*Longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize 2022*
In Dinner with Joseph Johnson, Daisy Hay captures a changing nation through the stories of the men and women who wrote it into being, and whose ideas still influence us today.
Once a week, in late eighteenth-century London, writers of contrasting politics and personalities gathered around a dining-table. The host was Joseph Johnson, publisher and bookseller: a man at the heart of literary life. He was joined at dinner by a shifting constellation of extraordinary people who remade the literary world, including the Swiss artist Henry Fuseli, his chief engraver William Blake and scientists Joseph Priestley and Benjamin Franklin. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were among the attendees, as were the poet Anna Barbauld, the novelist Maria Edgeworth and the philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft.
Johnson’s years as a maker of books 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, proclaimed the rights of women and children and charted the evolution of Britain’s relationship with America and Europe. Johnson made their voices heard even when external forces conspired to silence them.
‘As immersive and engaging as a multi-plot Victorian novel’ TLS
‘Hugely engrossing . . . An exciting blend of ideas and personalities’ Sunday Times
‘Dinner with Joseph Johnson reminds us of the excitement of a period in which inherited orthodoxies were forensically scrutinized and found lacking’ Daily Telegraph
Letters from the Heart
Over the past few months I’ve been immersed in a feast of late-eighteenth-century reading as I’ve meandered through the foothills of a new book project. I’ve had the delight of reacquainting...
Read moreJust Getting on with It
I remember hearing Leonard Cohen being interviewed some years ago, and he said, when asked whether he minded being referred to as a ‘minor poet’, that no he didn’t mind at all, in fact he had...
Read moreThe Abyss Beyond the Orchard
For about a hundred and thirty years after his death in 1800, William Cowper was one of those figures about whom every keen reader had something to say. He was up there with Milton and Johnson,...
Read more