ABSTRACT
The taste of readers of poetry in the mid-century is revealed by Dodsley’s Collection of Poems, by Several Hands, which first appeared in three duodecimo volumes in 1748. Robert Dodsley,1 the footman poet, who by the middle of the century had become a fashionable bookseller and the leading publisher of English poetry, was so successful with this Collection that by 1758 it had grown to six volumes, and between 1748 and 1782 it was reprinted eleven times. It was in these volumes largely that people of the day read their “contemporary” poetry. The authors included Dodsley’s friends, especially those for whom he was publisher, and other poets who were pleased to be included. One or two, like Robert Nugent (170288) and George, Lord Lyttelton, were there perhaps less as poets than as men of fashion and of influence in the world of letters.2 Shenstone and Akenside got generous recognition because they were Dodsley authors; Collins, Gray, and others were doubtless there because they were eminent in public esteem. Poets such as Beattie or Chatterton, considered in this chapter along with these Dodsley protégés, emerged just too late to be included in the Collection.3
