 "The Dying Negro" (1773) is thought to have originated in a draft by Bicknell, then passed to Day who worked it up for publication.Some of his contemporaries credited Bicknell with the "Musical Travels" published in 1774 under the pseudonym "Joel Collier".This attribution is also accepted by modern scholars, and was supported soon after Bicknell's death, by William Seward, who knew Bicknell and introduced James Boswell to him, in 1786.