ABSTRACT
The Rev. William Dodd was the son of a Lincolnshire clergyman. Educated at Cambridge university, where he excelled, Dodd went to London in 1749 to make a career as a writer. He had some success, but lived above his means and married a woman with no social status or money. He fell back on the church, was ordained in 1752, became a fashionable preacher able to move his hearers to tears, and tried to cultivate the aristocratic patrons necessary for advancement. Characteristic of the fashionable literature of 'Sensibility', or refined feeling, 'Thoughts in Prison' is in blank verse, the form of Milton's Paradise Lost, and there are many verbal echoes of Milton's poem. Dodd's poem is structured according to the sequence of his imprisonment: Week I, The Imprisonment; Week II, The Retrospect; Week III, Public Punishment; Week IV, The Trial; Week V, Futurity.
