For this reason doubtless Alexander Pope gave him a niche in The Dunciad (book ii. 413), where, under the soporific influence of Dulness, "Boyer the state, and Law the stage gave o'er" his crime, according to Pope's explanatory note, being that he was "a voluminous compiler of annals, political collections, &c."
He described her as "artful", and it seems that she was friendly and engaging with her potential employees, revealing her vicious character only when they were under her roof; in The Dunciad, Alexander Pope warns not to "...lard your words with Mother Needham's style".
In 1728 Smedley was made one of the bad examples in Alexander Pope's The Dunciad.
Though he was the type of writer/publisher denounced in the following century by writers such as Samuel Butler (Prose Observations) and Alexander Pope (The Dunciad), more recent assessments of his life and career see him as an important figure in the development of historiography, especially in the popularization of a hitherto high-culture genre of discourse.
The scene shown in The Distrest Poet was probably inspired by Alexander Pope's satirical poem The Dunciad, most likely by the prefatory matter of the second version, the Dunciad Variorum which had been published in 1735, and in which Pope confirmed his authorship of the original.
Also in 1728, Alexander Pope feigned the imprint of Anne Dodd for the early versions of The Dunciad, probably as an extension of the poem's parody of the emerging culture of hack-written political papers rather than as a satire on Mrs. Dodd herself.
Duncombe published in both the Whitehall Evening Post and the London Journal. Alexander Pope satirized the London Journal by name in The Dunciad, and Duncombe had written a letter to it criticizing John Gay's The Beggar's Opera for its vitiating effects on public morals.
In the context of The Dunciad, Moore stands not just for the generally degraded fop, nor for the imprudent heir of a fortune, but for the avarice and stupidity of book sellers (exemplified by Edmund Curll) who would publish anything at all, regardless of value, if it looked like it would sell.
Even after his death under suspicious circumstances, he was not widely mourned, and Alexander Pope, in particular, memorialized him viciously in The Dunciad a full seventeen years after his death, where he has the publisher Edmund Curll given a gift of a tapestry by Dulness showing the fates of dunces, where the whipping of Tutchin through the west country is a featured panel.