The Augustan Reprint Society

THE

TOY-SHOP

(1735)

THE

KING

AND THE

MILLER

OF MANSFIELD

(1737)

ROBERT DODSLEY

Introduction by

HARRY M. SOLOMON

Publication Number 218-219

WILLIAM ANDREWS CLARK MEMORIAL LIBRARY

University of California, Los Angeles

1983

GENERAL EDITOR

• David Stuart Rodes, University of California, Los Angeles

EDITORS

• Charles L. Batten, University of California, Los Angeles
• George Robert Guffey, University of California, Los Angeles
• Maximillian E. Novak, University of California, Los Angeles
• Nancy M. Shea, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
• Thomas Wright, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library

ADVISORY EDITORS

• Ralph Cohen, University of Virginia
• William E. Conway, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
• Vinton A. Dearing, University of California, Los Angeles
• Phillip Harth, University of Wisconsin, Madison
• Louis A. Landa, Princeton University
• Earl Miner, Princeton University
• James Sutherland, University College, London
• Norman J. W. Thrower, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
• Robert Vosper, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
• John M. Wallace, University of Chicago

PUBLICATIONS MANAGER

• Nancy M. Shea, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library

CORRESPONDING SECRETARY

• Beverly J. Onley, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library

EDITORIAL ASSISTANT

• Frances Miriam Reed, University of California, Los Angeles

INTRODUCTION

The career of Robert Dodsley (1703-1764), or "Doddy" as Samuel Johnson affectionately called him, resembles nothing so much as the rise of Francis Goodchild in Hogarth's Industry and Idleness (1747) series. Like Goodchild, Dodsley began as a humble apprentice and, through energy, ingenuity, and laudable ambition, grew prosperous and gained the esteem of all London. Today Dodsley is remembered as the most important publisher of his period, a man who numbered among his authors Pope, Young, Akenside, Gray, Johnson, Burke, Shenstone, and Sterne. His long-labored Collection of Poems (1748) rescued many of his contemporaries' works from pamphlet obscurity and even now provides both the best and the most representative introduction to mid-eighteenth-century English poetry. His twelve-volume A Select Collection of Old Plays (1744) made the lesser Elizabethan dramatists, long out of print, available again.

It is one of the minor ironies of literary history that the man who did so much to insure the survival of the poems and plays of others has had his own almost entirely forgotten. For Dodsley was not always a bookseller. When he escaped his country apprenticeship and fled to London to work as a footman, Dodsley had his heart set on literary distinction; and it was first as poet and later as playwright that he came to the attention of the Town. Although a few of his poems are as ingratiating as Dodsley himself is reported to have been, most are now aesthetically irretrievable. His dramas, in contrast, remain interesting. Two of the best—The Toy-Shop (1735) and The King and the Miller of Mansfield (1737)—were much more popular than his earlier poems and for a time made him seem the equal of fellow dramatist Henry Fielding. So great was the vogue of these two works that Dodsley has been described as the principal developer of the sentimental or moralizing afterpiece.[1] Both works are short afterpieces intended to complement or contrast with the full-length play on the day's bill and both moralize conspicuously; the two plays could, however, hardly be more different in tone and technique.

The Toy-Shop grew out of Dodsley's admiration of and consequent desire to emulate the witty raillery of Augustan satire. When he sent Pope his newly minted collected poems, A Muse in Livery (1732), Dodsley also included an orphan muse in the packet. In February of 1733 Pope politely responded that he liked the play and would encourage John Rich to produce it, but that he doubted whether it had sufficient action to engage an audience. Dodsley apparently did all he could to strengthen his acquaintance with Pope, including publishing a laudatory Epistle to Mr. Pope, Occasion'd by His Essay on Man in 1734; and the following February when Rich finally produced The Toy-Shop at Covent Garden, some thought that Pope was the author and Dodsley's alleged authorship a diversion. Understandably, Dodsley was delighted to have his play even momentarily mistaken for the work of Alexander Pope.

The Toy-Shop was enormously popular. "This little Performance, without any Theatrical Merit whatsoever," the Prompter wrote on 18 February, "received the loudest Applauses that I have heard this long while, only on Account of its General and well-Adapted Satire on the Follies of Mankind."[2] Dodsley's afterpiece was performed thirty-four times during the 1735 season. In print it was even more in demand. For his benefit performance on 6 February, Dodsley advertised that "Books of the Toy-Shop will be sold in the House."[3] There were at least six legitimate editions of the piece within the year. It was pirated, translated into French, and subsequently anthologized in almost every collection of English farces.[4]

Every critic has concurred with Pope in finding the play plotless. The short first scene establishes the premise: that the Master of the shop is "a general Satyrist, yet not rude nor ill-natur'd," who moralizes "upon every Trifle he sells, and will strike a Lesson of Instruction out of a Snuff-box, a Thimble, or a Cockle-shell" (p. 10). Working within a tradition that includes Lucian's sale of philosophers and, just after The Toy-Shop, Fielding's auction in The Historical Register, For the Year 1736 (1737), Dodsley acknowledged that his premise was adopted directly from Thomas Randolph's Conceited Pedlar (1630). His metaphor of the world as "a great Toy-shop, and all it's [sic] Inhabitants run mad for Rattles" (p. 45) recalls the brilliant penultimate verse paragraph of "Epistle II" of Pope's Essay on Man, wherein mankind is shown as eternally addicted to "toys" of one kind or another:

With so many unmistakable resemblances to Pope in Dodsley's play, it is not surprising that some spectators thought they detected the hand of the author of The Rape of the Lock.

Following a hint