Dinner with Joseph Johnson

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A portrait of a radical age via the writers who gather around a publisher's dining table - from William Wordsworth to Mary Wollstonecraft


Once a week, in late eighteenth-century London, writers of contrasting politics and personalities gathered around a dining table. The veal and boiled vegetables on offer at 72 St Pauls Churchyard may have been unappetising but the company was convivial and the conversation was at once brilliant, unpredictable and profound. The host was Joseph Johnson, publisher and bookseller: a man at the heart of literary life.

Johnson was joined at dinner by a shifting constellation of extraordinary people who, during the period he was in business, remade the literary world. His guests included the Swiss artist Henry Fuseli, his chief engraver William Blake and scientists Joseph Priestley and Benjamin Franklin. William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge sat beside a group of remarkable women including the poet Anna Barbauld, the novelist Maria Edgeworth and, her voice ringing out above all others, the philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft.

Johnson's years as a maker of books, between 1760 and 1809, saw profound political, social, cultural and religious shifts in Britain and abroad. Several of his authors were involved in the struggles for reform: they pioneered revolutions in medical treatment and scientific enquiry; they proclaimed the rights of women and children; they charted the evolution of Britain's relationship first with America and then with Europe.

Number 72 was a refuge for these writers and by continuing to publish their work, Johnson made their voices heard even when external forces conspired to silence them. In this remarkable portrait of a revolutionary age, Daisy Hay captures a changing nation through the connected stories of the men and women who wrote it into being, and whose ideas still influence us today.

© Daisy Hay 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022

Critics Review

  • Hay’s meticulously researched biography, rich in period and personal detail, sheds light on both Johnson and the vibrant cultural world he inhabited

    Guardian
  • [A] compelling and magnificent study… Dinner with Joseph Johnson is an admirable achievement of biography and humanistic imagination

    Times Literary Supplement
  • Dinner with Joseph Johnson sheds much-needed light on a key figure in both the ideological and material context of the 18th century… Hay’s meticulous research brings this “paper age” to life… Evokes the noise and excitement of an age characterised by the unceasing hum of literary debate… a fitting reflection of the period that Hay describes: a time when the written word could make someone’s name – or cost them their liberty

    Financial Times
  • This delightful book by the English literature professor Daisy Hay gives the reader the feeling of being at a rather elevated party… Johnson’s guests talked, wrote and painted about democracy, human rights, atheism, feminism, anatomy, chemistry and electricity. While dreaming of a better future, they befriended each other, loved each other and criticised each other… shaped an era… Johnson was a brilliant talent spotter and supported the best minds of his day

    The Times
  • A portrait of literary ferment… Daisy Hay’s compendious and impressive survey illuminates the contribution to these significant ideological shifts of the ill-assorted men and women whose kinship was marked by their shared participation in Joseph Johnson’s hospitality

    Daily Telegraph

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