Abbreviated title
Directions to servants
JSA Identification Number
4_18_4
Teerink/Scouten Number
785
ESTC Number
T69637
Copy and its Location
CUL , Williams 301
Publisher and Printer
Directions to servants in general; and in particular to the butler, cook, footman, coachman, groom, house-steward, and land-steward, porter, dairy-maid, chamber-maid, nurse, laundress, house-keeper, tutoress, or governess. By the Reverend Dr. Swift, D.S.P.D., Vol. , pp .
London, Dodsley, Robert Cooper, Mary, 1745.

Commentary

This is a London reprint of Faulkner’s edition of Directions to Servants of 1745. It seems to have no independent authority.

Robert Dodsley was born 13 February 1703 and died 23 September 1764. In his early life he was footman to Charles Dartiquenave and others, but gained admission to literary society through his poems and plays. Pope set him up in business with £100 in 1735. He published for Pope and became one of the foremost literary booksellers of the century, publishing Akenside, Shenstone, the Wartons, Collins, Gray, the Annual Register, Percy’s Reliques, and his innovative collections of poems and plays.

Thomas and Mary Cooper took over Thomas Warner’s trade publishing business when he died in 1733. The business was highly successful and continued until Mary’s death in 1761.

References: The Prose Writings of Jonathan Swift, ed. Herbert Davis and others, 16 vols. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1939-74), vol. xiii, pp. 3-65, 209-20; Irvin Ehrenpreis, Swift: The Man, His Works, and the Age (London: Methuen, 1962-83), vol. iii, pp. 832-5; Michael Treadwell, ‘London Trade Publishers, 1675-1750’, Library, 6th ser. 4 (1982), 99-134; James E. Tierney, ‘Robert Dodsley’, in The D ictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 154, The British Literary Book Trade, 1700-1820, ed. James E. Bracken and Joel Silver (Detroit, MI: Gale, 1995).