Robert Dodsley - book seller, author and playwright

Name: 
Robert Dodsley
Date of birth:  
Feb 13, 1704
Date of death:  
Sep 23, 1764
Place of death: 
in Durham
Biography: 

Born near Mansfield, Nottinghamshire as the son of a school master. With his brother James Dodsley a London publisher and bookseller. Shop at Tully's Head in Pall Mall. Published works by Frances Sheridan, Oliver Goldsmith, Samuel Johnson and of Boswell himself. Also publishers of Laurence Sternes The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759).

Robert Dodsley was also a very active author and playwright. His play The Toyshop: A Dramatic Satire ran at Covent Garden in 1735. In 1758 we wrote the tragedy Cleone.

An active magazine publisher he co-founded, with Edmund Burke, The Annual Register (1758), a yearly chronicle of British and world history which is still being published. He also published the literary magazine The Museum (with poet and physician Mark Akenside (1721-1770) at its first editor) , and others.

Dodsley is buried at Durham, where he died on a visit to a friend.

Life with Boswell: 

Boswell met a Mr. Dodsley (a good, jolly, decent, conversable man ) at Thomas Davies' home (or book shop) on Christmas day, 1762. The Dodsleys had published Boswell's poem The Cub at Newmarket earlier that same year. From the journal one gets the impression that Boswell hadn't met this Mr. Dodsley before, which suggests that he is referring to Robert Dodsley who retired from the publishing business in 1759, and so wouldn't have met Boswell in the shop.

Literature

On the AbeBooks used books search engine you can usually find copies of Harry M. Solomon's 1996 biography of Dodsley, The Rise of Robert Dodsley: Creating the New Age of Print. The biography is also available for reading online at Questia Online Library. Some of Dodsley's own writings and short early biographies about him are also available through AbeBooks.

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Related links: 
Annual Register (scanned copies of the first 21 volumes)
Robert Dodsley (Wikipedia)

Please cite this article as follows, depending on required citation style:

MLA: Frandzen, Thomas. "Robert Dodsley - book seller, author and playwright". James Boswell .info. 2012. Web. Date accessed: May 18, 2012. <http://www.jamesboswell.info/biography/robert-dodsley-book-seller-author-and-playwright>
APA: Frandzen, T. (2012) Robert Dodsley - book seller, author and playwright. Retrieved from http://www.jamesboswell.info/biography/robert-dodsley-book-seller-author-and-playwright