Dinner with Joseph Johnson
Books and Friendship in a Revolutionary Age
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
A fascinating portrait of a radical age through the writers associated with a London publisher and bookseller—from William Wordsworth and Mary Wollstonecraft to Benjamin Franklin
Once a week, in late eighteenth-century London, writers of contrasting politics and personalities gathered around a dining table. The veal and boiled vegetables may have been unappetising but the company was convivial and the conversation brilliant and unpredictable. The host was Joseph Johnson, publisher and bookseller: a man at the heart of literary life. In this book, Daisy Hay paints a remarkable portrait of a revolutionary age through the connected stories of the men and women who wrote it into being, and whose ideas still influence us today.
Johnson’s years as a publisher, 1760 to 1809, witnessed profound political, social, cultural and religious changes—from the American and French revolutions to birth of the Romantic age—and many of his dinner guests and authors were at the center of events. The shifting constellation of extraordinary people at Johnson’s table included William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Benjamin Franklin, the scientist Joseph Priestly and the Swiss artist Henry Fuseli, as well as a group of extraordinary women—Mary Wollstonecraft, the novelist Maria Edgeworth, and the poet Anna Barbauld. These figures pioneered revolutions in science and medicine, proclaimed the rights of women and children and charted the evolution of Britain’s relationship with America and Europe. As external forces conspired to silence their voices, Johnson made them heard by continuing to publish them, just as his table gave them refuge.
A rich work of biography and cultural history, Dinner with Joseph Johnson is an entertaining and enlightening story of a group of people who left an indelible mark on the modern age.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this illuminating account, Hay (Young Romantics), a literature professor at the University of Exeter, sheds light on the far-reaching impact of the dinners hosted by Joseph Johnson at St. Paul's Churchyard from 1760 to 1809. An influential bookseller, Johnson befriended, hosted, and published many of the era's defining artists and thinkers, including William Blake, Erasmus Darwin, Joseph Priestley, and Mary Wollstonecraft, as well as painter Henry Fuseli. Hay offers a window into what went on in Johnson's dining room and outside of it; some of what she covers is well-known, including the Priestley Riots and Priestley's exile from Britain. But the real value of Hay's account is in the small, humanizing stories she recounts. For instance, Wollstonecraft, who described Johnson as "a father and brother," castigated him for interfering in her interest in Fuseli—later, Johnson would be a chief supporter of Wollstonecraft. As Hay points out, Johnson's main attribute was kindness, and his considerable role in the intellectual development of Britain was the result of "the kinship of friends who catch each other when they fall." Hay's is a fascinating take on the intellectual and political development of the time. Fans of literary history will relish this opportunity to pull up a seat at Johnson's table.
