Professor Joseph Desmond O'Connor (1919–98) was one of the leading British phoneticians in the second half of the 20th century. A friendly and informal man, he was known by everyone, students as well as colleagues, as Doc.
Whatever be our notion concerning the intrinsic worth of the letters published by Dodsley in the third volume of Shenstone's Works in Verse and Prose^) to Shenstone they were of great iinportance. Indignant and lamenting the destruction of bis letters to Whistler, he wrote in 1754 (Letter LXXTX) to Graves: "I confess to you, that I am considerably mortified by Mr. John W., .'s conduct in regard to my letters to bis brother: and, rather than they should have been so unnecessarily destroyed, would haye given more money than it is allowable for me to mention with decency. I look upon my letters äs some of my chef-d'oeuvres; and, could I be supposed to have the least pretensions to propriety of style or sentiment, I should imagine it must appear, principally, in my letters to bis brother, and one or two more friends." That the letters were esteemed in the second half of the eighteenth Century is perhaps indicated by the number of issues that Dodsley put out The most casual reading of studies of any of the persons connected with the Shenstone circle ever so slightly, causes one to realize that the earlier letters at least have been and are used considerably äs bases for dating facts and events of minor literary and personal history of the time. The dating given by Dodsley in bis edition of the Letters is the dating generally accepted without further consideration.
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