SOURCE: Wendorf, Richard. “Robert Dodsley as Editor.” Studies in Bibliography 31 (1978): 235-48.

In the following essay, Wendorf analyzes Dodsley's editorial work on Collection of Poems, arguing that although Dodsley often changed wording and punctuation in the poems he published, he usually did so with the consent of the authors.

In spite of the considerable amount of bibliographical work which has been devoted to Robert Dodsley and his Collection of Poems, surprisingly little attention has been paid to Dodsley's role as an editor of eighteenth-century poetry.¹ That an examination of editorial influence should focus on Dodsley is natural for several reasons. He was, after all, the doyen of mid eighteenth-century London publishers. It was Johnson who paid tribute to Dodsley's treatment of authors by claiming that “Doddy, you know, is my patron.”² In an age in which literary patronage had largely been abandoned by the aristocracy, it was to the...