University of Virginia Library

Robert Dodsley as Editor
by
Richard Wendorf

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 publisher (and former footman) Dodsley that "literary adventurers" like Johnson and Collins addressed themselves. Much information about Dodsley has fortunately survived, some of it

through the care of the poet William Shenstone, who preserved the vigorous correspondence between himself and his good friend. The evidence itself, however, is often contradictory and points to Dodsley's peculiar position as editor, publisher, and self-taught man of letters. It is clear that Dodsley took considerable care in preparing his authors' works for the press; whether he in fact took too much care in some cases is a question closely related to his editorial zeal and to his own conception of himself as poet and dramatist. The substantive readings of his poets' texts were often altered when they appeared in the Collection, and their accidentals almost always modified to agree with its distinctive "house style." The following observations, although they should provide a much more substantial portrait of Dodsley as editor, are offered in the expectation that, in answering some questions, they will raise others.

Of Dodsley's publications, A Collection of Poems by Several Hands (1748-58) is of primary importance in determining the kinds of influence the bookseller could have had on poetical texts. The Collection itself is a major document in eighteenth-century taste, a diverse mixture of poetry in which Pope was accompanied by Tickell, Johnson by Chesterfield, Collins by Stephen Duck.[3] It was Dodsley's purpose, as he stated in the "Advertisement" to the first edition, "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" (I, 1). Many of the poems in the miscellany, moreover, were offered to the public for the first time. Gray's "Ode on the Spring" and "Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat" were transmitted to Dodsley by Horace Walpole, a mutual friend, and they first appeared anonymously in the Collection in 1748.

The five poems by Collins which appeared in the first and fourth volumes, however, had already been published in his Odes or in An Epistle: Addrest to Sir Thomas Hanmer; but it was Dodsley who was responsible for keeping these poems in print until Collins' work was collected in 1763 and 1765. The age owed to these volumes, more than to anything else, R. W. Chapman has written, "its knowledge of some poems which are still famous. Gray's poems were not collected in a popular form until 1768, Johnson's not until 1785," Chapman continues, "but The Vanity of Human Wishes, the Drury-Lane Prologue, and some of Gray's Odes were universally accessible because they were in Dodsley. If this were not borne in mind, the bibliographical evidence would suggest that the Vanity, like the Eton Ode and Collins's Ode to Evening, must have been almost forgotten for twenty years or more."[4]

In selecting the poems for his Collection, Dodsley was influenced by

settled reputation as well as by the opinion of literary middle-men like Walpole, Shenstone, and Joseph Spence. According to W. P. Courtney, who compiled a book-length study of Dodsley's miscellany, "Most of the pieces composing these volumes were submitted to the judgment of George, the first Lord Lyttelton, before they were passed for printing. . . . Many poems were inserted in the third and the later volumes from members of New College, Oxford, who had passed through their school education at Winchester College, and these were probably supplied through Spence, Dodsley's warm friend for many years, and a member of both these establishments."[5]

According to Dodsley's biographer Ralph Straus, much of the success of the Collection was in fact due to "Dodsley's personal friendships with the authors, and to their active assistance."[6] Dodsley's correspondence during the years of the Collection is filled with his attempts to charm, cajole, or reason his authors into the kind of assistance he needed. Intent on publishing Shenstone's elegies, Dodsley wrote: "Upon my word, Sir, if you do not bring me up these mourning Muses, nothing elegant will come from Tully's Head this season. I shall loose the Fame of being the Muses' Midwife, & my hand for want of practice will forget its obstetrick faculties" (BL Add. MS. 28959, f. 49). Poor Dodsley, Straus writes, "was at times hard put to it to keep his temper with his scattered band of poets" (p. 103), especially when he experienced difficulty in retrieving proof from leisurely authors like his friend Shenstone. Dodsley wrote to Shenstone in 1758, concerning volumes five and six of the Collection: "I had expected every day for some time to have receiv'd the two remaining Sheets from You, when behold another Letter came without a Proof! Ah, dear Mr. Shenstone! consider what a sad situation I am in—big with twins, at my full time, and no hopes of your assistance to deliver me! Was ever man in such a situation before?" (BL Add. MS. 28959, f. 92).

But the poets themselves, as their letters to each other attest, were often hard pressed to keep their tempers with Dodsley, and it is this kind of friction between bookseller and writer which allows us a closer view of Dodsley's editorial practices. The poets asserted that Dodsley not only chose to print what he wanted, but sometimes altered their poems as well, an alteration of substantives that obviously has a direct bearing on several important midcentury poetical texts. Although information does not survive concerning each of the contributors to Dodsley's miscellany, it is nevertheless possible to clarify Dodsley's editorial policy by analyzing his treatment of the poets Dyer, Gray, and Shenstone.[7]

The country clergyman John Dyer had two poems, "Grongar Hill" and "The Ruins of Rome," published in the first edition of Dodsley's Collection

(1748).[8] Dyer, an ill man by 1756, still had hopes that his poem The Fleece might be accepted by Dodsley, although he admitted that "people are so taken up with politics, and have so little inclination to read anything but satire and newspapers, I am in doubt whether this is a proper time for publishing it." Nevertheless, with the assistance and enthusiasm of Mark Akenside and Joseph Warton, Dyer sent the poem on to Dodsley and it was published 15 March 1757. In a letter to a friend, Dyer recorded his reaction to the edition: "Mr Dodsley, I think, has performed his part well; but in one or two places there have happened such alterations of the copy, as make me give my reader false precepts. . . . I will not trouble you with any . . . corrections, but I will Mr Dodsley, lest a second edition should happen." In his letter to Dodsley, Dyer pointed out the mistakes caused by Dodsley's ignorance of the methods of "us graziers," and expressed his hope that "these remarks will be agreeable to you. If you are inclined to make use of them, or any others, which I may send you, be pleased to acquaint me." Dyer died in December, however, and a corrected edition of The Fleece was never published.

Dodsley's treatment of The Fleece prompted Straus to note "that on several occasions Dodsley seems to have trusted his own judgment and sense of rhythm rather than the manuscript given to him for publication. That he was justified in such a course is open to question, but one may imagine him reading to a circle of friends the latest parcel to arrive, and then and there pencilling such alterations as seemed to please the company" (p. 110). But whereas Dodsley and his company may have been pleased with the alterations, a man like Dyer, whose poem was in part a technical treatise (on sheep-raising and the wool trade), had reason to complain at his falsified "precepts," even though Dodsley himself was a poet with a considerable reputation in the 1740's.

Gray's immediate reaction to the Collection was not to any changes Dodsley might have made in the printing of his poems but to the aesthetic appearance of the miscellany itself. In January or February 1748 he wrote to Walpole: "I am obliged to you for Mr. Dodsley's book, and, having pretty well looked it over, will (as you desire) tell you my opinion of it. He might, methinks, have spared the Graces in his frontispiece, if he chose to be œconomical, and dressed his authors in a little more decent raiment—not in whited-brown paper and distorted characters, like an old ballad. I am ashamed to see myself; but the company keeps me in countenance."[9] Perhaps as a result of Gray's remarks, Dodsley replaced the three graces which formed the title-page's vignette with one of Apollo and the nine Muses in the second and subsequent editions.

Dodsley had apparently made some alterations to the poems themselves, but Gray makes no mention of these. The two odes ("On the Spring" and

"On the Death of a Favourite Cat") had been transmitted to Dodsley by Walpole, who had taken the text from Gray's letters to him. Walpole had already been responsible for getting Gray's "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College" into print (it was published by Dodsley in 1747), and, in his characteristically coy way, Gray seems not to have been averse to having these two other pieces published as well: "As to my Eton Ode, Mr. Dodsley is padrone," he wrote to Walpole; "The second you had, I suppose you do not think worth giving him: otherwise, to me it seems not worse than the former. He might have Selima too, unless she be of too little importance for his patriot-collection; or perhaps the connections you had with her may interfere. Che se io?" (Letter 142).

Gray sent a copy of the "Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat" to both Walpole (Letter 134) and Thomas Wharton (Letter 135). The Walpole text has not survived, but it is reasonable to believe that it was very similar, but probably not identical, to the text in his letter to Wharton (which differs at several points from the original text in Gray's Commonplace Book). The comparison to be made is therefore between the texts of the poem in the Collection and in Gray's letter to Wharton. When "Selima" was inserted into the Collection, several noticeable alterations had been made to Gray's manuscript: lines four and five had been transposed; "Her Coat" was changed to "The coat" in line ten; "averse to" in line 24 became "a foe to fish"; and line 36 was changed from "A Fav'rite has no friend!" to "What fav'rite has a friend!" That these changes were apparently Dodsley's responsibility and not Gray's is indicated by later printings of the poem. In Designs by Mr. R. Bentley for Six Poems by Mr. T. Gray (Dodsley, 1753) and Poems by Mr. Gray (published by James Dodsley in 1768), both of which were supervised by Gray, these changes were replaced by the manuscript readings in the letter to Wharton. These variants were also corrected in later editions of the Collection, with the exception of "The coat" in line ten.[10] Much later, when preparing new editions of his poems in 1768, Gray mentioned "several blunders of the press" in Dodsley's previous printings of the poems in the Collection.[11]

Gray was not as reticent, however, about Dodsley's handling of his "Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard." Dodsley's printing of the "Elegy" was of course a race against time. Walpole's wide circulation of the poem resulted in a letter from the publisher William Owen to Gray implying that the poem would soon appear in his Magazine of Magazines. Faced with this unpleasant prospect, Gray instructed Walpole to offer it to Dodsley: "I have but one bad Way left to escape the Honour they would inflict upon me. & therefore am obliged to desire you would make Dodsley print it immediately (wch may be done in less than a Week's time) from your Copy, but without my Name, in what Form is most convenient for him, but in his best Paper & Character. he must correct the Press himself, & print it without any Interval between the Stanza's, because the Sense is in some Places continued beyond them; & the Title must be, Elegy, wrote in a Country Church-yard" (Letter 157).

And yet in spite of his detailed instructions, Gray was not entirely pleased with Dodsley's publication. He remarked to Walpole (20 February 1751): "Nurse Dodsley has given it a pinch or two in the cradle, that (I doubt) it will bear the marks of as long as it lives. But no matter: we have ourselves suffered under her hands before now; and besides, it will only look the more careless, and by accident as it were" (Letter 158). Gray's previous "suffering" clearly points to Dodsley's handling of his odes in the Collection three years earlier, and presumably to the miscellany's appearance as well. As for the "pinches" which Dodsley had inflicted this time, Gray made some remarks in a subsequent letter to Walpole: "The chief errata were sacred bower for secret; hidden for kindred (in spite of dukes and classicks); and frowning as in scorn for smiling."[12] These possibly are errata: the rapid printing of the poem would aggravate compositors' errors and leave little time for editorial revision. But at the least Dodsley's own contributions appear to be the slight indentation of the first line of each stanza (although he did not separate them), and the addition of the funereal borders of skulls, bones, hour-glass, spade, and crown (which were employed through the twelfth edition in 1763).[13]

In his later dealings with Dodsley, Gray often provided specific instructions for his publications which compromised his bookseller's enterprising spirit; Dodsley, however, remained an invariably accommodating publisher. When Gray revised his "Elegy" in 1752, the poet read proof on a publication for the first time (Letter 170). Dodsley wanted to number each stanza in the poem; Gray objected, and the stanzas remained unnumbered. When Dodsley published Designs by Mr. R. Bentley for Six Poems by Mr. T. Gray he wanted Gray's name to appear at the top of the title-page, but the poet insisted on the illustrator's pre-eminence and again got his own way (Letter 172). Dodsley

also hoped to boost the volume's sales by prefixing the poems with Gray's portrait, but once again the poet remonstrated—this time to Walpole—and the engraving was suppressed (Letter 173). Finally, when Robert's brother James Dodsley, by 1768 the head of the firm, asked Gray if he could bring out a smaller edition of his poems, the poet consented, but with specific instructions: "all I desire is, that the text be accurately printed, & therefore whoever corrects the press, should have some acquaintance with the Greek, Latin, & Italian, as well as the English, tongues" (Letter 465).

In his meticulousness, his pretended indifference to publication, and his distance from the world of London publishing, Gray was in many ways an anomalous contributor to Tully's Head. Gray apparently wrote directly to Dodsley twice only, and met him no oftener.[14] For a fuller view of Dodsley's editorial practice we must look at the career of William Shenstone. Although Shenstone resembled Gray in many ways, especially in his retirement and his attention to literary detail, he was also Dodsley's close friend. In return for the lampreys, porter, and tea which his publisher sent him, Shenstone replied with a steady flow of his own poems and those of his friends, often accompanied by revisions, proof-sheets, and news of his literary circle.

Dodsley published Shenstone's The Judgment of Hercules in 1741, and acted as agent for The School-mistress the following year. When he was preparing the first three volumes of his Collection, Dodsley decided to include The School-mistress as it was, taking his copy from the 1742 edition. Shenstone, however, who had apparently been tinkering with his poem for six years, expressed his displeasure to Lady Luxborough: "As to Dodsley's Collection I find it is approv'd on all Hands; tho' I should have been much better pleas'd with him, if he had giv'n me previous notice e'er he publish'd my Schoolmistress; that I might have spruc'd her up a little before she appeared in so much Company. They tell me he purposes a second Edition concerning wch I have wrote to him."[15] Shenstone was even more blunt with his friend and fellow poet Richard Jago: "I am afraid, by your account, that Dodsley has published my name to the School-mistress. I was a good deal displeased at his publishing that poem without my knowledge, when he had so many opportunities of giving me some previous information; but, as he would probably disregard my resentment, I chose to stifle it, and wrote to him directly upon the receipt of yours, that I would be glad to furnish him with an improved copy of the School-mistress. &c. for his second edition" (Letter LXIV). In printing from the 1742 edition, Dodsley was of course faithful to his poet's text; all that he failed to take into consideration were his author's altered intentions. Shenstone consulted with his friends Graves, Whistler, and Jago; revised his poem to their mutual satisfaction; and sent it off in time for the second edition.

By 1759, however, Shenstone must have changed his opinion of second

editions, for we find Dodsley having to argue rather forcefully on their behalf: "And now I come to your exclamation agst Second Editions, with Additions & Alterations. I shall dispatch this point in a very few words. Would you have an Author, after he has once publish'd, ty'd up from correcting his errors, or improving his Work? Second thoughts you know are said to be the best, & therefore second Editions corrected, are no bad things—I speak as a Bookseller" (BL Add. MS. 28959, f. 115). Dodsley did not, of course, speak just as a bookseller. Perhaps because he was a writer himself, certainly because he understood his authors, he appealed to Shenstone in terms the poet would appreciate; his argument is based not on increased sales but on the improvement of the author's work.

Because they respected Dodsley's poetical integrity, and because they did not have the time themselves, Shenstone and his friends allowed their bookseller an unusual amount of discretion in the final preparation of their poetry for the fourth volume of the Collection in 1755. A long letter to Jago, however, shows how uneasy Shenstone was with this arrangement, especially since he was submitting his friends' pieces (as well as his own) to Dodsley's judgment: "I am thoroughly determined never to print any thing for the future, unless I have the company of my friends when I send to the press. Hurried as I then was, I sent up your two copies, and what I proposed for him of my own, with a kind of discretionary power to select the best readings. How you would approve of this measure I knew not; but I had this to plead in my behalf, that D[odsley] was a person of taste himself; that he had, as I imagined, many learned friends to assist him; that his interest was concerned in the perfection of his Miscellany; and that I submitted my own pieces to the same judgement" (Letter CLXXVII). Thus beneath Shenstone's anxiety in the letter we are able to detect his basic trust in Dodsley, another "person of taste," especially in regard to the handling of his own poetry.[16]

Dodsley, for his part, seems to have been as conscientious as Shenstone had hoped: "I have spent this whole day amongst your Papers & those of your friends," he wrote to the poet, "& have put them as nearly in the order you desire as I can. I hope to send you prooft sheets of the whole of them before next week is out, which I beg you will correct & send back by the return of the Post. I have impertinently attempted to alter one Stanza of Lady Luxborough's, which pray restore to its original reading if you like it better" (BL Add. MS. 28959, ff. 22-23). But Shenstone's uneasiness continued, especially when he corresponded with Lady Luxborough: "I have expected to see Dodsley's miscellany advertis'd these six weeks ago. Had he allow'd me but one Half of this time to deliberate, I could have adjusted the share we have in it much more to my satisfaction. I know but little what he has finally done, in pursuance of that discretionary Power with which I, thro'

absolute Haste, found it requisite to intrust him; and that possibly at a time when his own Hurry was as great as mine" (Letter CLXXIX).

Part of Shenstone's trepidation, however, lay in the fact that he too had tampered with Lady Luxborough's verses and was now hoping that Dodsley had restored the original readings: "And if he have not done so, universally (as I apprehend may be the Case) the Fault may be repair'd in some future Impression, & is, even now, not altogether mine" (Letter CLXXIX). Dodsley, on his part, acknowledged his responsibility: "I am in some pain for those different readings which you left so imprudently to my determination but I have done as well as I could, & have generally thought it the best way to follow where you seem'd to point" (BL Add. MS. 28959, f. 37). As late as March 1755 Shenstone wrote to Dodsley in the hope that the edition might be delayed and the verses revised again, but by the twenty-first he had received his copy and was communicating his reaction to Richard Graves: "I wish the last Stanza of Whistler's Verses upon Flowers had remained as he himself wrote it: but being somewhat dissatisfied with the original Reading, and having no Time left to improve it myself, I left it to D------, who I think has made it worse; however, in this Respect, and some others, it may be proper to fix one's Eye upon a subsequent Impression; and Dodsley has acted as discreetly as it was possible for him to do, considering what instructions were given him, and how much was left to his Discretion" (Letter CLXXXII). Two days later Shenstone acknowledged his receipt of the volume to Dodsley and politely complimented him on his work: "I am oblig'd to you for the care you took to forward it, when printed, as well as for all that Trouble I occasion'd you, before. Some Improvements may be made in a subsequent Impression; & whenever this is propos'd I dare say you will give me notice. In general, you have done all that I could expect from a Person of Genius and a Friend" (Letter CLXXXIII).

In spite of his previous anxieties, Shenstone became the principal contributor to (and liaison for) the final two volumes of the Collection, published in 1758. In a letter to his friend Thomas Percy, we find that both Shenstone and Dodsley have been tinkering with Percy's contributions; but Shenstone is now more eager to see that Percy himself has the last word: "I recollected that Mr Dodsley & myself had formerly taken some Pains, (and, I believe, some Liberties too), with the Pieces to which you alluded. Be this as it will, you are most evidently in ye right for not adopting implicitly what was done in your absence; nor can Mr. Dodsley or myself wish to debarr you of a Privilege, which, on a similar occasion, we should be so ready to demand Ourselves" (Letter CCXV). In his own dealings with Dodsley, however, Shenstone was now much more willing to trust to his publisher's final judgment: "In regard to the Song 'I told my nymph' I desire yt you would follow all ye readings you propose. (The same, as to ye Compliment 1743.) As to ye Ode 1739. I am neither wholly satisfy'd with yr reading or my own" (Letter CCXIV). Shenstone therefore included both his original first stanza and an altered one and left the final choice to Dodsley:

Although Shenstone preferred the altered stanza, Dodsley's final version most closely follows the first and includes several changes of his own:

At this stage Dodsley's and Shenstone's correspondence and their frequent visits together approximate a form of poetical collaboration. If Dodsley supplied the final touches to Shenstone's work, so too Shenstone read and criticized Dodsley's Melpomene (1757) and Cleone (1759, to which he helped add an epilogue; see Letter CXCVI), and also revised his friend's Fables (1761). As a reviser Shenstone placed himself in the same precarious position in which he had formerly found Dodsley: "You will observe, that I take great liberties with the Fables you ask me to revise," he wrote to Graves; "Dodsley must think me very fantastical or worse, while I was correcting those he wrote at The Leasowes.— I find my ear much more apt to take offence than most other people's; and, as his is far less delicate than mine, he must of course believe, in many places, that I altered merely for alteration's sake" (Letter CCXLIX). Even Horace Walpole took an active interest in Dodsley's poetry, as he indicated in a letter concerning the unsuccessful Agriculture: "I am sorry you think it any trouble to peruse your poem again; I always read it with pleasure. One or two little passages I have taken the liberty to mark and to offer you alterations . . . I don't know whether you will think my emendations for the better. I beg in no wise that you will adopt any of them out of complaisance; I only suggest them to you at your desire, and am far from insisting on them."[17] But Agriculture, like Dyer's The Fleece, never saw a revised edition.

Thus Dodsley's correspondence with his authors (and Shenstone in particular) reveals how carefully he worked as editor and publisher to obtain the best possible edition for his publications, and to correct errors in earlier editions. Not all of Dodsley's authors were in agreement, of course; Dr. John Brown suggested to Dodsley that "If such a thing is practicable . . . I would

have a printed Copy [of Honour] sent down by way of Proof, as I cannot expect that You in the hurry of Business should revise it with that Care, as an Author does his own Productions."[18] John Hoadly in fact argued that Dodsley was too hurried to present accurate texts of poems in the Collection: "I beg the Favour of You to take upon yourself the correct printing of what little pieces of mine there are in it; as they were most shamefully neglected in the last Edition [1755], even to ye. leaving out whole Lines; to the utter Confusion of Grammar, Sense, and what some Poets might resent more—even Rhime."[19] And in the following month (8 March 1758) Hoadly again reproached his publisher: "I am much surpriz'd to see You advertise, to publish this Month; for except what Pieces you have had corrected by ye. Authors themselves, (which I think I can plainly trace,) ye. Volumes are miserably printed. . . . For my sake, let ye. Pieces taken from my Volumes be corrected; or People will think I don't understand common Grammar" (Bodleian MS. Eng. Letters d. 40, ff. 111-112). But most of Dodsley's authors appear to have agreed with John Gilbert Cooper who, in reference to his essays in The Museum, wished that Dodsley "would write it concert with me in the humorous papers, that is, make any addition, altaration, amendment etc as you think proper, for I know nobody's taste I can more rely upon than yours."[20]

The letters of his authors to him, especially when they suggest revisions for Dodsley's own writing, in turn reveal relationships which were founded upon mutual respect. Dodsley's editorial privilege consisted mostly of suggestion; his authors usually had the last word. When they were somewhat displeased with the final results, as Shenstone and his friends were, it was in fact often due to the extensive discretionary power which they had put in Dodsley's hands. For Gray, moreover, it was predominantly a comfortable relationship; the discretion (or indiscretion) of Dodsley as padrone enabled the poet to indicate his own indifference towards publication. It is clear that this discretionary power often caught Dodsley between the roles of author and publisher. On the one hand, because he was a successful poet and playwright, he was inclined to value (perhaps too highly) his own literary judgment. On the other hand, again because he was an author himself, he maintained respect for a writer's literary property and for the integrity of a literary work. The evidence suggests that Dodsley's band of authors was for the most part pleased with his editorial practice. When Dodsley did alter his writers' texts, as he did Lady Luxborough's, he was usually prompt in pointing out his initiative and asking for approval. And when in fact Dodsley

had the final word on any text, his authors could rely on his fierce partisanship for corrected second editions. Dodsley, meanwhile, was clearly open to the suggestions made to him by writers like Gray and Shenstone.

These are substantive changes, however; when we turn to Dodsley's treatment of accidentals we find ourselves on much less solid ground. Although Dodsley can usually be depended upon to preserve his authors' wording (or at least to point to his alterations), his presentation of accidentals often seems to be his own (or that of his compositors).[21] This is particularly true of the Collection, which has a distinctive house style that is noticeably different even from Dodsley's earlier and later publications.

We have seen that Dodsley was willing to follow Gray's detailed instructions concerning the substantives of his text, but with the accidentals the bookseller often wished to print for himself.[22] Dodsley's tampering with accidentals is apparent in his presentation of Gray's three poems in the Collection. A comparison of Gray's manuscript version of the "Ode on the Spring" in a letter to Walpole with its presentation in the Collection shows that Dodsley usually replaced Gray's capitalization of nouns with lower-case letters, and some place-name nouns with small capitals (Letter 125). Thus "Hours" (l. 1) became "hours," "Crowd" (l. 18) became "crowd," and "Attick" (l. 5) became "Attic." When these poems were reprinted in 1753 and 1768, however, each of these adjustments in the Collection was replaced by Gray's original manuscript reading.

Occasionally a capitalized noun was not changed in the Collection, as in "Contemplation's sober eye" ("Ode on the Spring," l. 31); but in the second and subsequent editions of the miscellany the normalization had its effect and the word became "contemplation's." Capitalization and punctuation in the 1753 and 1768 versions of both "Ode on the Spring" and "Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat" are irregular, however: the Collection sometimes has a word capitalized which is lower-case in the 1753 and 1768 editions, but usually this situation is reversed. In the "Eton" ode, for instance, which Dodsley first published in folio in 1747, most nouns are capitalized and place-names are italicized. The capitals are dropped in the version in the Collection, and usually only the personifications are re-capitalized in the later

editions. The italicized nouns, meanwhile—"Henry's" (l. 4), "Windsor's" (l. 6), "Thames" (l. 9)—are reduced to non-italicized small capitals in both the Collection and later editions. Finally, the stanzaic presentation of the "Ode on the Spring" in the Collection is unique. Gray ran the lines on in his manuscript; in the 1753 and 1768 editions the stanzas were separated but without any numbering; in the Collection the stanzas were separated and numbered by Roman numeral.

Dodsley's treatment of Collins' poems in the Collection is similar. In the "Ode, to a Lady" for instance—which Dodsley had first published in his Museum (1746), and which then appeared in revised form in the Odes (Millar, 1747) and the Collection (2nd ed., 1748)—the two printings which Dodsley supervised are alike in many ways, and at first glance one might conjecture that Dodsley used his Museum version as copy-text when he included the poem in the Collection. The details of punctuation are very similar, but in capitalization and italics the Museum version is actually much more closely followed by Millar's Odes. Italics disappear in the Collection, although small capitals often take their place; capitalization of nouns, including personifications, is generally eliminated. The stanzas are indicated by Roman numerals in both the Museum and Collection texts; in the Odes they are preceded by Arabics (a characteristic of that publication). It is obvious that at some points Dodsley drew upon the Odes version, though, for punctuation as well as for the text itself. The following example, however, demonstrates Dodsley's usual practice.

     

Museum (ll. 46-47):	Ev'n humble H------'s cottag'd Vale Shall learn the sad-repeated Tale,
Odes (ll. 58-59):	Ev'n humble Harting's cottag'd Vale Shall learn the sad repeated Tale,
Collection (ll. 46-47):	Ev'n humble Harting's cottage vale Shall learn the sad-repeated tale,

Here we can see Dodsley following his earlier punctuation, modifying its italics and capitals, augmenting a substantive from the version printed in the Odes ("Harting's"), and (deliberately?) altering another ("cottage").

These examples from Gray and Collins point to a consistency of style throughout the six volumes of the Collection. Italics are removed except in titles and footnotes, and even there italics become less frequent in later editions. The italics, in turn, are often replaced by small capitals. Punctuation is normalized, and spelling often modernized. The stanzas are separated, usually by Roman numerals (this had been true of Dodsley's Museum as well). And capitalization, even in the case of some personifications, is usually abandoned. Dodsley's removal of capitals, is, of course, part of a larger trend in printing in the late 1740's;[23] but it is also one solution to the problem of

reprinting together a large number of poems whose authors (and whose editors) have widely differing practices affecting accidentals. As "house style," Dodsley's imposition of his own taste in the Collection works well, but it will not serve for the modern editor who wishes to present his poet's own accidentals.

That this house style represented a solution to a particular problem is suggested by later editions of Gray's poetry. There, in the editions of 1753 and 1768, Gray's own stylistic preferences are restored. In the Collection, therefore, the text can usually be relied upon to represent an author's own work, or at least his compliance with his editor's revisions (unless external evidence proves otherwise); but the accidentals are certainly Dodsley's and his compositors'. If the scholarly editor's task is to choose a copy-text which approximates as closely as possible his author's own preferences in the presentation of accidentals, in this respect, then, he will have to approach Dodsley's Collection of Poems with caution, even as he learns to rely upon Dodsley's diligence as an editor and his zeal (for better or worse) for revised editions.

Notes