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Hay house book writing challenge9/11/2023 ![]() ![]() William Godwin became a familiar figure at the table after Wollstonecraft’s death in 1797 in the final years of Johnson’s life he was joined by figures from a younger generation, such as the chemist Humphry Davy and the essayist William Hazlitt.Ĭan you tell us more about how Johnson’s story intersects with that of Benjamin Franklin?ĭH: For much of the period between 17 Franklin lived in London, in lodgings just off the Strand, not far from Johnson’s shop. Mary Wollstonecraft was a frequent guest, as was the poet and children’s writer Anna Barbauld, whose fame during the years my book covers eclipsed Wollstonecraft. More famous contemporary figures at dinner included Joseph Priestley, the artist Henry Fuseli, the poet Erasmus Darwin and Benjamin Franklin, who found shelter at Johnson’s before he left Britain for America. In his dining room though, the voices of the first generation of Romantic poets weren’t the voices that dominated: Blake came to dinner as a staff-engraver, rather than as a poet, and Wordsworth and Coleridge both appeared as ambitious young men, unknown outside a tiny circle, and jostling for places at table. Johnson published some of the most significant figures of eighteenth-century life, and at his house in the City of London he brought those figures together, week after week, for dinner.ĭH: Johnson’s guests included some individuals who are now as about as famous as it’s possible to be: William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake. The story of Johnson himself is really interesting, because of the way it reflects some of the enormous social changes also underway in the period, but in my book, as in life, Johnson is an enabling figure, whose life gives shape and structure to a cultural history of English literature in the decades surrounding the emergence of Romanticism. Instead it is about the world he created: in this story he is the touchstone who unites an enormous cast of men and women who, between them, wrote into being the enormous political, scientific, literary, artistic and cultural changes that took place in Britain in the final decades of the eighteenth century. ![]() But Dinner with Joseph Johnson is not straightforwardly a biography of him-or even a book about him. Why write a book about Joseph Johnson, someone of whom few people have heard?ĭH: Joseph Johnson was an extraordinary man, who brought together an extraordinary range of people. 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. ![]() The host was Joseph Johnson, publisher and bookseller: a man at the heart of literary life. The veal and boiled vegetables may have been unappetising but the company was convivial and the conversation brilliant and unpredictable. Once a week, in late eighteenth-century London, writers of contrasting politics and personalities gathered around a dining table. ![]()
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