Dinner with Joseph Johnson: Books and Friendship in a Revolutionary Age
by Daisy Hay
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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 FranklinOnce 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 show more 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. show lessTags
Recommendations
Member Recommendations
nessreader Both books about groups of 18th century English intellectuals - liberals, scientists, engineers, writers, medicos, philosophers- whose shared social life sparked their ideas and enriched their lives. Uglow writes about the northerners, Hay about a London set radiating from the bookseller Johnson. Quite an overlap of characters; Priestly, Edgeworth, Franklin and erasmus Darwin feature in both.
Literature for the People: How the Pioneering Macmillan Brothers Built a Publishing Powerhouse by Sarah Harkness
nessreader Accessable book trade history/biography, in 18th century (Johnson) and 19th (Macmillans)
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Author Information
10+ Works 482 Members
Daisy Hay is the author of Young Romantics: The Tangled Lives of English Poetry's Greatest Generation. She has a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Cambridge and an M.A. in Romantic and sentimental literature from the University of York. She is a lectured and archival studies at the university of Exeter.
Awards and Honors
Common Knowledge
- Original publication date
- 2022
- People/Characters
- Mary Wollstonecraft; Joseph Priestley; William Blake; Benjamin Franklin; Henry Fuselli; Anna Barbauld
- Important places
- London, England, UK; Birmingham, England, UK
Classifications
- Genres
- Literature Studies and Criticism, Fiction and Literature, Biography & Memoir
- DDC/MDS
- 828.609 — Literature & rhetoric English & Old English literatures English miscellaneous writings English miscellaneous writings 1745-1799
- LCC
- Z325 .J72 .H39 — Bibliography, Library Science and Information Resources Book industries and trade Bookselling and publishing
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 68
- Popularity
- 458,387
- Rating
- (4.58)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 6
- ASINs
- 2
