Dinner with Joseph Johnson
Daisy Hay*Longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize 2022*
'Hugely engrossing... An exciting blend of ideas and personalities' John Carey, Sunday Times
'As immersive and engaging as a multi-plot Victorian novel' Times Literary Supplement
'Impressive... [An] elegant account... Dinner with Joseph Johnson reminds us of the excitement of a period in which inherited orthodoxies were forensically scrutinised and found lacking' Daily Telegraph
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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...