Robert Dodsley

Robert Dodsley 1703-64, English publisher and author. He wrote occasional verses, and also several plays, including The King and the Miller of Mansfield (1737); a ballad opera, The Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green (1741); and the tragedy Cleone (1758). He is best known, however, as the publisher of works by Pope, Johnson, Gray, and Goldsmith and as the editor of A Select Collection of Old Plays (12 vol., 1744) and A Collection of Poems by Several Hands (6 vol., 1748-58). He founded with Burke the Annual Register (1758), which still exists.

Dodsley, Robert (1703–64), wrote several poems while a footman in the service of the Hon. Mrs Lowther, including Servitude (anon., 1729). He set up as a bookseller and wrote several plays, including a musical play, The Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green (1741). He is chiefly remembered as the publisher of works by Pope, Dr Johnson, E. Young, Goldsmith, T. Gray, Akenside, and Shenstone and of A Collection of Poems, by Several Hands (1748–58, revised and continued by Pearch, 1775) which was a classic and influential statement of mid-18th-cent. taste. In 1758 he founded, in conjunction with Burke, The Annual Register. He also has the credit of having suggested the compiling of a dictionary to Dr Johnson.

Dodsley, Robert (1703–64), English playwright and publisher. He was working in London when his literary gifts attracted the attention of Pope and Defoe. Helped by them, and by the success of his first play The Toy Shop (1735), he established himself as a bookseller and publisher in Pall Mall, where he issued works by such authors as Pope and Dr Johnson, and also published a Select Collection of Old Plays, later revised and edited by Hazlitt. The best known of his own plays 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. Dodsley also wrote the libretto of a ballad opera, The Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green (1741).