[1] After graduating, Dobson joined the English department at Sydney as a tutor in 1934; his colleagues included Mitchell, E. R. Holme, R. G. Howarth and A. J.
He completed the honours school of English at Merton College, Oxford, studying under C. L. Wrenn and Edmund Blunden and graduating with a first-class degree in 1937.
[3] In the meantime, Dobson had been appointed lecturer in English at the University of Reading (1940), though he spent part of the Second World War working in Naval Intelligence.
He also published his doctoral thesis as English Pronunciation, 1500–1700 (1957), and wrote The Phonetic Writings of Robert Robinson (1957).
[4] Dobson was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1973[6] and was presented with a Festschrift, Five Hundred Years of Words and Sounds in 1983.