R. and J. Dodsley

LC name authority rec. n.nr98004257

LC Heading: R. and J. Dodsley

found: Plomer, H.R. Dict. of the printers and booksellers 1726-1775, 1932: p. 77 (under entry for Robert Dodsley: in 1750 Robert Dodsley took into partnership his younger brother James who succeeded him in the business on his death, Sept. 25, 1764)

Robert Dodsley (1704-1764)

Dodsley, Robert (1704–1764), bookseller and writer, was born on 13 February 1704 in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, the eldest of seven children of Robert Dodsley (bap. 1681, d. 1750), a master of the free school in Mansfield, and his first wife. Robert's early efforts at poetry suggest that he learned something of the art from his schoolmaster father, as well as a smattering of major authors, both classical and contemporary. However, in a practical-minded move, his father apprenticed Robert, at the age of fourteen, to a local stocking weaver. It is not clear when Robert left his master or under what circumstances, but by the mid-1720s he entered into service with a series of well-connected families that eventually took him to London.

The first known verses of the aspiring young poet were composed while Dodsley was in the service of Sir Richard Howe, who kept a residence both at Langar Hall, east of Nottingham, and at Compton, in Gloucestershire. At some time before September 1729 Dodsley became a footman to Charles Dartiquenave, a well-known London epicure, friend of Swift and Pope, member of the Kitcat Club, and contributor to The Tatler. Dodsley's first publication, Servitude, a poem attempting to counter the increasing displeasure with the attitude of servants, appeared on 20 September 1729. At Dartiquenave's Dodsley became acquainted with visiting literati and probably first met Alexander Pope, who would later play a major role in his young career. Within two years Dodsley had moved to Whitehall as footman to Jane Lowther, a daughter of John, Viscount Lonsdale. On 14 February 1732, while still in Mrs Lowther's service, Dodsley married Catherine Iserloo (d. 1754), the beloved Kitty of his early poems. A little more than two months later, Mrs Lowther engaged a host of her fashionable friends to subscribe to Dodsley's A Muse in Livery, or, The Footman's Miscellany, his most significant publication to date (the first edition had appeared in February). The more than 200 subscribers included Sir Robert Walpole, the countess of Hartford, and the duchesses of Bolton, Bedford, and Cleveland. Not until the ‘second’ edition, however, did Nourse, the publisher, add to the title-page: ‘By R. Dodsley, now a Footman to a Person of Quality at Whitehall’.

The earliest remnant of Dodsley's acquaintance with Pope, a brief letter from the older poet on 5 February 1733, acknowledged the receipt of Dodsley's manuscript of The Toy-Shop and promised to recommend the one-act play to John Rich, manager of Covent Garden theatre. Pope kept his word, and Rich produced The Toy-Shop as an afterpiece on 3 February 1735. A moralizing satire on the town's vanities delivered by the toyshop owner himself, the play captured the fancy of audiences and enjoyed at least thirty-four performances and seven editions in its first year alone.

Shop at the sign of Tully's Head

Although Pope had encouraged young Dodsley's poetic aspirations, apparently his own publishing agenda led him to convince Dodsley that his true talents would be realized in the book trade. Lacking experience in the bookselling business, Dodsley probably spent time learning the trade in the shop of Pope's current publisher, Lawton Gilliver, while Gilliver was publishing Dodsley's next three poems—The Modern Reasoners (1734), An Epistle to Mr. Pope, Occasion'd by his Essay on Man (1734), and Beauty, or, The Art of Charming (1735).

With proceeds from The Toy-Shop and other works, together with a £100 contribution from Pope, Dodsley opened his bookshop at the sign of Tully's Head in Pall Mall, London, probably in March or April 1735. Not surprisingly, his first publication found him linked in the imprint with Lawton Gilliver and James Brindley for volume 2 of the Works of Alexander Pope. The original site of Tully's Head is not known, but, three years later, he moved into the former quarters of Sir William Younge in Pall Mall, a large house at the end of a passageway almost directly opposite Marlborough House and running up towards King Street. Although some distance from the centre of the book trade around Stationers' Corner, Tully's Head was near the fashionable coffee houses in St James's, a short walk from parliament and government offices in Whitehall, and had no serious competition in the area, except for Brindley in New Bond Street.

During these early years Pope channelled several of his own works to Tully's Head and recommended the shop to his friends. To William Duncombe, he wrote on 6 May 1735: ‘Mr. Dodsley, the Author of the Toyshop ... has just set up a Bookseller, and I doubt not, as he has more Sense, so will have more Honesty, than most of [that] Profession’ (Correspondence, ed. Sherburn, 3.454). In 1737 Dodsley issued nine publications, including a volume of Pope's letters (together with Knapton, Gilliver, and Brindley); an edition of still another of his own plays, The King and the Miller of Mansfield; and the year's most popular work, Richard Glover's political epic Leonidas. The next year saw twenty-one new works, including London by the not yet famous Samuel Johnson, an edition of Fénélon's Télémaque, a translation of Tasso's Jerusalem, a few more poems by Pope, and another of Dodsley's own plays, Sir John Cockle at Court. By 1739 Dodsley had begun to mount sufficient reserves to publish several multi-volume works on his own, including two-volume editions of Mrs Rowe's Miscellaneous Works, The Philosophy of Sir Isaac Newton, and Roger Boyle's Dramatic Works.

In the same year Dodsley's brief publishing career suffered a formal blow when he was prosecuted for publishing Paul Whitehead's Manners, a satire on various court figures and prelates. Bishop Thomas Sherlock, one of Whitehead's targets, induced the House of Lords to summon both author and publisher to Westminster Hall. Although Whitehead absconded to avoid prosecution, Dodsley was reprimanded and ordered to be detained in custody until further notice. A week later, upon the intercession of Dodsley's Pall Mall neighbour Benjamin Victor, a petition for his release was filed by one of Whitehead's victims, Lord Essex. After a formal apology upon his knees in the Lords and the payment of a £70 fine, Dodsley was released. As Alexander Chalmers later commented, ‘The whole process, indeed, was supposed to be intended rather to intimidate Pope, than to punish Whitehead’ (Chalmers, 16.201).

Dodsley had not been wholly innocent in the Whitehead affair. A decade of service in aristocratic gatherings had acquainted him with arrogance and incompetence in high places, and, early on, he had begun to resent the haughty imposition of a privileged social class. His struggle to reconcile his sense of his own genius with the humiliations he was forced to endure as a footman were vividly expressed in his Miseries of Poverty (1731). The Toy-Shop of 1735 had indicted the vanities and pretensions of aristocrats and clergymen. In the opening scene of his second play, The King and the Miller of Mansfield (1737), Henry II, lost and alone at night in Sherwood Forest, realizes that, when not surrounded by his courtiers and flatterers, he is but a ‘common Man’; the king chastises Lord Lurewell for harassing the simple country folk and knights the humble, virtuous miller as Sir John Cockle, the titular character of Dodsley's next play (pp. 26, 51). Also about this time, the bookseller became acquainted with Pope's circle of patriot friends—George Lyttelton, Richard Glover, lords Chesterfield and Cobham, and the prince of Wales, major contributors to anti-ministerial literature. Dodsley also lent his shop to the cause by publishing Pope's satires on court and political figures: The First Epistle of the First Book of Horace Imitated (1737), The Second Epistle of the Second Book of Horace Imitated (1737), One Thousand Seven Hundred and Thirty Eight, the last published just seven months before Whitehead's Manners.

The 1740s

Except for 1740, Dodsley's list of publications and authors, both new and established, grew at full tilt during the 1740s. He brought out the first poems of Mark Akenside, John Brown, John Gilbert Cooper, Thomas Gray, William Mason, William Shenstone, Joseph and Thomas Warton, and William Whitehead, all of whom, except the contentious Brown, continued a long-term publishing relationship with Tully's Head. Also appearing under Dodsley's imprint for the first time were poems by William Collins, Stephen Duck, William Thompson, and Edward Young, specifically Night Thoughts. Also during the decade, he issued Johnson's Vanity of Human Wishes, the last works of Jonathan Swift, including Directions to Servants, and the tenth volume of Miscellanies, as well as various editions of Pope's Works.

Notable also was the broadening of the subjects and types of works Dodsley was publishing during the 1740s: translations of ancient and foreign authors, works on architecture, religion, philosophy, travel, and science. These included Christopher Pitt's edition of Virgil's Aeneid (1740), William Melmoth's The Letters of Pliny (1746), and translations of Callimachus (1744), Sallust (1744), the Decameron (1741), and Don Quixote (1742); Joseph Spence's Polymetis (1747), John Wood's The Origin of Building (1741), George Lyttelton's Observations on the Conversion and Apostleship of St. Paul (1747), John Barr's Summary of Natural Religion (1749), Voltaire's The Metaphysics of Sir Isaac Newton (1747), William Duncan's Elements of Logic (1748), James Spilman's Journey through Russia into Persia (1742), Richard Pococke's Description of the East (1743), William Cheselden's Anatomy of the Human Body (1741), and Henry Baker's The Microscope Made Easy (1742) and Natural History of the Polype (1743).

The year 1741 saw the first of four periodicals Dodsley would publish during his career, the Publick Register, or, The Weekly Magazine. This threepenny sixteen-page weekly, containing foreign and domestic news, literary essays, and poetry, was aimed at capturing some of the market dominated by Edward Cave's monthly Gentleman's Magazine. Cave met the challenge by exerting his influence in the trade, and Dodsley was forced to discontinue the periodical with the twenty-fourth number which carried the complaint: ‘the ungenerous Usage I have met with from one of the Proprietors of a certain Monthly Pamphlet, who has prevail'd with most of the common News-Papers not to advertise it, compel me for the present to discontinue it’ (Publick Register, 332).

Engaging Mark Akenside as editor, Dodsley made his second bid for the periodical market by issuing the fortnightly The Museum, or, Literary and Historical Register on 29 March 1746. Running regularly forty pages, the fortnightly contained literary essays, poems, book reviews, and historical essays, and attracted original contributions from a host of notables, including William Collins, Stephen Duck, David Garrick, Soame Jenyns, Samuel Johnson, Robert Lowth, George Lyttelton, Christopher Smart, Joseph Spence, Horace Walpole, William Warburton, the Warton brothers, and the future poet laureate William Whitehead. When The Museum was discontinued with its thirty-ninth number on 12 September 1747, once more Cave, in the preface to the collected edition of his Gentleman's Magazine for 1747, smugly celebrated the demise of the supposed ‘super-excellent Magazine’ (GM, 1747). Fifteen months later, Dodsley bought a quarter-share in the London Magazine, the Gentleman's chief competitor. In the same year he purchased a share in the influential thrice-weekly London Evening-Post.

Dodsley's genius for envisioning new literary projects also brought to the market in the 1740s the two major works by which he is chiefly known to posterity. His love of the theatre—largely bred of his own success (three of his plays running on London stages within a single month in 1738)—inspired him to produce the twelve-volume Select Collection of Old Plays (1744–5). A compilation of sixty-one plays, ranging back beyond Shakespeare, the Collection drew upon the Harleian collection (then in his possession) and the collection of Sir Clement Dormer, to whom the work is dedicated. As announced in his preface, Dodsley's intention ‘to snatch some of the best Pieces of our old Dramatic Writers from total Neglect and Oblivion’ produced an unprecedented repository of texts in the English theatre tradition to which all subsequent editors would be indebted (Select Collection, 1.xxxv).

The advertisement to Dodsley's second major contribution to English literary history, A Collection of Poems by Several Hands, showed similar intent and foresight: ‘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’ (Collection of Poems, 1748, vol. 1.iii–iv). Given the extensive circle of poets Dodsley had cultivated by 1747, he had no trouble filling the first three volumes of the Collection, which appeared on 15 January 1748. Four editions were called for by March 1755 when Dodsley added a fourth volume, and, three years later, he completed the set with volumes 5 and 6. Although the earlier volumes showed many changes by their 1758 edition, the Collection set the canon for mid-eighteenth-century poetry, passing through several editions and supplements by other editors through the rest of the century. Although the earlier volumes show a disproportionate number of contributions by Dodsley's friends Shenstone and Akenside, except in the case of perhaps a half-dozen figures (including Swift and Young), its pages reflect the work of most major and minor practising poets of Dodsley's era.

In the late 1740s Dodsley solidified his publishing relationship with Samuel Johnson. Johnson provided the introduction and ‘The vision of Theodore the hermit’ to Dodsley's two-volume Preceptor (1748), a compilation of essays for the education of youth on such topics as mathematics, architecture, geography, rhetoric, drawing logic, ethics, trade and commerce, and law and government. The work passed through many editions, even becoming a textbook in colonial American colleges. Also, in 1749, Dodsley published Johnson's Vanity of Human Wishes and his tragedy Irene. Within a week of the last night of Irene's performance at Drury Lane, Dodsley's own masque, The Triumph of Peace, was acted on the same stage.

The 1750s

During the 1750s Dodsley reached the zenith of his career: his book production reached new highs, he became the London publisher of belles-lettres, he introduced many significant works and new talent, and his own pen enjoyed a few triumphs. He opened the decade with his own popular compilation of moral aphorisms, The Oeconomy of Human Life by an ‘Ancient Bramin’ (1750), a work that was soon translated into five languages and became the most frequently printed work of the entire eighteenth century. The next three years brought Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard, Richard Owen Cambridge's Scribleriad, the first English edition of Voltaire's Age of Louis XIV, Christopher Pitt and Joseph Warton's edition of Virgil's Works, William Duncan's translation of Caesar's Commentaries, William Melmoth's translation of Cicero's Letters, William Popple's translation of Horace's Ars poetica, Edward Young's Poetical Works, and, the least successful, Dodsley's own Public Virtue.

On 4 January 1753 Dodsley re-entered the periodical market with The World, a lively weekly on contemporary fashionable life. Immediately successful, the weekly was soon printing 2500 copies per week, ran for a full three years, and earned its conductor, Edward Moore, the amazing sum of £858. Among its many contributors were lords Bath, Chesterfield, and Hailes, the earl of Cork, Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, Richard O. Cambridge, Soame Jenyns, Joseph Warton, William Whitehead, and Horace Walpole. Two days after the close of The World, Dodsley ventured into the newspaper trade with William Strahan, publishing the first issue of their London Chronicle on 1 January 1757. Samuel Johnson provided the introduction for this thrice weekly, which ran through to the end of the century and included many contributions from James Boswell. Dodsley's last entry in the periodical market, the Annual Register, was begun in 1758 (published in 1759) with Edmund Burke at the helm. This annual 400-page volume chronicled the previous year's major events, and printed literary, historical, and topographical essays, as well as poetry and reviews. Burke discontinued his services in the 1760s, but James Dodsley continued the publication until 1791, when it was taken over by the Rivingtons.

Dodsley's eminent stature in the trade during the last half of the 1750s is evident in both the number and importance of his publications. Collaborating with five other booksellers, Dodsley published one of the most notable works of the century, Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language (1755). Johnson later acknowledged that Dodsley had given him the idea for the dictionary and, since Dodsley had published all of his significant works to date, Johnson referred to the bookseller as ‘Doddy ... my patron’ (Boswell, Life, 1.326).

Other notable first editions of these years included Edward Young's Centaur not Fabulous (1755), James Hampton's History of Polybius (1756), Thomas Blacklock's Poems (1756), John Dyer's The Fleece (1757), Soame Jenyns's Free Enquiry into the Origin and Nature of Evil (1757), Edmund Burke's Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Thomas Gray's Odes (1757), volumes 4–6 of Dodsley's Collection of Poems (1758), David Hume's Remarks on the Natural History of Religion (1758), Oliver Goldsmith's Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe (1759), and (with William Strahan and William Johnston) Johnson's Rasselas (1759). In 1758 Dodsley's own poetic exploration into the realm of terror and pity, Melpomene, appeared under Mary Cooper's imprint, and, in one week, he sold 2000 copies of his tragedy Cleone, as it was being acted at Covent Garden Theatre in early December. Although Dodsley baulked at the purchase of the copyright to Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy in late 1759, the first London edition would appear from the Dodsley's shop, his brother James having paid Sterne £630 for volumes 1–4 early the next year.

By the mid-1750s, Tully's Head became a fashionable gathering place of London's literati. As Joseph Warton recalled Johnson saying, ‘The Noctes Atticae are revived at honest Dodsley's house’ (Correspondence, ed. Tierney, 19), and Dodsley's correspondence frequently notes the visits and gatherings at Tully's Head. As his correspondence also reveals, Dodsley's regular literary advisers were Spence, Mark Akenside, George Lyttelton, and Horace Walpole. Outside London Dodsley relied heavily upon his Birmingham friend Shenstone and frequently on Shenstone's friend at Bath, Richard Graves. Besides his substantial contributions to Dodsley's Collection of Poems and Fables of Aesop, Shenstone entertained Dodsley on several summer visits in the 1750s where the two would revise Dodsley's works. Graves did much the same for Dodsley's writings, although most of his advice came by letter.

In 1755, as one of the earliest members of the newly founded Society of Arts (then calling itself the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce), Dodsley was elected the society's first ‘stationer’ and was thereby responsible for providing all of its printing and publishing. He also served, along with William Hogarth, Samuel Richardson, and Jacob and Richard Tonson, on several society committees delegated to offer rewards to the public for the execution of prescribed drawings and the invention of new processes related to paper making, as well as to judge the resulting submissions.

During his later years Dodsley's own pen and genius for literary projects remained active. After protracted revisions and continuing refusals by David Garrick, Dodsley's tragedy Cleone was finally produced by John Rich at Covent Garden on 2 December 1758, with George Anne Bellamy in the title role. The occasion found the whole town taking sides, and a bitter exchange arising between the author and his friend Garrick. In late February 1761 appeared Dodsley's Select Fables of Aesop and other Fabulists, printed by John Baskerville and including ancient, modern, and ‘newly invented’ fables in three volumes, respectively. By his death, Dodsley, with the help of Graves, had managed to edit and publish the first few volumes of an edition of Shenstone's Works (1764–9), as they were simultaneously serving as the poet's executors.

In his time, Dodsley was variously described as a man of modesty, simplicity, benevolence, humanity, and true politeness. His relations with his authors seem regularly to have been conducted with cordiality and integrity, but always moderated by practical business sense. Extant evidence of copyright purchases shows that he offered the age's standard rates for authors' manuscripts, meaning that he was consistently fair, though not overly generous. Although early contributors to Tully's Head, only William Warburton and John Brown quit Dodsley in pique. Warburton associated several attacks on his works with Dodsley authors, and, as Pope's literary executor, he thought Dodsley ‘not very regardfull’ of the memory of his patron when the bookseller published such works as Thomas Warton's Observations on the Faerie Queene (1754), which accused Pope of prejudice and ignorance for enthroning Lewis Theobald as the ‘prince of dullness’ (Correspondence, ed. Tierney, 212; Warton, 11.265). The Revd Mr Brown, fearing allusions to his penchant for cursing and swearing in Sir Charles Hanbury's forthcoming response to his Estimate, attempted to intimidate its publisher, but then resorted to dismissing Dodsley's mediation with ‘Footman's language I never return’ (Correspondence, 357).

Dodsley and the trade

Besides his brother James, Dodsley trained at least two other apprentices at Tully's Head, John Hinxman and John Walter. Both men advertised themselves as former Dodsley apprentices when they opened their own shops, Hinxman taking over John Hildyard's business in York in 1757 and Walter setting up at Homer's Head in Charing Cross, London, in 1759. James Dodsley left Walter £1000 in his will, suggesting an ongoing relationship through the last half of the century. Hinxman returned to London in 1761 to marry Mary Cooper's sister and to take over the business of Dodsley's long-time publishing associate.

During his twenty-four-year career at Tully's Head, Dodsley co-published with at least fifty-three other booksellers, including the most notable members of the London trade: Charles Bathurst, Charles Hitch, Andrew Millar, the Knaptons, Rivingtons, Tonsons, and Longmans. Likewise, he collaborated with or served as the agent for a number of provincial booksellers including Joseph Bentham, Richard Clements, and James Fletcher. In the 1750s he also shipped some of his works to Dublin's George Faulkner for the issuing of Irish editions. By far, the names appearing most frequently in his imprint were those of Thomas (and later) Mary Cooper, Dodsley's City agents, who also occasionally published works with which Dodsley did not initially want his name connected.

Although at least thirteen printers had a hand in producing Dodsley's volumes, John Hughs seems to have been his primary printer, and the latter sometimes farmed out work to William Bowyer junior and William Strahan. John Baskerville printed Dodsley's Fables of Aesop, and the bookseller acted as the Birmingham printer's London agent for the sale of his Horace and Virgil, as well as for Baskerville's new typeface and wove paper. For the illustration of his publications, Dodsley enlisted the designing and engraving services of at least twenty-three hands, some among the best-known names in the trade: Francis Hayman, William Hogarth, William Kent, Samuel Wale, Charles Grignion, and Simon Ravenet.

By the time of his retirement, Dodsley's name had appeared in imprints, either as sole or joint publisher, for 468 first editions alone. He was listed as ‘seller’ in the imprints to another 135 publications. Beginning in 1753, James Dodsley's initial had become linked with Robert's in Tully's Head imprints, and, although Robert officially retired in March or April 1759, the familiar imprint R. and J. Dodsley continued to appear on Tully's Head publications until his death.

Death and last will and testament

On 23 September 1764, in his sixty-first year, Dodsley died of complications arising from his old nemesis, gout, while visiting Durham with his close friend Joseph Spence. Spence, who held a prebend in that city, saw to Dodsley's burial in the Durham Cathedral churchyard and provided the inscription on the large brown stone that marks his grave.

Dodsley's executors were Francis Dyer, husband of his sister Alice, and his younger brother Alvory, who had served in the house of Sir George Savile (and might have been running a London pamphlet shop at the time). Over the years, Dodsley must have reinvested his profits in the business because he had comparatively little savings at the time of his death. Although he bequeathed a total of £1500 to his siblings John, Isaac, Alice, and Alvory and to his nieces Kitty (daughter of Isaac), Sarah (daughter of John), and Kitty (daughter of Alice), all of these legacies were to be paid from James's £2000 bond to his brother (perhaps the purchase price of Tully's Head at Robert's retirement in 1759). James was left the remaining £500 due, as well as the remainder of Robert's estate. Most lucrative, however, was James's inheritance of at least fifty copyrights that, by reason of continuing editions through the rest of the century, would help make the small fortune James himself left at his death (£8000 apiece to two nephews alone).

James E. Tierney

(James E. Tierney, ‘Dodsley, Robert (1704–1764)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Sept 2013 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/7755, accessed 22 Feb 2016])

James Dodsley (1724-1797)

Dodsley, James (1724–1797), bookseller, was born in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, the youngest of seven children of Robert Dodsley (bap. 1681, d. 1750), a local schoolmaster, and younger brother of Robert Dodsley (1704–1764). By 1742 James was employed in his brother's London bookshop at the sign of Tully's Head, his signature as witness appearing that year on Robert's agreement to purchase the copyright to Henry Baker's The Microscope Made Easy. Despite the central role Tully's Head played in the contemporary literary world, almost nothing is known of James during his first fifteen years at the shop: he is not mentioned in his brother's correspondence until 1757, and only one of his own letters survives from the period. His name was first joined with Robert's in the well-known imprint ‘Printed for R. and J. Dodsley’ on 2 May 1753 when the firm published Henry Jones's poem Merit. On 3 December 1754 he became a member of the Stationers' Company by redemption, and, in April 1759, he assumed the reins of Tully's Head at his brother's retirement.

Although James Dodsley was bequeathed only £500 at his brother's death in 1764, he inherited a small fortune in copyrights. Of these, the following, which he owned either in whole or in part, enjoyed multiple editions during James's years at Tully's Head: William Melmoth's translations of Cicero's Letters and Pliny's Letters, and his Fitzosborne's ‘Letters on Several Subjects’; Joseph Spence's Polymetis; William Whitehead's The Roman Father; William Duncan's Elements of Logic; Robert's own Preceptor and his weekly The World; and Samuel Johnson's Rasselas and Dictionary. To these James added many editions of Robert Dodsley's own works, including The King and the Miller of Mansfield and The Oeconomy of Human Life, the most printed work of the century. Likewise, James continued to issue Robert's popular collections, the Select Fables of Aesop, Select Collection of Old Plays, and Collection of Poems by Several Hands (the most popular poetic miscellany of the last half of the century), the latter two re-edited by Isaac Reed.

James Dodsley's own industry added many new titles to Tully's Head credits, including works by Frances Brooke, Richard Cumberland, Oliver Goldsmith, Richard Graves, Charlotte Lennox, Horace Walpole, and, notably, Laurence Sterne's Sermons of Mr. Yorick. Christopher Anstey's The New Bath Guide (1766) netted eleven editions for Dodsley in its first ten years. By far his most profitable publication, Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, passed through seven editions and 18,000 copies in 1790 alone. Other popular titles included Lord Chesterfield's Letters to his Son (ten editions by 1793), Soame Jenyns's Internal Evidence of the Christian Religion (seven editions by 1785), and Thomas Warton's History of English Poetry. James Dodsley's joining the London Congers in the early 1780s gave a new direction to Tully's Head's agenda, for most of his subsequent publications involved joint undertakings of large printings of multi-volume editions of established authors, such as Johnson's Lives of the Poets.

Some time late in 1786, after forty-four years at Tully's Head, Dodsley announced his retirement, only to resume business two weeks later. On 7 June of the next year he suffered a major loss when £2500 of uninsured stock went up in flames at his Lincoln's Inn warehouse. John Nichols, who was dining with the bookseller during the fire, reports that Dodsley bore the news ‘without the least apparent emotion’, and before the fire was extinguished, sold the potential waste paper to a member of the company for £100. The agreement was not fulfilled, however, and Dodsley later sold the residue for £80 (Nichols, Lit. anecdotes, 6.439). The following year Dodsley paid the usual fine to avoid the office of sheriff of London and Westminster. His reserved manner is reflected in his obituary printed in the Gentleman's Magazine: ‘He kept a carriage many years, but studiously wished that his friends should not know it, nor did he ever use it on the eastern side of Temple Bar’ (GM, 347). Some time in the 1780s Dodsley bought an estate between Chislehurst and Bromley but rarely visited it. He continued in his Pall Mall house, but, during the early 1790s, he seems to have turned over his retail business to George Nicol and to have acted merely as a wholesaler for his own productions.

Dodsley died at his home in Pall Mall on 19 February 1797. He was buried in St James's Church, Westminster, where his epitaph reads, in part: ‘a man of retired and contemplative turn of mind’, who was ‘upright and liberal in all his dealings’ and ‘a friend to the afflicted in general, and to the poor of this parish in particular’. Having never married, he distributed his estate—estimated at £70,000—primarily to his nephews and nieces. His stock and copyrights were sold at the Globe tavern, Fleet Street, London, on 18 October 1797, ending the house of Dodsley.

Although he was at the helm of Tully's Head several years longer than his brother and predecessor, Robert, James Dodsley did not seem to enjoy all of Robert's energy and enterprise; nor did he possess his brother's literary talent. Besides his career as a bookseller, Robert also earned some contemporary reputation as a poet and playwright; James