoing scoundrel. I happen to own a volume of manuscript letters written by Dodd, from Newgate Prison, to a man named Edmund Allen; and as not every reader of Boswell can be expected to remember who Edmund Allen was, I may say that he was Dr. Johnson’s neighbor and landlord in Bolt Court, a printer by trade and an intimate friend of the Doctor. It was Allen who gave the dinner to Johnson and Boswell which caused the old man to remark, “Sir, we could not have had a better dinner had there been a Synod of Cooks.” The Dodd letters to Allen, however, are only a part of the contents of the volume. It contains also a great number of Johnson’s letters to Dodd, and the original drafts of the petitions which he drew up in his efforts to secure mitigation of Dodd’s punishment. The whole collection came into my possession many years ago, and has afforded me a subject of investigation on many a winter’s evening when I might otherwise have occupied myself with solitaire, did I happen to know one card from another.
Allen appears to have been an acquaintance of Dodd’s, and, I judge from the letters before me, called on Johnson with a letter from a certain Lady Harrington, who for some reason which does not appear, was greatly interested in Dodd’s fate. Boswell records that Johnson was much agitated at the interview, walking up and down his chamber saying, “I will do what I can.” Dodd was personally unknown to Johnson and had only once been in his presence; and while an elaborate correspondence was being carried on between them, Johnson declined to go to see the prisoner, and for some reason wished that his name should not be drawn into the affair; but he did not relax his efforts. Allen was the go-between in all that passed between the two men. In the volume before me, in all of Dodd’s letters to Allen, Johnson’s name has been carefully blotted out, and Johnson’s letters intended for Dodd are not addressed to him, but bear the inscription, “This may be communicated to Dr. Dodd.” Dodd’s letters to Johnson were delivered to him by Allen and were probably destroyed, Allen having first made the copies which are now in my possession. Most of Dodd’s letters to Allen appear to have been preserved, and Johnson’s letters to Dodd, together with the drafts of his petitions, were carefully preserved by Allen, Dodd being supplied with unsigned copies. Allen in this way carried out Johnson’s instructions to “tell nobody.”
Dodd’s letters seem for the most part to have been written at night. The correspondence began early in May, and his last letter was dated June 26, a few hours before he died. None of Dodd’s letters seem to have been published, and Johnson’s, although of supreme interest, do not appear to have been known in their entirety either to Hawkins, Boswell, or Boswell’s greatest editor, Birkbeck Hill. The petitions, so far as they have been published, seem to have been printed from imperfect copies of the original drafts. Boswell relates that Johnson had told him he had written a petition from the City of London, but they mended it. In the original draft there are a few repairs, but they are in Dr. Johnson’s own hand. The petition to the King evidently did not require mending, as the published copies are almost identical with the original.
In the petition which he wrote for Mrs. Dodd to copy and present to the Queen, Johnson, not knowing all the facts, left blank spaces in the original draft for Mrs. Dodd to fill when making her copy; thus the original draft reads:—
To the Queen’s Most Excellent Majesty
Madam:—