William Dodd, the so-called “Macaroni Parson,” was born in 1729, the son of a vicar in Lincolnshire. Upon taking his degree with first-class honors at Cambridge in 1749, he moved to London, intent upon a career in literature. His poetical debut, “Diggon Davy’s Resolution on the Death of his Last Cow,” a narrative poem on the subject of foot-and-mouth disease, begins with an exchange between the title character and his friend Colin Clout, who find themselves seated beneath the “secreted shade” of a hawthorn bush:
COLIN
How! MULLY gone!—the sad mischance I rue!
Ah! wretched DIGGON, but more wretched SUE!
DIGGON
How could I hope, where such contagion reigns,
Where one wide ruin sweeps the desart plains;
Where every gale contains the seeds of death,
That DIGGON’s kine should draw untained breath?
Vain hope, alas! If such my heart had known,
Since MULLY’s gone, the last of all my own.
No more shall SUSAN skim the milky stream,
No more the cheese-curd press, or churn the cream;
No more the dairy shall my steps invite,
So late the source of plenty and delight. . . .
COLIN
But have you, DIGGON, all those methods try’d,
By book-learn’d doctors taught, when cattle dy’d?
The poem ends four pages later with Diggon announcing his intention of going abroad to uncover certain named “popish plots” concealed by the French government and Colin vowing to shoot his neighbor’s dog, who suddenly appears, running in the direction of his own cattle “with headlong speed.”
After the surprising failure of this remarkable work to secure him a patron or a reputation among the literary public, Dodd seems to have applied himself to various sorts of hackwork, writing textbooks, unproduced plays, and what we would now call “fan fiction” set in the universe of the Dunciad. In 1751, he married a verger’s daughter who, according to Walpole, had previously been the mistress of the Earl of Sandwich, and with the uncertain proceeds of his writings leased a fashionable house. The money soon dried up, however, and he seems to have reluctantly accepted that a clerical career would provide the necessary support for his literary aspirations.
After being ordained in the Church of England the following year, Dodd continued scribbling. He wrote articles for the Christian Magazine, of which he also became editor. He embarrassed himself in a pamphlet war with John Wesley. He produced The Sisters, a lurid romance (“Caroline raised herself up, and looking beyond the bed, saw by a little glimmering fire two men grim and dreadful, whose look struck terror through her soul, and whose voices made her tremble in every limb”); and The Beauties of Shakespeare, in which he invented the modern index.
While his successes as an author were modest, Dodd’s fame as a clergyman grew, and he soon found himself ascending to a series of promising appointments. After winning a lottery—and receiving his wife’s inheritance—he decided to open a small chapel which he hoped would attract members of the royal family. This was the so-called Charlotte Chapel. The chapel was praised for its design and did secure Dodd a following among parts of the beau monde, but his income failed to match his expenditures. In 1771, he foolishly signed over the income from his writings to the publisher of the Christian Magazine, who promptly fired him as editor. His charitable work at the Magdalen Hospital for the Reception of Penitent Prostitutes made him little money but earned him the scorn of Walpole, who in 1774 wrote gleefully to a friend to announce that George III “has ordered the pure precise Dr Dodd to be struck off the list of chaplains, not for gallantry with a Magdalen, as you would expect, but for offering a thumping bribe to my Lord Chancellor for the fat living of St George.”
By 1777, Dodd was reduced to forging a check in the name of his former pupil the Earl of Chesterfield for the astonishing amount of forty-two hundred pounds. When the forgery was discovered, Dodd confessed and found himself imprisoned and sentenced to death. His plight attracted the sympathy of the British public, among whom he previously had been the object of popular scorn. Now faced with the most important commission of his literary career, Dodd accepted the services of a ghostwriter. Dr. Johnson wrote a number of speeches and letters given or sent by Dodd, and under his own name circulated a petition for a stay of execution signed by some twenty-three thousand people. These efforts did not sway the mind of the judge, Lord Chief Justice Mansfield, and on June 27, 1777, the Macaroni Parson was hanged at Tyburn. Among those assembled was the young John Taylor, the future publisher of Keats, who years later would recall the scene of the execution:
It was lamentable to remark the difference between his former deportment in the streets and his appearance in the coach the last time I saw him, when he was going to suffer the sentence of the law. In the streets he walked with his head erect and with a lofty gait, like a man conscious of his own importance, and perhaps of the dignity of his sacred calling. In the coach he had sunk down with his head to the side, his face pale, while his features seemed to be expanded: his eyes were closed, and he appeared a wretched spectacle of despair. The crowd of people in Holborn, where I saw him pass, was immense, and a deep sense of pity seemed to be the universal feeling.
Wesley visited him in prison, and wept.
This column appears in the Trinity 2024 issue of The Lamp.
