IT will hardly be questioned that the influence of the priesthood is waning. Why this is so, it is not within the province of a mere book-collector to discuss; but the fact will, I think, be admitted. In the past, however, every country and almost every generation has produced a type of priest which seems to have been the special product of its time. The soothsayer of old Rome, concealed, perhaps, in a hollow wall, whispered his warning through the marble lips of a conveniently placed statue, in return for a suitable present indirectly offered; while to-day Billy Sunday, leaping and yelling like an Apache Indian, shrieks his admonitions at us, and takes up a collection in a clothes-basket. It is all very sad and, as Oscar Wilde would have said, very tedious.

Priests, prophets, parsons, or preachers! They are all human, like the rest of us. Too many of them are merely insurance agents soliciting us to take out policies of insurance against fire everlasting, for a fee commensurate, not with the risk, but with our means. It is a well-established trade, in which the representatives of the old-line companies, who have had the cream of the business, look with disapproval upon new methods, as well they may, their own having worked so well for centuries. The premiums collected have been enormous, and no evidence has ever been produced that the insurer took any risk whatever.

And the profession has been, not only immensely lucrative, but highly honorable. In times past priests have ranked with kings: sometimes wearing robes of silk studded with jewels; on fortune’s cap the topmost button, exhibit Wolsey; sometimes appearing in sackcloth relieved by ashes; every man in his humor. But it is not my purpose to inveigh against any creed or sect; only I confess my bewilderment at the range of human interest in questions of doctrine, while simple Christianity stands neglected.

The subject of this paper, however, is not creeds in general or in particular, but an eighteenth-century clergyman of the Church of England. It will not, I think, be doubted by those who have given the subject any attention that religious affairs in England in the eighteenth century were at a very low ebb indeed. Carlyle, as was his habit, called that century some hard names; but some of us are glad occasionally to steal away from our cares and forget our present “efficiency” in that century of leisure. Perhaps not for always, but certainly for a time, it is a relief to

And to quote Austin Dobson again, with a slight variation:—

certainly not that of the clergyman of whom I am about to speak.

And now, without further delay, I introduce William Dodd. Doctor Dodd, he came to be called; subsequently, the “unfortunate Doctor Dodd,” which he certainly considered himself to be, and with good reason, as he was finally hanged.

William Dodd was born in Lincolnshire, in 1729, and was himself the son of a clergyman. He early became a good student, and entering Clare Hall, Cambridge, at sixteen, attracted some attention by his close application to his studies. But books alone did not occupy his time: he attained some reputation as a dancer and was noted for being very fond of dress. He must have had real ability, however, for he was graduated with honors, and his name appears on the list of wranglers. Immediately after receiving his Arts degree, he set out to make a career for himself in London.

Young Dodd was quick and industrious: he had good manners and address, made friends quickly, and was possessed of what, in those days, was called “a lively imagination,” which seems to have meant a fondness for dissipation; with friends to help him, he soon knew his way about the metropolis. Its many pitfalls he discovered by falling into them, and the pitfalls for a gay young blade in London in the middle of the eighteenth century were many and sundry.

But whatever his other failings, of idleness Dodd could not be accused. He did not forget that he had come to London to make a career for himself. He had already published verse; he now began a comedy, and the death of the Prince of Wales afforded him a subject for an elegy. From this time on he was prepared to write an ode or an elegy at the drop of a hat. The question, should he become author or minister, perplexed him for some time. For success in either direction perseverance and a patron were necessary. Perseverance he had, but a patron was lacking.

While pondering these matters, Dodd seemed to have nipped his career in the bud by a most improvident marriage. His wife was a Mary Perkins, which means little to us. She may have been a servant, but more likely she was the discarded mistress of a nobleman who was anxious to see her provided with a husband. In any event, she was a handsome woman, and his marriage was not his greatest misfortune.

Shortly after the wedding, we hear of them living in a small establishment in Wardour Street, not then, as now, given over to second-hand furniture shops, but rather a good quarter frequented by literary men and artists. Who supplied the money for this venture we do not know; it was probably borrowed from someone, and we may suspect that Dodd already was headed the wrong way—or that, at least, his father thought so; for we hear of his coming to London to persuade his son to give up his life there and return to Cambridge to continue his studies.

Shortly after this time he published two small volumes of quotations which he called “Beauties of Shakespeare.” He was the first to make the discovery that a book of quotations “digested under proper heads” would have a ready sale. Shakespeare in the dead centre of the eighteenth century was not the colossal figure that he is seen to be as we celebrate the tercentenary of his death. I suspect that my friend Felix Schelling, the great Elizabethan scholar, feels that anyone who would make a book of quotations from Shakespeare deserves Dodd’s end, namely, hanging; indeed, I have heard him suggest as much; but we cannot all be Schellings. The book was well received and has been reprinted right down to our own time. In the introduction he refers to his attempt to present a collection of the finest passages of the poet, “who was ever,” he says, “of all modern authors, my first and greatest favorite”; adding that “it would have been no hard task to have multiplied notes and parallel passages from Greek, Latin and English writers, and thus to have made no small display of what is commonly called learning”; but that he had no desire to perplex the reader. There is much good sense in the introduction, which we must also think of as coming from a young man little more than a year out of college.

As it was his first, so he thought it would be his last, serious venture into literature, for in his preface he says: “Better and more important things henceforth demand my attention, and I here, with no small pleasure, take leave of Shakespeare and the critics: as this work was begun and finish’d before I enter’d upon the sacred function in which I am now happily employ’d.”

Dodd had already been ordained deacon and settled down as a curate in West Ham in Essex, where he did not spare himself in the dull round of parochial drudgery. So passed two years which, looking back on them from within the portals of Newgate Prison, he declared to have been the happiest of his life. But he soon tired of the country, his yearning for city life was not to be resisted, and securing a lectureship at St. Olave’s, Hart Street, he returned to London and relapsed into literature.

A loose novel, “The Sisters,” is credited to him. Whether he wrote it or not is a question, but he may well have done so, for some of its pages seem to have inspired his sermons. Under cover of being a warning to the youth of both sexes, he deals with London life in a manner which would have put the author of “Peregrine Pickle” to shame; but as nobody’s virtue was over-nice, nobody seemed to think it particularly strange that a clergyman should have written such a book. In many respects he reminds us of his more gifted rival, Laurence Sterne.

Dodd’s great chance came in 1758, when a certain Mr. Hingley and some of his friends got together three thousand pounds and established an asylum for Magdalens, presumably penitent. The scheme was got under way after the usual difficulties; and as, in the City, the best way to arouse public interest is by a dinner, so in the West End a sermon may be made to serve the same purpose. Sterne had talked a hundred and sixty pounds out of the pockets of his hearers for the recently established Foundling Hospital; Dodd, when selected to preach the inaugural sermon at Magdalen House, got ten times as much. Who had the greater talent? Dodd was content that the question should be put. The charity became immensely popular. “Her Majesty” subscribed three hundred pounds, and the cream of England’s nobility, feeling a personal interest in such an institution, and perhaps a personal responsibility for the urgent need of it, made large contributions. The success of the venture was assured.

Dodd was made Chaplain. At first this was an honorary position, but subsequently a small stipend was attached to it. The post was much to his liking, and it became as fashionable to go to hear Dodd and see the penitent magdalens on Sunday, as to go to Ranelagh and Vauxhall with, and to see, impenitent magdalens during the week. Services at Magdalen House were always crowded: royalty attended; everybody went.

Sensational and melodramatic, Dodd drew vivid pictures of the life from which the women and young girls had been rescued: the penitents on exhibition and the impenitents in the congregation, alike, were moved to tears. Frequently a woman swooned, as was the fashion in those days, and her stays had to be cut; or someone went into hysterics and had to be carried screaming from the room. Dodd must have felt that he had made no mistake in his calling. Horace Walpole says that he preached very eloquently in the French style; but it can hardly have been in the style of Bossuet, I should say. The general wantonness of his subject he covered by a veneer of decency; but we can guess what his sermons were like, without reading them, from our knowledge of the man and the texts he chose. “These things I command you, that ye love one another,” packed the house; but his greatest effort was inspired by the text, “Whosoever looketh on a woman.” It does not require much imagination to see what he would make out of that!

But for all his immense popularity Dodd was getting very little money. His small living in the country and his hundred guineas or so from the Magdalen did not suffice for his needs. He ran into debt, but he had confidence in himself and his ambition was boundless; he even thought of a bishopric. Why not? It was no new way to pay old debts. Influence in high places was his; but first he must secure a doctor’s degree. This was not difficult. Cambridge, if not exactly proud of him, could not deny him, and Dodd got his degree. The King was appealed to, and he was appointed a Royal Chaplain. It was a stepping-stone to something better, and Dodd, always industrious, now worked harder than ever. He wrote and published incessantly: translations, sermons, addresses, poems, odes, and elegies on anybody and everything: more than fifty titles are credited to him in the British Museum catalogue.

And above all things, Dodd was in demand at a “city dinner.” His blessings—he was always called upon to say grace—were carefully regulated according to the scale of the function. A brief “Bless, O Lord, we pray thee” sufficed for a simple dinner; but when the table was weighted down, as it usually was, with solid silver, and the glasses suggested the variety and number of wines which were to follow one another in orderly procession until most of the company got drunk and were carried home and put to bed, then Dodd rose to the occasion, and addressed a sonorous appeal which began, “Bountiful Jehovah, who has caused to groan this table with the abundant evidences of thy goodness.”

The old-line clergy looked askance at all these doings. Bishops, secure in their enjoyment of princely incomes, and priests of lesser degree with incomes scarcely less princely, regarded Dodd with suspicion. Why did he not get a good living somewhere, from someone; hire a poor wretch to mumble a few prayers to half-empty benches on a Sunday while he collected the tithes? Why this zeal? When a substantial banker hears of an upstart guaranteeing ten per cent interest, he awaits the inevitable crash, certain that, the longer it is postponed, the greater the crash will be. In the same light the well-beneficed clergyman regarded Dodd.

Dodd himself longed for tithes; but as they were delayed in coming, he, in the meantime, decided to turn his reputation for scholarship to account, and accordingly let it be known that he would board and suitably instruct a limited number of young men; in other words, he fell back upon the time-honored custom of taking pupils. He secured a country house at Ealing and soon had among his charges one Philip Stanhope, a lad of eleven years, heir of the great Earl of Chesterfield, who was so interested in the worldly success of his illegitimate son, to whom his famous letters were addressed, that he apparently gave himself little concern as to the character of instruction that his lawful son received.

Dodd’s pupils must have brought a substantial increase of his small income, which was also suddenly augmented in another way. About the time he began to take pupils, a lady to whom his wife had been a sort of companion died and left her, quite unexpectedly, fifteen hundred pounds. Nor did her good fortune end there. As she was attending an auction one day, a cabinet was put up for sale, and Mrs. Dodd bid upon it, until, observing a lady who seemed anxious to obtain it, she stopped bidding, and it became the property of the lady, who in return gave her a lottery ticket, which drew a prize of a thousand pounds for Mrs. Dodd.

With these windfalls at his disposal, Dodd embarked upon a speculation quite in keeping with his tastes and abilities. He secured a plot of ground not far from the royal palace, and built upon it a chapel of ease which he called Charlotte Chapel, in honor of the Queen. Four pews were set aside for the royal household, and he soon had a large and fashionable congregation. His sermons were in the same florid vein which had brought him popularity, and from this venture he was soon in receipt of at least six hundred pounds a year. With his increased income his style of living became riotous. He dined at expensive taverns, set up a coach, and kept a mistress, and even tried to force himself into the great literary club which numbered among its members some of the most distinguished men of the day; but this was not permitted.

For years Dodd led, not a double, but a triple life. He went through the motions of teaching his pupils. He preached, in his own chapels and elsewhere, sermons on popular subjects, and at the same time managed to live the life of a fashionable man about town. No one respected him, but he had a large following and he contrived every day to get deeper into debt.

It is a constant source of bewilderment to those of us who are obliged to pay our bills with decent regularity, how, in England, it seems to have been so easy to live on year after year, paying apparently nothing to anyone, and resenting the appearance of a bill-collector as an impertinence. When Goldsmith died, he owed a sum which caused Dr. Johnson to exclaim, “Was ever poet so trusted before?” and Goldsmith’s debts were trifling in comparison with Dodd’s. But, at the moment when matters were becoming really serious, a fashionable living—St. George’s—fell vacant, and Dodd felt that if he could but secure it his troubles would be over.

The parish church of St. George’s, Hanover Square, was one of the best known in London. It was in the centre of fashion, and then, as now, enjoyed almost a monopoly of smart weddings. Its rector had just been made a bishop. Dodd looked upon it with longing eyes. What a plum! It seemed beyond his reach, but nothing venture, nothing have. On investigation Dodd discovered that the living was worth fifteen hundred pounds a year and that it was in the gift of the Lord Chancellor. The old adage, “Give thy present to the clerk, not to the judge,” must have come into his mind; for, not long after, the wife of the Chancellor received an anonymous letter offering three thousand pounds down and an annuity of five hundred a year if she would successfully use her influence with her husband to secure the living for a clergyman of distinction who should be named later. The lady very properly handed the letter to her husband, who at once set inquiries on foot. The matter was soon traced to Dodd, who promptly put the blame on his wife, saying that he had not been aware of the officious zeal of his consort.

The scandal became public, and Dodd thought it best to go abroad. His name was removed from the list of the King’s chaplains. No care was taken to disguise references to him in the public prints. Libel laws in England seem to have been circumvented by the use of asterisks for letters: thus, Laurence Sterne would be referred to as “the Rev. L. S*****,” coupled with some damaging statement; but in Dodd’s case precaution of this sort was thought unnecessary. He was bitterly attacked and mercilessly ridiculed. Even Goldsmith takes a fling at him in “Retaliation,” which appeared about this time. It remained, however, for Foote, the comedian, to hold him up to public scorn in one of his Haymarket farces, in which the parson and his wife were introduced as Dr. and Mrs. Simony. The satire was very coarse; but stomachs were strong in those good old days, and the whole town roared at the humor of the thing, which was admitted to be a great success.

On Dodd’s return to London his fortunes were at a very low ebb indeed. A contemporary account says that, although almost overwhelmed with debt, his extravagance continued undiminished until, at last, “he descended so low as to become the editor of a newspaper.” My editorial friends will note well the depth of his infamy.

After a time the scandal blew over, as scandal will when the public appetite has been appeased, and Dodd began to preach again: a sensational preacher will always have followers. Someone presented him to a small living in Buckinghamshire, from which he had a small addition to his income; but otherwise he was almost neglected.

At last he was obliged to sell his interest in his chapel venture, which he “unloaded,” as we should say to-day, on a fellow divine by misstating its value as a going concern, so that the purchaser was ruined by his bargain. But he continued to preach with great pathos and effect, when suddenly the announcement was made that the great preacher, Dr. Dodd, the Macaroni Parson, had been arrested on a charge of forgery; that he was already in the Compter; that he had admitted his guilt, and that he would doubtless be hanged.

The details of the affair were soon public property. It appears that, at last overwhelmed with debt, Dodd had forged the name of his former pupil, now the Earl of Chesterfield, to a bond for forty-two hundred pounds. The bond had been negotiated and the money paid when the fraud was discovered. A warrant for his arrest was at once made out, and Dodd was taken before Justice Hawkins (Johnson’s first biographer), who sat as a committing magistrate, and held him for formal trial at the Old Bailey. Meanwhile all but four hundred pounds of the money had been returned; for a time it seemed as if this small sum could be raised and the affair dropped. This certainly was Dodd’s hope; but the law had been set in motion, and justice, rather than mercy, was allowed to take its course. The crime had been committed early in February. At the trial a few weeks later, the Earl of Chesterfield, disregarding Dodd’s plea, appeared against him, and he was sentenced to death; but some legal point had been raised in his favor, and it was several months before the question was finally decided adversely to him.

Dodd was now in Newgate Prison. There he was indulged in every way, according to the good old custom of the time. He was plentifully supplied with money, and could secure whatever money would buy. Friends were admitted to see him at all hours, and he occupied what leisure he had with correspondence, and wrote a long poem, “Thoughts in Prison,” in five parts. He also projected a play and several other literary ventures.

Meanwhile a mighty effort was set on foot to secure a pardon. Dr. Johnson was appealed to, and while he entertained no doubts as to the wisdom of capital punishment for fraud, forgery, or theft, the thought of a minister of the Church of England being publicly haled through the streets of London to Tyburn and being there hanged seemed horrible to him, and he promised to do his best. He was as good as his word. With his ready pen he wrote a number of letters and petitions which were conveyed to Dodd, and which, subsequently copied by him, were presented to the King, the Lord Chancellor, to any one, in fact, who might have influence and be ready to use it. He even went so far as to write a letter which, when transcribed by Mrs. Dodd, was presented to the Queen. One petition, drawn by Johnson, was signed by twenty-three thousand people; but the King—under the influence of Lord Mansfield, it is said—declined to interest himself.

FACSIMILE OF THE FIRST PAGE OF DR. JOHNSON’S PETITION TO THE KING ON BEHALF OF DR. DODD
FACSIMILE OF THE FIRST PAGE OF DR. JOHNSON’S PETITION TO THE KING ON BEHALF OF DR. DODD

And this brings me to a point where I must explain my peculiar interest in this thoroughgoing scoundrel. I happen to own a volume of manuscript letters written by Dodd, from Newgate Prison, to a man named Edmund Allen; and as not every reader of Boswell can be expected to remember who Edmund Allen was, I may say that he was Dr. Johnson’s neighbor and landlord in Bolt Court, a printer by trade and an intimate friend of the Doctor. It was Allen who gave the dinner to Johnson and Boswell which caused the old man to remark, “Sir, we could not have had a better dinner had there been a Synod of Cooks.” The Dodd letters to Allen, however, are only a part of the contents of the volume. It contains also a great number of Johnson’s letters to Dodd, and the original drafts of the petitions which he drew up in his efforts to secure mitigation of Dodd’s punishment. The whole collection came into my possession many years ago, and has afforded me a subject of investigation on many a winter’s evening when I might otherwise have occupied myself with solitaire, did I happen to know one card from another.

Allen appears to have been an acquaintance of Dodd’s, and, I judge from the letters before me, called on Johnson with a letter from a certain Lady Harrington, who for some reason which does not appear, was greatly interested in Dodd’s fate. Boswell records that Johnson was much agitated at the interview, walking up and down his chamber saying, “I will do what I can.” Dodd was personally unknown to Johnson and had only once been in his presence; and while an elaborate correspondence was being carried on between them, Johnson declined to go to see the prisoner, and for some reason wished that his name should not be drawn into the affair; but he did not relax his efforts. Allen was the go-between in all that passed between the two men. In the volume before me, in all of Dodd’s letters to Allen, Johnson’s name has been carefully blotted out, and Johnson’s letters intended for Dodd are not addressed to him, but bear the inscription, “This may be communicated to Dr. Dodd.” Dodd’s letters to Johnson were delivered to him by Allen and were probably destroyed, Allen having first made the copies which are now in my possession. Most of Dodd’s letters to Allen appear to have been preserved, and Johnson’s letters to Dodd, together with the drafts of his petitions, were carefully preserved by Allen, Dodd being supplied with unsigned copies. Allen in this way carried out Johnson’s instructions to “tell nobody.”

Dodd’s letters seem for the most part to have been written at night. The correspondence began early in May, and his last letter was dated June 26, a few hours before he died. None of Dodd’s letters seem to have been published, and Johnson’s, although of supreme interest, do not appear to have been known in their entirety either to Hawkins, Boswell, or Boswell’s greatest editor, Birkbeck Hill. The petitions, so far as they have been published, seem to have been printed from imperfect copies of the original drafts. Boswell relates that Johnson had told him he had written a petition from the City of London, but they mended it. In the original draft there are a few repairs, but they are in Dr. Johnson’s own hand. The petition to the King evidently did not require mending, as the published copies are almost identical with the original.

In the petition which he wrote for Mrs. Dodd to copy and present to the Queen, Johnson, not knowing all the facts, left blank spaces in the original draft for Mrs. Dodd to fill when making her copy; thus the original draft reads:—

The case of the unfortunate Dr. Dodd was by now the talk of the town. If agitation and discussion and letters and positions could have saved him, saved he would have been, for all London was in an uproar, and efforts of every kind on his behalf were set in motion. He can hardly have been blamed for feeling sure that they would never hang him. Johnson was not so certain, and warned him against over-confidence.

Rather curiously, merchants, “city people,” who, one might suppose, would be inclined to regard the crime of forgery with severity, were disposed to think that Dodd’s sufferings in Newgate were sufficient punishment for any crime he had committed. After all, it was said, the money, most of it, had been returned; so they signed a monster petition; twenty-three thousand names were secured without difficulty. But the West End was rather indifferent, and Dr. Johnson finally came to the conclusion that, while no effort should be relaxed (in a letter to Mr. Allen he says, “Nothing can do harm, let everything be tried”), it was time for Dodd to prepare himself for his fate. He thereupon wrote the following letter, which we may suppose Allen either transcribed or read to the unfortunate prisoner:—

Sir:—

You know that my attention to Dr. Dodd has incited me to enquire what is the real purpose of Government; the dreadful answer I have put into your hands.

Nothing now remains but that he whose profession it has been to teach others to dye, learn how to dye himself.

It will be wise to deny admission from this time to all who do not come to assist his preparation, to addict himself wholly to prayer and meditation, and consider himself as no longer connected with the world. He has now nothing to do for the short time that remains, but to reconcile himself to God. To this end it will be proper to abstain totally from all strong liquors, and from all other sensual indulgences, that his thoughts may be as clear and calm as his condition can allow.

If his Remissions of anguish, and intervals of Devotion leave him any time, he may perhaps spend it profitably in writing the history of his own depravation, and marking the gradual declination from innocence and quiet to that state in which the law has found him. Of his advice to the Clergy, or admonitions to Fathers of families, there is no need; he will leave behind him those who can write them. But the history of his own mind, if not written by himself, cannot be written, and the instruction that might be derived from it must be lost. This therefore he must leave if he leaves anything; but whether he can find leisure, or obtain tranquillity sufficient for this, I cannot judge. Let him however shut his doors against all hope, all trifles and all sensuality. Let him endeavor to calm his thoughts by abstinence, and look out for a proper director in his penitence, and May God, who would that all men shall be saved, help him with his Holy Spirit, and have mercy on him for Jesus Christ’s Sake.

I am, Sir,

Your most humble Servant,
Sam Johnson.

June 17, 1777.