An extremely early example of a manuscript work using transformational “turn-ups” and “turn-downs” in the manner of Bernard Alsop’s “The Beginning, Progress, and End of Man”, first printed in 1650.



With 10 chapters of biblical meditations and verses: 'Upon the Creation', 'On Cain and Abel', 'On Noah's Flood', 'On the Tower of Babel', 'On the Burning of Sodom', 'On Abraham Offering Isaac', 'On Death', 'On Judg[e]ment', 'On Heaven', and 'On Hell', each illustrated with an elaborate and very dramatic watercolour “turn-up” and “turn-down”, and one other full-page illustration. When opened the moveable flaps reveal the various consequences of the meditations, and were clearly used to instruct Dodsley’s pupils, and perhaps his own numerous children, one of whom was  poet, playwright, cartographer, and publisher, also Robert Dodsley (1704-1765).



Robert Dodsley, the elder (c.1681-1750), was a master of the Free School in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire. He has been rather unkindly described as "a little deformed man, who, having had a large family by one wife, married when seventy-five a young girl of seventeen, by whom he had a child” (ODNB); he in fact married three times and had 14 children. Their descendants lived at Skegby Hall, Nottinghamshire from 1820 until the 1930s.



The current manuscript has been known about publicly, since 1910, when it was mentioned, rather bluntly, in a biography of Robert Dodsley (the younger) by Ralph Straus, and described as being in the possession of the family: it “is ornamented with coloured drawings and picturesque borders, crude all of them, but not devoid of interest. In the main its contents are original, and show no contemptible style of diction”.



Another example of this manuscript, identical in almost every way, is housed as “On Biblical Subjects” (MSS 04350), at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library in Toronto.