Dinner with Joseph Johnson

Books and Friendship in a Revolutionary Age

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*Longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize*

In late eighteenth-century London, a group of extraordinary people gathered around a dining table once a week.

The host was Joseph Johnson, publisher and bookseller and he was joined at dinner by a shifting constellation of great minds including William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Henry Fuseli, Anna Barbauld and Mary Wollstonecraft.

Johnson's years as a maker of books saw profound change in Britain and abroad. In this remarkable portrait of a revolutionary age, 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.

'Rich in period and personal detail' Guardian

'Hugely engrossing' Sunday Times

Hay's meticulously researched biography, rich in period and personal detail, sheds light on both Johnson and the vibrant cultural world he inhabited
Hannah Beckerman, Guardian

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
Emma Duncan, The Times

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
Freya Johnston, Literary Review

About Daisy Hay

Daisy Hay is an award-winning biographer whose previous work includes Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives and Mr and Mrs Disraeli: A Strange Romance. She began her writing career as a doctoral student and then a Bye-Fellow at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge before moving to Oxford where she held the Alistair Horne Fellowship at St Antony's College and a Visiting Scholarship at the Oxford Centre for Life Writing at Wolfson College. She has also held a Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard. In 2016 she was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize by the Leverhulme Trust and in 2018 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She is currently Associate Professor in English Literature and Life Writing at the University of Exeter and lives in Devon with her family.

Details

Imprint: Vintage
Published: 03/08/2023
ISBN: 9781784701079
Length: 528 pages
Dimensions: 197mm x 34mm x 128mm
Weight: 440g
Price: £10.99

All editions

Dinner with Joseph Johnson

Books and Friendship in a Revolutionary Age

Format:

Buy the book from:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About Daisy Hay

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