About the Author

Harry M. Solomon is Hollifield Chair of English Literature at Auburn University. His books include Sir Richard Blackmore, Robert Dodsley: The Toy-Shop (1735), and The Rape of the Text: Reading and Misreading Pope's "Essay on Man."

Reviews

"I doubt whether Dodsley's brother would thank a man who should write his life, yet Dodsley himself was not unwilling that his original low condition should be recollected. When Lord Lyttelton's Dialogues of the Dead came out, one of which is between Apicius, an ancient epicure, and Dartineuf, a modern epicure, Dodsley said to me, 'I knew Dartineuf well, for I was once his footman.'" --Samuel Johnson, from Boswell's Life of Johnson