Dinner with Joseph Johnson

Author Daisy Hay
Narrator Kristin Atherton
Publisher Random House
Publish Date 7 April 2022
Run Time 19 hours and 23 minutes
Format Audio
Genre Biography and non-fiction prose, Biography: writers, History, Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers, Publishing and book trade, Social and cultural history.

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

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

Hay makes the most of a vivid period in English and especially London history. Her carefully poised study puts Johnson, today an obscure figure, back at the centre of his circle

London Review of Books

A beautifully packaged, skilfully written and detailed book that finally gives this gentle revolutionary the recognition he deserves

Country Life

Chronicling Johnson’s fascinating dining companions and the changes that rocked Britain during the period, this is a feast for those interested in the 18th century

BBC History Magazine

Marvellous… The list of [Joseph Johnson’s] guests reads like a who’s who revolutionary politics and culture: abolitionist MPs, Jacobin agents, pioneering scientists and radical preachers… Panoramic and kaleidoscopic

History Today

It makes little sense to approach a character of such extensive and various connections as the bookseller and publisher Joseph Johnson other than via the clubbable sort of method at which Daisy Hay has already proven herself adept… In Dinner with Joseph Johnson, she has again broadened her scope… Hay pursues lines of enquiry with patience and sensitivity to detail

Literary Review

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