Circle of Allan Ramsay, 1713 - 1784 Portrait of William Dodd, [Nicknamed the Macaroni Parson] (1729–1777)

Circle of Allan Ramsay, 1713 - 1784

Portrait of William Dodd, [nicknamed the Macaroni Parson] (1729–1777)

oil on canvas

30 x 25in. (76 x 64 cm.)

William Dodd, [nicknamed the Macaroni Parson] (1729–1777), Church of England clergyman and forger, was born in Bourne, Lincolnshire, the eldest of the six children of the Revd William Dodd (1703?–1757), vicar of Bourne. He was probably born on 29 May 1729 (Howson), though the parish register for Bourne shows that a William Dodd, son of William Dodd, was baptized at Bourne on 23 May 1728 (IGI). His mother was possibly Elizabeth Dickson or Dixon, who married a William Dodd on 3 April 1726, perhaps at Bourne (or at Norton Disney or Surfleet in the same county).

Dodd entered Clare College, Cambridge, in 1746 as a sizar, and in 1749 he was entered in the first tripos list as a wrangler. He was made MA in 1759. On leaving Cambridge in 1749 he went to London, where he lived for the rest of his life. There he sought to pursue a literary career which had begun at Cambridge with Diggon Davy's Resolution on the Death of his Last Cow (1747), a poem on foot-and-mouth disease. In London he rapidly produced a co-authored student crammer of philosophical texts and wrote both a farce on Sir Roger de Coverley, which was apparently never staged, and A New Book of the Dunciad. In 1751 he married Mary Perkins (d. 1784), the daughter of a verger of Durham Cathedral, and his initial literary success encouraged him to lease an expensive house in Wardour Street. The fatal pattern was thus established of over-extending his limited financial resources in pursuit of advancement. It quickly became clear that his writings would not support him so he returned to Cambridge, he was ordained at Gonville and Caius College on 19 October 1752, and he became curate at All Saints', West Ham. He continued to write and, while his talent for originality was limited, he did have a facility for extracting from the work of others, most successfully in The Beauties of Shakespeare (1752), a collection of quotations which stayed in print well into the twentieth century. This book proved a boon to those who wished to demonstrate erudition without the inconvenience of actually having to read the plays, although it did provide Goethe with his first exposure to Shakespeare. Dodd also tried his hand at fiction and published The Sisters (1754), a novel whose dullness at least conceals its limp eroticism. During the 1760s he concentrated on theological writing; he published a Commentary of the Bible in monthly parts from 1764 and became almost solely responsible for the Christian Magazine (1760–67), some articles from which were collected in Dodd on Death.

Meanwhile Dodd's reputation as a preacher was growing. He was appointed to a lectureship at All Saints' in 1752; this was followed by lectureships in the City of London at St James Garlickhythe, in May 1753, and St Olave, Hart Street, in April 1754. He also delivered the Lady Moyer lectures at St Paul's Cathedral from 1754. In 1764 he attacked John Wesley for allegedly claiming that Methodists were perfect and for failing to control his followers. Wesley at first ignored the attack but then silenced his opponent with a fierce response in Lloyd's Evening Post (3 April 1767). In 1765 Dodd became tutor to the heir of Philip Dormer Stanhope, earl of Chesterfield, so he reluctantly turned schoolmaster and opened a small private school; he also graduated LLD in 1766 in the hope of attracting other wealthy pupils. His precarious finances received a boost when his wife received an inheritance and a lottery prize. With the money he opened Charlotte (or Pimlico) Chapel in Charlotte Street, behind Buckingham House, in July 1767. The aim was to attract royalty and thereby the cream of London society through his reputation as a preacher. Initially aristocracy joined his congregation