In 1806 he was chaplain to the lord mayor, Sir William Leighton, and published five sermons preached in that capacity. The fourth of these, on ‘The Lawfulness of Judicial Oaths and on Perjury,’ preached at St. Paul's Cathedral 31 May 1807, produced ‘A Reply to so much of a sermon by Philip Dodd as relates to the scruples of the Quakers against all swearing. By Joseph Gurney Bevan.’ He was rewarded for his civic services by the valuable rectory of St. Mary-at-Hill in the city of London in 1807, where he was one of the most popular divines of the metropolis.
In 1812 he was presented by his college to the sinecure rectory of Aldrington in Sussex, the church of which had been destroyed. Sir J. S. Sidney, bart., in 1819 gave him the rectory of Penshurst, Kent, worth 766l. per annum, which was his last church preferment. In 1837 he wrote ‘A View of the Evidence afforded by the life and ministry of St. Paul to the truth of the Christian Revelation.’ He died at Penshurst Rectory 22 March 1852, aged 77. He married Martha, daughter of Colonel Wilson of Chelsea College.
[Biog. Dict. of Living Authors, 1816, p. 96; Gent. Mag. June 1852, pp. 626–7.]
DODD, RALPH DONE
DODD, RALPH (1756–1822), civil engineer, appears to have been born in 1756 in London, and after receiving the ordinary routine education he studied practical mechanical engineering, and devoted much of his attention to architecture. The earliest published work by which Dodd is known is his ‘Account of the principal Canals in the known World, with reflections on the great utility of Canals,’ which was published in London in 1795. Shortly after this he was engaged in projecting a dry tunnel from Gravesend in Kent to Tilbury in Essex. He endeavoured to demonstrate in a pamphlet which he circulated the practicability of this undertaking and the great importance of it to the two counties and to the nation at large. In 1798 he proposed to construct a canal from near Gravesend to Strood. In 1799 he published ‘Letters on the Improvement of the Port of London without making Wet Docks,’ but there is no evidence that those letters led to the adoption of any of his schemes. In 1805 he was giving great attention to the water supply of London, and in connection with this subject he published ‘Observations on Water, with a recommendation of a more convenient and extensive supply of Thames water to the metropolis and its vicinity, as a just means to counteract pestilential or pernicious vapours.’ Many striking facts were recorded in this work, and several remedies of the disgraceful state of things which then existed are recommended. The time, however, was not yet ripe enough for their adoption.
In 1815 he issued his ‘Practical Observations on the Dry Rot in Timber.’ He was a promoter of steam navigation. Dodd was injured by the bursting of a steam vessel at Gloucester. He was advised to go to Cheltenham for his health, and from want of means went on foot. He died the day after reaching Cheltenham, 11 April 1822, when only 2l. 5s. was found on his body. He left a widow, a son, George Dodd [q. v.], and two other children.
[Gent. Mag. for 1822, i. 474; Dodd's Works.]
DODD, ROBERT (1748–1816?), marine painter and engraver, commenced his artistic career as a landscape-painter, and is stated to have attained some success in that line at the age of twenty-three. In 1779 he was living at 33 Wapping Wall, near St. James's Stairs, Shadwell, and at the same place there also lived a painter, Ralph Dodd. It would seem that they were brothers, and it is difficult to distinguish their paintings, as they exhibited concurrently from 1779 to 1782, when Robert Dodd removed to 32 Edgware Road. It would also seem that Ralph Dodd should not be identified with Ralph Dodd the engineer [q. v.] Residing as he did in the midst of the greatest shipping centre of the world, Dodd found plenty of opportunity for practice as a painter of marine subjects, a line in which he attained great excellence. His pictures of sea-fights and tempests were very much admired. Many of them he engraved or aquatinted and published himself. He first appears as an exhibitor in 1780 at the Society of Artists in Spring Gardens, contributing ‘A Group of Shipping in a Calm,’ ‘Evening with a Light Breeze,’ and ‘An Engagement by Moonlight.’ He first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1782, sending ‘Captain McBride in the Artois frigate capturing two Dutch Privateers on the Dogger-bank’ and ‘A View of the Whale-fishery in Greenland’ (engraved and published by him in 1789). He continued to exhibit numerous pictures at the Royal Academy up to 1809. Towards the close of his life Dodd resided at 41 Charing Cross, where he was still living in 1816. Among the marine subjects painted by him the most remarkable were some sets of pictures representing the events of the terrible storm on 16 Sept. 1782 which befell Admiral Graves's squadron on its return as convoy to prizes from Jamaica, and which resulted in the loss of H.M.S. Ramillies and
