Author: Dodd, James William
Biography:
DODD, James William (1759-1818: ancestry.co.uk)
Baptized at St Stephen, Norwich, on 4 Feb. 1759, the son of the actor James William Dodd (c. 1740-1796) and his wife, Martha (d 1769), he was admitted to Westminster School on 24 Sep. 1770 (King’s Scholar, 1774), and then to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he matriculated in 1781 (BA 1783, MA 1786). He was elected minor fellow at Trinity in 1784, and, in the following year, major fellow. Also in 1784, he was appointed second usher at Westminster School, a position he held for the next thirty-four years. Robert Southey (q.v.) blamed Dodd, among others, for his expulsion from Westminster. Ordained deacon in 1787 and priest in 1788, he was vicar of Swineshead, Lincoln (1800-11), and then rector of North Runcton with Hardwicke and Setchey, Norfolk (from 1811). The record of his 16 May 1811 marriage to Ann Elizabeth Whitaker at St Margaret’s, Westminster, lists him as "bachelor," but Westminster School records state that Ann was his second wife (the first is unidentified). In 1811, he had at least two children: Charles William (1800-34), an usher at Westminster School from 1821; and Frances (1809-40), who at age 18 married a son of Dr Charles Burney. His second son, Edmund James (1812-71), entered Westminster in July 1822. One of three other daughters ascribed to him, Ann Sally, Susan, or Martha Ann, who fell into poverty in 1841, appealed to Old Westminsters for relief. Dodd wrote his sole published work, Ballads of Archery, Sonnets, etc. (1818), “for the entertainment of a Society of Archers … the Royal Kentish Bowmen.” At the prompting of Archdeacon Robert Nares, he donated to the British Museum a rare copy of Roger Ascham’s 1545 treatise on archery, Toxophilus the schole of shootinge. In 1813, at their first anniversary dinner, the founders of the Roxburghe Club elected him a member. His contribution to the Club’s publication scheme, The Funeralles of King Edward the Sixt, appeared in 1817. He died in London on 27 Aug. 1818, age 57, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. Students of Westminster School donated his monument in the Dark Cloister. Dodd’s wife auctioned his notable book collection in 1818, and, in the following year, his collection of prints and musical instruments. (ancestry.com 12 May 2023; CCEd 12 May 2023; Westminster School GB-2014-WSA-00556; ACAD; PROB 11/1608; GM [1827], 641; GM [1832], 594; Hampshire Advertiser 25 July 1840) JC