Romanticism, Publishing and Dissent: Joseph Johnson and the Cause of Liberty

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Romanticism, Publishing and Dissent Joseph Johnson and the Cause of Liberty

Helen Braithwaite

Romanticism, Publishing and Dissent

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Romanticism, Publishing and Dissent Joseph Johnson and the Cause of Liberty Helen Braithwaite

© Helen Braithwaite 2003 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2003 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries ISBN 0–333–98394–7 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Braithwaite, Helen, 1965– Romanticism, publishing and dissent: Joseph Johnson and the cause of liberty / Helen Braithwaite. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–333–98394–7 1. Johnson, Joseph, 1738–1809. 2. Publishers and publishing – Great Britain – Biography. 3. Booksellers and bookselling – Great Britain – Biography. 4. Great Britain – Politics and government – 1760–1820. I. Title. Z325.J72 B73 2002 070.5¢092 – dc21 [B] 2001050804 10 9 8 12 11 10

7 09

6 5 4 08 07 06

3 05

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

To K.A.M.


Contents Acknowledgements

viii

List of Abbreviations

x

Note on the Text

xi

Introduction

xii

1 Dissenting Origins

1

2 Striving for Independence

30

3 A Friend to Reformation

59

4 Responses to Revolution

91

5 The War of Opinion

127

6 ‘Honest Joe’

155

Notes

182

Bibliography

216

Index

233

vii

Acknowledgements The genesis of this book was a PhD thesis submitted at the University of Birmingham and I am greatly indebted to Mark Storey for his sympathetic guidance and support during the three years spent researching and writing there, as well as to the Faculty of Arts for awarding me a bursary. I am also personally grateful to Nicholas Roe, Maureen Bell, Nigel Wood, Leonora Nattrass, Timothy Fulford, J. H., Michael Gamer, William St Clair (for being generous enough to share his knowledge and enthusiasm with a complete stranger), Daniel Roberts, Lynda Pratt, Sarah Lowndes and Averill Buchanan. The co-operation and assistance of library staff at the University of Birmingham, Birmingham City Reference Library, the British Library, the Bodleian Library and the University of Edinburgh, especially those in charge of Special Collections, proved immensely valuable. I am most grateful to the officers in charge of the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle at the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, for granting me permission to consult and use material from Joseph Johnson’s recently discovered business letter book. Thanks are also due to the following for allowing me to refer to and quote from manuscripts: the Director (on behalf of the Trustees) of Dr Williams’s Library; University of Edinburgh Library; National Library of Scotland; the Main Library of the University of Birmingham; and John Rylands University Library of Manchester. I am further obliged to the curators of manuscripts at the British Library, Boston Public Library, Van Pelt Library at the University of Pennsylvania, McLennan Library at McGill University, the Special Collections Library at Duke University, Princeton University Library, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Huntington Library, the New York Historical Society, the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, the Houghton Library at Harvard University, Folger Shakespeare Library, the Library of University College London, Lambeth Palace Library, Liverpool Libraries and Information Services, and the Scottish Catholic Archives. A tremendous debt is owing to previous researchers on Joseph Johnson, notably Leslie F. Chard, Gerald Tyson, Phyllis G. Mann, Jane Worthington Smyser and Claire Tomalin, who, between them, have painstakingly helped piece together Johnson’s activities and so begun the process of rescuing his reputation from its unmerited obscurity. Their considerable efforts laid the foundations for this entire study. J. E. Cookson’s research on the liberal antiwar movement in England during the last twenty years of the bookseller’s career also proved vital in helping to plug the gaps in my understanding. So, too, has the work of Ursula Henriques, Richard Burgess Barlow, Martin Fitzpatrick, John Gascoigne, John Seed, G. M. Ditchfield and James E. viii

Acknowledgements ix

Bradley, in tracing out the groundwork of the political and parliamentary activity of religious dissent in the late eighteenth century. Beth Lau and Pamela Clemit were both especially kind in responding to my eleventh-hour requests and offering the benefits of their respective research on William Godwin. I am grateful to Dr Iain G. Brown of the National Library of Scotland for putting me right on several matters, including a false attribution. Any other errors, omissions or oversights are entirely my own. John Simons and Philip Martin both originally did much to kindle my interest in this period. I am grateful to Josie Dixon and Eleanor Birne at Palgrave for supporting this particular project and helping to bring it to fruition, and to Janey Fisher, not least for her patience. Jackie and Clair Taylor have done so much to sustain me with their kindness and hospitality during my many extended stays in Edinburgh over the years. Needless to say, without the tolerance and understanding of the rest of my family, it is unlikely this piece of work would ever have been undertaken, let alone completed.

List of Abbreviations Aikin

John Aikin, ‘Biographical Account of the Late Mr. Joseph Johnson’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 106 (December 1809), 1167–8. AR The Analytical Review, or History of Literature, Domestic and Foreign, On An Enlarged Plan (28 vols; London: J. Johnson, 1788–98) Belsham Thomas Belsham, Memoirs of the Late Reverend Theophilus Lindsey, M.A. (London: J. Johnson and Co., 1812) BL Joseph Johnson Business Letter Book II (1795–1810) Chard Leslie F. Chard, ‘Joseph Johnson: Father of the Book Trade’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 79 (1976), 51–82. CL Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Ralph M. Wardle (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1979) LPW The Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper, ed. James King and Charles Ryskamp (5 vols; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979–86) Memoirs Memoirs of Dr. Joseph Priestley, To the Year 1795, Written By Himself (2 vols; London: J. Johnson, 1806–7) PH The Parliamentary History of England, From the Earliest Period to the Year 1803 (24 vols; London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown [etc.], 1812–20) Rutt The Life and Correspondence of Joseph Priestley, LL.D., F.R.S., ed. John Towill Rutt (2 vols; London: R. Hunter, M. Eaton and C. Fox, 1831–32) ST T. B. and T. J. Howell, A Complete Collection of State Trials (23 vols; London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown [etc.], 1816–26) TMW The Theological and Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Priestley, LL.D. F.R.S., ed. John Towill Rutt (25 vols; Hackney [London]: printed by G. Smallfield, 1817–31) TR The Theological Repository; Consisting of Original Essays, Hints, Queries, &c. Calculated to Promote Religious Knowledge (1st series, 3 vols; Vol. I, 2nd edn, London: J. Johnson, 1773; Vol. II, London: J. Johnson and J. Payne, 1770; Vol. III, London: J. Johnson, 1771; 2nd series, 3 vols [IV–VI], Birmingham: printed by Pearson and Rollason for J. Johnson, 1784–88) Tyson Gerald P. Tyson, Joseph Johnson: a Liberal Publisher (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1979) West William West, ‘Letters to My Son at Rome: XI. Mr. Johnson, of St. Paul’s Church-Yard, and His Literary Connexions’, Aldine Magazine (1839), 201–5.

x

Note on the Text An invaluable research resource for this book has been the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC). Many of the titles listed as printed for or sold by Joseph Johnson were first identified through the ESTC. Where practical and feasible this information has been confirmed by inspecting copies of individual works and checking against contemporary review and catalogue listings, although this verification has not always been possible. Dates or places of publication which were not originally printed on title-pages and remain indeterminate appear in square brackets in citations.

xi

Introduction Most students and literary historians of the eighteenth century are familiar with or come to know about the bookseller and publisher Joseph Johnson through their reading of Mary Wollstonecraft or Thomas Paine or, in some cases, William Blake, with all of whom Johnson was associated, particularly during the period of the French Revolution in England. Claire Tomalin, for example, in her Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft (1974) devoted an entire chapter to Wollstonecraft’s relations with her publisher, producing in the process one of the first truly extended pieces of research on Johnson and certainly the first to acknowledge the significant level of encouragement and support he gave to her career, as to a great many other writers, artists and intellectuals, including William Cowper, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Maria Edgeworth, Henry Fuseli, Blake and, most notably, Joseph Priestley. Tomalin’s work helped to start a snowball effect as, over the next five years, Johnson was literally rediscovered in a series of articles and biographical studies, mainly by American-based scholars. As a result, more is now known about Johnson’s activities (aside from his involvement with Wollstonecraft and Paine) probably than about most other booksellers of the period. Yet the received picture we tend to have of him is still very much that of the publisher of Rights of Man (1791) and Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), two works out of a considerable œuvre spanning almost fifty years, and all too often the ‘shorthand’ used to present him to us is as a ‘radical’ publisher. What is not in dispute, but rather implicitly acknowledged by this, is that throughout his career Joseph Johnson was fundamentally sympathetic to ideas favouring improvement and reform. It is simply the matter of degree which remains open to discussion. The question at the heart of this book, then, is ‘How radical a publisher was Joseph Johnson?’ and its aim is to determine how far the works he published tended to promote the case for more extreme or thoroughgoing social, religious and political change in England between 1760 and 1810. Plenty of evidence can be (and traditionally has been) mustered to support this ‘radical’ view – first and foremost that Johnson published many of the leading and most influential responses to Edmund Burke’s classic reactionary Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). His dinners were attended by such leading ‘radical’ lights as Paine, Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, Priestley and John Horne Tooke – figures who (however much they reasoned to the contrary in their work) were very much identified with the spread of extreme, pro-French, atheistic and anti-monarchical ideas in England during the 1790s. Moreover, he was eventually sent to prison at the height of the invasionary crisis in 1798 for xii

Introduction xiii

selling a ‘seditious’ pamphlet that denounced the prolonged war between England and France and was said to greet the prospect of an invasion with enthusiasm. Yet what we also know about Johnson is that he had been active in the book trade for thirty years prior to the outbreak of the French revolution and that, in that time, he had built up a wide-ranging and diverse list of authors and acquaintances that did not consist simply of hard-core ‘radicals’ but included ‘arch-conservatives’, perhaps equally crudely cast (such as the educational writer, Sunday school pioneer and very model of domestic propriety, Sarah Trimmer), latitudinarian Anglicans, Catholics, moderate dissenters (such as Mrs Barbauld, whose views on women’s rights were nowhere near so advanced as Wollstonecraft’s) and sober evangelicals (William Cowper, for example, possibly Johnson’s most commercially successful author, who was a pious moralist in favour of reform but certainly no ‘radical’). Indeed, the image of a man ‘generous, candid, and liberal’ in his dealings and outlook is one repeatedly conjured up by contemporary reminiscences and reports, where the one adjective that seems to cling to the bookseller above all is not ‘radical’ (a term not yet really coined in the modern sense) so much as ‘respectable’.1 Clearly, then, there are dangers in making too much of certain relationships and regarding someone who, among other things, publishes ‘radicals’ as solely a ‘radical’ publisher. Also, Johnson was certainly incriminated as a ‘radical’ in 1798 but, in view of the heightened sensitivities of the time, was that really the case (as with so many of his high-profile authors), and might that label be just as inappropriate, exaggerated and expedient now as then? Two hundred years on it seems owing to Joseph Johnson to try and establish more fully the extent to which his publications contributed to the development of a ‘radical’ political platform and ideology in England in the latter half of the eighteenth century. This involves assessing his activities more in terms of his overall output (which involves well over two thousand separate books and pamphlets), not just one or two famous works which may tend to give rather a distorted view of his activities, within the context of the changing political circumstances of the time and in comparison with his contemporaries in the book trade. Central to this task, however, will be to revisit and reconsider the true tenor of his most famously ‘radical’ publications, in doing so endeavouring to cut through much of the politically motivated rancour, malice and misrepresentation these works aroused (and, ironically, themselves set out to contest and expose), and to scrutinize more closely the kinds of constitutional change they actually sought. The accent throughout, then, is not so much on the man (who, necessarily perhaps, preferred to cut a slight, modest and remarkably unobtrusive figure in life) as on his books. In other words, it is the ideas, the substance and ethos of what Johnson published rather than the detailed technicalities of his role as a bookseller or patron which are the main point of interest.

xiv Romanticism, Publishing and Dissent

The study has a largely chronological sweep, with each chapter tracing the development of Johnson’s career in relation to a specific issue: namely, the dissenting campaigns for greater civil and religious liberty in the early 1770s and late 1780s in Chapters 1 and 3, the conflict between Britain and her American colonies in the 1770s in Chapter 2, the French Revolution in Chapter 4 and the war with France from 1793 onwards in Chapter 5. The concluding chapter is chiefly devoted to the proceedings, implications and aftermath of Johnson’s trial. I am conscious that, by explicitly devoting itself to an examination of Johnson’s political publications, this study accords them by default more of a significance than proportionately they may have had. Consequently, I have tried wherever possible to correct the impression that political writing was the mainstay of Johnson’s output and to re-focus attention on his notable achievements as an educational and scientific publisher, both areas worthy of more detailed investigation (as in themselves capable of challenging the rather politically fixated view we tend to have of his activities). Nevertheless, the hope is that, by placing the still predominantly silent yet pivotal figure of the bookseller at its centre, this study will form a useful contribution to understanding the particularly close relationship between literature and politics in this period and, by exposing the subtly different strains of political commitment even within the reformist camp, enable us to get at the very varied nature of ‘radicalism’ in the last quarter of the eighteenth century in England.

. . . suffer not the insidious surmises and malevolent insinuations of any man . . . to ensnare you into a mistrust of my sincerity . . . nor allow yourselves to be drawn aside from the contemplation of my real character by the false glare of names, Jacobin, republican, an opposer of the civil and ecclesiastical constitution of his country, or any other stigmatical denominations, easily devised by base impostors to vilify the patriotic principles of a generous enemy to their corruptions. Truth, not opinion, is the proper object of regard. Defence of Gilbert Wakefield (1799)


1 Dissenting Origins

[A]s long as there is a Protestant Dissenter in England, there will be a firm and intrepid friend to the Protestant Succession, to the liberty, and to the present happy constitution of this country. Joseph Priestley, A View of the Principles and Conduct of the Protestant Dissenters (1769) In the closing weeks of 1760 at the time of the death of George II a young newly-trained bookseller started up in business at a shop, the ‘Golden Anchor’, on Fenchurch Street in the heart of the City of London. The same age as the old king’s successor, he immediately brought out a sixpenny sermon which lamented the end of ‘so eminently glorious’ a reign but welcomed the peaceful accession of George III, delivered on 2 November to a local Presbyterian congregation by its minister, John Palmer. After a brief but unproductive stint a few hundred yards west on Lombard Street during the spring, by August he had settled into premises just north of London Bridge on Fish Street Hill. Among the first works he published from this new address was another sermon, preached on the day of George III’s coronation (22 September 1761) by a Baptist minister, John Johnson, in Liverpool. Like Palmer’s, this stressed that kings were wholly subordinate to the command of God and hoped that those ‘blessings’ which Britain had enjoyed for ‘above seventy years past’, especially the ‘full liberty’ of assembling together for worship, would continue.1 The cause of religious freedom was being trumpeted in the bookseller’s output even at the start, albeit humbly and respectfully by those who still in such matters had to crave a prince’s indulgence. It was the interests of this diverse group, above all, to which he was already most firmly and personally attached and which would go on to shape the entire future course of his activities. Joseph Johnson was himself originally from Liverpool, which by the mideighteenth century was a relatively large, finely built and visibly prospering town but as yet home to little printing of any kind and barely a handful of booksellers. He was the younger son of a yeoman farmer or petty landowner, 1

2


with no obvious links to the book trade but some means and enough presence of mind to encourage him (along with his brother) to forsake the land and go into business. Accordingly, he had been sent up to London in 1752 at the age of 14 and spent the next seven years bound as apprentice to a Baptist bookseller on Gracechurch Street, George Keith. Keith had been in business for about ten years, during which time he had established himself as a diligent, middle-ranking publisher of religious literature. In fact, two of his regular collaborators – the keenly Presbyterian owner of the Monthly Review, Ralph Griffiths, on the Strand, and another well-known Baptist bookseller, Christopher Henderson, near the Royal Exchange – acted as copublishers with Johnson of John Palmer’s sermon. Keith’s father-in-law was the leading Baptist theologian Dr John Gill, whose widely-esteemed works on divinity formed the backbone of his publishing output. Joseph Johnson’s family, too, were Baptists – one of a small but staunch number in the Liverpool area. His grandfather and uncle were both Baptist ministers and his father a Baptist deacon, while the large house (in the outlying village of Everton) in which he had grown up had been registered at the start of the century as the first regular local Baptist meeting house. That congregation had since moved to a chapel in the city on Byrom Street, which the young Joseph and his family attended. Its minister during the 1740s was the Reverend John Johnson (no relation), whose early printed sermons and religious tracts appeared under George Keith’s imprint.2 A zealous Calvinist (like John Gill), with rigidly exclusive notions about predestination and salvation, the Reverend Johnson had left to form a new local meeting in 1748 when a split occurred between the Particular and General Baptists among his hearers. Whereas Particular Baptists held that salvation was only offered to a choice few, General Baptists believed that Christ died for all men who were, therefore, all equally eligible for redemption. As strict in terms of discipline but doctrinally more liberal, the General Baptists had been overtaken in numbers by their Calvinist brethren during the century, although neither branch by mid-century was thriving. Ironically, Joseph Johnson and his family had chosen not to follow the ‘Johnsonian Baptists’ and were content to remain within the more tolerant but dwindling Arminian branch of the faith at Byrom Street.3 George Keith, however, adhered to the Particular tradition and, during the years of Johnson’s apprenticeship, his theological list was pitted with heavily Calvinist tracts and a stream of defences of the ‘nature and fitness of things’, the importance of Christian duty and the causes of religious salvation, many dwelling on the eternality of death and the sufferings of the damned. Typical of these were the works of Benjamin Wallin and William Cudworth, which dominated his list from the mid-1750s onwards, and the ‘supralapsarian’ Baptist minister and intimate friend of John Gill, John Brine. Baptists, like Presbyterians and Congregationalists (or Independents), refused to admit the authority or subscribe to the rites and articles of the

Dissenting Origins 3

Church of England, and so dissented from the established religion. In theory, this prohibited them from graduating at the English universities and thereby entering the professions, although in practice many did actually circumvent these rules. They were also legally barred from holding civil, military or crown offices under the terms of the 1661 Corporation and 1673 Test Acts. These required that all candidates swear oaths of supremacy and allegiance (in matters both temporal and spiritual) to the monarch and receive Anglican communion. Whereas it was common for wealthier middle-class Presbyterians to conform, such moves were strictly forbidden among the traditionally humbler, more austere Baptist community. Its members clung rigidly to the idea of the sanctity of private judgement and the individual’s sole responsibility to God, deploring any attempts to make a man’s civil station contingent upon his religious views by the imposition of oaths or public confessions of faith. For a century, Protestant dissenters had concentrated their energies in the world of trade and commerce rather than risk their consciences – so much so that, by 1760, the ‘principal strength’ of dissent was estimated to lie among retailers and businessmen. It was no accident, then, that London, the commercial as well as cultural heart of the nation, was also the chief centre of religious dissent in England.4 Since 1689 Protestant dissenters (unlike their Catholic counterparts) had enjoyed a fairly wide toleration but, technically, it was still limited and excluded all those who refused to believe in the idea of the Trinity – ‘the intellectual underpinning of Church, King and Parliament’.5 They were regarded as blasphemers and liable to prosecution and imprisonment until well into the nineteenth century, although this threat was rarely carried out. Under the first two Georges, the laws against dissenters were seldom exercised – indeed, there were annual indemnities against the penalties of nonsubscription – and, though still required to pay tithes (a ‘popish institution’ to most Baptists) in support of the Anglican church and submit to being buried, baptised and married by its clergy, dissenting loyalty to the Hanoverian monarchy ran high.6 Liverpool, once a Tory bastion, had turned decidedly ‘Whig and Liberal’ after 1688 – a period which saw a rapid rise in the number of dissenters to a peak of as many as 20,000 in Lancashire. During the Jacobite rebellion of 1715 dissenting ministers had come out resolutely in favour of the House of Hanover throughout the county. Feelings had run no less high in 1745, when among ‘the most zealous and active of the volunteers who enlisted in the Liverpool regiment’ to take up arms against the Stuarts was the Reverend John Johnson of Byrom Street.7 At the coronation of George III, the General Body of Protestant Dissenting Ministers in London again presented an address pledging their allegiance to the new monarch and promising to ‘inculcate’ among their hearers ‘that submission and obedience which they owe to [his] majesty’s . . . government.’ Joseph Johnson’s opening efforts as a bookseller, then, naturally reflected this mood, demonstrating the dissenters’ still undimmed faith in the

4


Hanoverian succession and the hope symbolized by the new king’s promise to ‘maintain the Toleration inviolable’.8 At this point, the bloody and expensive Seven Years War with France had swung decisively in Britain’s favour, inducing a wave of loyal enthusiasm, and the religious and political outlook for the nation and its widening empire seemed positive. Within weeks, however, Londoners were on the streets following the resignation in October 1761 of the Prime Minister, William Pitt, who was popularly thought to have guided Britain towards victory, and his effective replacement by the much-hated and distrusted Earl of Bute (a Scot and a Catholic). An erstwhile Protestant dissenter and self-styled friend to civil and religious liberty, John Wilkes, famously began attacking the king’s ‘Favourite’, Bute, for his corrupting ‘Stuart’ influence and friendliness towards the French in his weekly newspaper the North Briton. These events, and the anti-ministerial fervour they aroused, constitute what has been called the birth of ‘modern English Radicalism’: Protestants perceived themselves threatened by popish influence, true Englishmen and their liberties were being trodden on by a Jacobite usurper, and the rights of the commons disregarded by the covert and arbitrary operations of ministers.9 These were the grounds on which political and religious reform would be lobbied for over the next thirty years in England, and they provide the backdrop to Joseph Johnson’s rise to prominence as a bookseller, active largely on behalf of the dissenting interest, during the same period. Johnson was not squarely drawn into these upheavals at first and his early output continued to be characterized by well-meaning and, for the most part, politically uncontentious sermons and divinity tracts, mostly by Protestant dissenting ministers. Many were reissues of works published by George Keith or by clergymen (predominantly Calvinist Baptists) whose works had already appeared with Keith’s imprint. More often than not they were sold by Johnson in conjunction with Keith, if not other devotional booksellers (such as James Buckland and Thomas Field, both leading purveyors of nonconformity on Paternoster Row) with whom Keith was used to collaborating. Predictably, but also somewhat pointedly perhaps, a hundred years after the Stuart Restoration, the work of heroic seventeenthcentury dissenters who had suffered much under attempts to impose religious uniformity during Charles II’s reign made their way onto his list. Among them, the Baptist minister Benjamin Keach, who had been tried, imprisoned and pilloried for flouting the Book of Common Prayer in 1664, the Presbyterian Walter Marshall (whose principal and most popular work, The Gospel-Mystery of Sanctification, of 1692, Johnson very early re-published) and the Puritan martyr Joseph Alleine, famously ejected from his living (like Marshall) in 1662 and continually punished and cast into prison for his evangelical preaching. Baptists, not coincidentally, had been the most active force in the Parliamentary army during the Civil War and the memory of


Lancashire dissenters who had been gravely hit by the Caroline persecution was not lost upon members of Johnson’s generation. Indeed, the names of many of these (Newcome, Harrison, Pendlebury, Goodwin, Yates, Heywood) were still very much alive in the eighteenth century by virtue of their descendants, several of whom were prominent dissenters and known to the bookseller.10 Similar memories were evoked at his shop on Fish Street Hill, which lay directly across the river from the old dissenting stronghold of Southwark, home to the first Particular Baptist chapel founded a century before, and by the sign of ‘Mead’s Head’ fixed outside his door. Richard Mead had been one of England’s most eminent physicians and a staunch Whig, who had treated George II, and Johnson initially hoped to trade on his reputation (and his shop’s convenient location, on the main route south to St Thomas’s and Guy’s Hospitals across the Thames) to establish himself as a serious medical and scientific bookseller.11 There were close and longstanding links to be exploited here between doctoring and dissent, for Mead was also the son of a celebrated Independent minister, Matthew Mead, who had been deprived of his Holborn living in 1662 but whose nonconformity never wavered despite all his sufferings and who went on to attract the largest congregation in London. Later, on the occasion of another centenary, Johnson would sell a specially-reprinted edition of one of Matthew Mead’s sermons first preached in 1689 in honour of the ‘Glorious Revolution’. Politics finally – if still only fleetingly – encroached upon the bookseller’s list when he joined up to publish an anonymous 400-page Impartial History of the Late War (1763) following the signing of the Treaty of Paris. Its alleged author, John Almon was an exact contemporary of Johnson’s, born in Liverpool where he had served his apprenticeship with a local printer and bookseller. Arriving in London in the late 1750s, he had found work as a journeyman printer and quickly become acquainted with the City booksellers. One of these was the owner of the Gazetteer, Charles Say, who hired Almon to help conduct his paper and contribute political pieces (under the pseudonym of an ‘Independent Whig’), but his acquaintance among other members of the trade almost certainly included Johnson, to whom he could naturally be expected to gravitate in view of their common age and background. Almon’s determinedly neutral yet decidedly Whig interpretations of recent political history, which included reviews of George II’s reign (in which ‘the effects of ministerial influence are traced and laid open’) and the administrations of Pitt (whom he revered) and Bute (whom he loathed), had already won him the patronage of members of the main court opposition, most notably Pitt’s brother-in-law, Lord Temple. Through Temple, he had just begun his friendship and association with John Wilkes, whose North Briton served as an important vehicle for the Pitt-Temple faction. The topicality or vogueishness of Almon’s History may have recommended it to Johnson, the all-too-favourable ‘concessions, surrenders, and advantages’ given in the peace negotiations to France on which it remarked having

6


caused a furious clamour amongst pamphleteers and journalists. Histories generally were much in demand and he had only recently brought out a large-scale General History of Sieges and Battles (12 vols, 1762) in small format to which this may have served as a supplementary volume. Its ‘patriotic’ pro-Pittite views, though, were likely to have struck a chord, neatly tailored as they were for that group of small traders, shopkeepers and householders to which Johnson himself now belonged, whose interests (its author claimed) had not been best served by the peace and who already had reason to be ‘disappointed’ by the new monarchy.12 Not insignificantly for Wilkes, these were also the men who had the right to vote for and stand as the City’s aldermen and councillors, as several of Johnson’s colleagues within the London book trade did. Almon’s History notably praised the religious tolerance of George II but, more justly perhaps, it offered Johnson the welcome chance to support a ‘volunteer’ pen against the ‘prodigious streams of abuse’ which had been heaped upon Pitt during the previous year, lavishly funded by the court party.13 Johnson advertised the work in the St James’s Chronicle, priced at 3s 6d, on 26 March 1763. Less than a fortnight later, on 8 April, Bute resigned only to be replaced by Temple’s rival elder brother, George Grenville. On 23 April No. 45 of the North Briton appeared, which heavily criticized George III’s speech defending the inglorious terms of the peace and Bute’s lingering corrupt influence. By the end of the month, Wilkes had been arrested for seditious libel (along with a large number of other printers and publishers) and imprisoned in the Tower, his case quickly brought to trial on 3 May. Almon’s previous works having sold reasonably well, another impression of the History was not surprisingly run off, followed by a second edition before the end of the year. Less controversially, Johnson published a sermon entitled National Peace a Choice Blessing of the Lord, preached to a dissenting congregation in London on 5 May by the Baptist minister Thomas Craner. Towards the end of the summer Almon himself set up as a bookseller on Piccadilly with Temple’s aid, in which potent new guise he and Johnson continued to join forces. Though their early collaborations were chiefly non-political, Johnson’s relationship with such a violently antigovernment figure at the very time of the North Briton furore (and one who would himself soon be targeted for publishing A Letter on Libels [1764] in the wake of Wilkes’s trial) remains singularly striking and locates him on the sympathetic fringes of these new, more strident oppositional forces that were fast emerging in the City of London. It also brought him other connections, for soon afterwards he teamed up with two of Wilkes’s and Almon’s other publishers, George Kearsley on nearby Ludgate Street (earlier arrested but released over his part in the North Briton) and William Nicoll in St Paul’s Churchyard, although the book in question was a relatively innocuous history of London. Johnson kept up his professional association with John Almon as a bookseller at regular intervals for the next 15 years and


also worked with Nicoll and Kearsley individually on a range of literary, scientific and religious projects. Unlike Almon, however, he was not one of those who allowed himself to fall directly under Temple’s influence or become personally embroiled with Wilkes and tainted by any overtly partypolitical association. * During the summer of 1765 Johnson left Fish Street Hill and moved into the very heart of the bookselling establishment at No. 8 (‘The Globe’), on Paternoster Row. Here he was only doors away from James Buckland (a senior and much-respected collaborator since his apprentice days), and opposite and along from the rising firm of Thomas Longman at No. 39 and another young dissenter, George Robinson, whom Longman had recently helped set up in business at No. 25 (‘Addison’s Head’). The change of premises was a measure of his rising stature within the trade, and not the only one as his name had already been recommended to an incoming visitor to England (Henry Fuseli) by the British Ambassador, Sir Andrew Mitchell, and in the same breath as one of the city’s most eminent property-owning booksellers, Andrew Millar.14 Around this time, however, he entered into partnership with a man who was (and remains) something of an unknown quantity in the trade, Benjamin Davenport. Davenport was actually fresh out of his apprenticeship as a hatbandmaker – Johnson’s shop on Fish Street Hill had been next door to a hatter’s – although he may have had some connection with Peter Davenport, an early pastor of the Baptist meeting in Liverpool with which Johnson’s family was associated, who had subsequently taken charge of a meeting in the City of London. Certainly, once the two men had officially started up in business (appearing together in imprints either as ‘Johnson and Davenport’ or ‘Johnson and Co.’), connections with Lancashire dissent began to loom large in their output.15 Despite having left Liverpool early for London, Johnson still tended to revisit family and friends, particularly during the annual summer lull in the trade when London was out of season and Parliament in recess, and had managed to retain and develop close personal and professional links with the north-west. In continuing to sell the works of the Reverend John Johnson, for instance, his name appeared alongside those of prominent booksellers in Liverpool and Warrington, one of whom, John Gore, had actually started up in business in 1762 with his help. In 1765 Johnson took a part-stake in a new weekly local newspaper (the city’s third) chiefly devoted to shipping and commerce, the Liverpool General Advertiser, which Gore began publishing. The same year he and Davenport came together with Gore (and the fashionable Strand booksellers Thomas Becket and Peter De Hondt) to publish A View of the Advantages of Inland Navigations (1765), a pamphlet by another of his businessman-friends in Liverpool, Thomas Bentley. This had been written at the request of Bentley’s future partner Josiah Wedgwood

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to further his ambitions for a main Midlands canal connecting the Trent and Mersey. It conveniently fed into a growing extra-parliamentary debate, zealously stoked by Wedgwood who placed weekly articles in the London and provincial press. It also represented an important link-up between progressive, predominantly dissenting scientists and entrepreneurs in Lancashire, London and the Midlands who formed the nucleus of the celebrated Lunar Society. The pamphlet’s real significance, however, for Johnson lay as much in the fact that its author was a founder and trustee of the dissenting academy at nearby Warrington. For almost a century Warrington had been known as a vibrant heartland for Presbyterian dissenters and its academy was simply the latest in an illustrious line of institutions (at Kendal and Bolton, for example) which had sprung up as alternatives to Oxford and Cambridge in the more tolerant atmosphere after 1689. They were noted for their free-ranging, liberal spirit of enquiry and proved vital in terms of supplying a steady stream of learned candidates for the dissenting ministry. Though set in motion by dissenters (in 1757), Warrington’s educational plan was not designed to serve any particular sect or party. No religious test for admission was ever imposed, so a sizeable Anglican contingent passed through its doors, and only a minority of students actually studied divinity, which formed a small part of the curriculum. Indeed, the stated aim of the academy was to promote ‘truth, virtue and happiness’ in the ‘general interests of mankind’ by the propagation of ‘sound learning’ and ‘real, useful knowledge’.16 It was most likely via Thomas Bentley or possibly John Gore (who mixed with ministers connected with the Academy) that Johnson was brought in touch with staff at Warrington, most notably its talented tutor of languages and belles-lettres, Joseph Priestley. Priestley had attended a series of chemistry lectures given at Warrington by Bentley’s partner, the physician and chemist Matthew Turner. Thereafter he made regular trips to Liverpool where, he says, he was ‘always received by Mr. Bentley’ – ‘a man of excellent taste, improved understanding, and a good disposition, but an unbeliever in christianity’. Turner was also ‘a professed Atheist’, not to mention a republican in politics, although he and Bentley were both founder-members of the short-lived Octagon dissenting chapel in Liverpool whose reformed liturgy (part-compiled by staff at Warrington) Johnson had helped to circulate.17 Priestley had already published works in London through Christopher Henderson and Ralph Griffiths, who was very friendly with Bentley. Bentley had probably solicited contributions to Griffiths’s Monthly Review from Warrington in the early 1760s and continued to act as an important literary channel of communication (for Priestley, among others) between Liverpool, Warrington and London. Possibly through his hands, then, Joseph Johnson took possession of a work which, in retrospect, would mark the start of the most prodigious, important and influential association of his career as, like Henderson, he


agreed to become one of the publishers of Priestley’s Essay on a Course of Liberal Education (1765). The Essay was the embodiment of Priestley’s achievements as a tutor at Warrington and dedicated to the trustees of the academy. However, it also fired off a warning shot for the future in terms of his activities and those of his new-found bookseller. In it, he called for an examination of the current ‘remote’ state of public education in England which did not provide for ‘Gentlemen who are designed to fill the principal stations of active life’ as opposed to those ‘adapted to the learned professions’. He argued the need, then, to reform education, to secularize it and adapt it to the new great ends of human society: politics and commerce. In line with this, he proposed a daring and innovative curriculum comprising history, constitutional law, politics, modern languages and mathematics, and included an outline of a course of lectures on ‘Civil History and Policy’ delivered during his time at the academy which in the Essay he sought more widely to recommend. This, he insisted, was not ‘teaching politics to low mechanics’ and, even if it were, ‘[o]nly tyrants, and the friends of arbitrary power, ever took umbrage at a turn for political knowledge’. Rather it was the best means of combating the current over-prevalent spirit of faction, eliminating prejudice and creating more useful and active citizens. Throughout the Essay Priestley made no effort to conceal his Real Whig sympathies and, in some ‘Remarks’ he appended on ‘A Code of Education’ proposed by an Anglican cleric Dr Brown, just as he had railed against the narrow and outmoded influence of the clergy, so he violently opposed a national system of education instituted by government which he saw as simply yet another means of control and that ‘inimical . . . to liberty, and the natural rights of parents.’18 Priestley almost certainly called in on Johnson when he travelled up to London in December 1765, keen to check on sales of his Essay (which was soon being touted as a valuable work) but also to enlist his help in finding books that would be of use to him in his scientific research and experiments. Back in Warrington in March, he wrote to another of his influential new acquaintances that winter, the dissenting minister Richard Price, asking him to procure some ‘foreign Articles’ for him or to ‘tell Mr. Johnson the bookseller where to get them’. A parcel of books was duly dispatched from Paternoster Row the following month. By June Priestley felt comfortable enough to conduct his correspondence with the Royal Society, to which he had just been elected, through Johnson, who conveniently was due to travel up to Lancashire in August and so could act as carrier. On his own admission, he had quickly come to regard the bookseller as ‘the most active, punctual & intelligent, as well as the most honest man in the trade’, and, at this point, had adopted him rather than any of the Essay’s other publishers as his main London agent.19 Other important personal and institutional links with the nonconformist community began to be forged as, together with Davenport, Johnson pub-

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lished theological works by David Jennings, late head of the influential London dissenting academy now based at Hoxton, a successor of his as tutor there, Andrew Kippis, and one of his former students, the classical scholar and bible critic Edward Harwood. Like Johnson, Harwood was the son of Lancashire dissenters and (like Kippis) firm friends with Joseph Priestley, the two having run schools close to each other in Cheshire in the late 1750s. He had also been intimate with Warrington’s renowned first divinity tutor, Dr John Taylor, under whose influence (like Priestley and most of the staff at Warrington) he had become an Arian. Arianism was the belief that Christ was more than man but of inferior status to God and, since being popularized earlier in the century by the Anglican theologian Samuel Clarke, had quickly spread among Presbyterian clergy. It was a less extreme position than Socinianism (which largely stripped Christ of any innate divinity and viewed him entirely as a man, like other men, who was not innately sinful but capable of great benevolence, moral excellence and self-perfection) but just as unpopular among orthodox Calvinists, including many of Harwood’s own congregation at Bristol. Ironically, one of the earliest works Johnson had sold had been The Arians and Socinians Monitor (1761) – a characteristically stinging and commercially successful attack on the learned Dr Taylor and his ilk and their erroneous tendency to worship ‘Godlike reason’ and treat all that was ‘divinely mysterious’ with contempt – by a Particular Baptist preacher based near Warrington, John Macgowan.20 This was not the only one of Macgowan’s many divinity tracts, which were usually quite popular, to make it onto Johnson’s list, nor was it the only blazingly Calvinist riposte to Taylor’s arguments he would sponsor. Yet the new ‘rational’ turn in English dissenting thought which it mockingly tried to halt began from this point to have an overriding impact on his activities. With Davenport, and Becket and De Hondt, Johnson brought out Harwood’s New Introduction to the Study and Knowledge of the New Testament (1767). This was speedily followed by his liberal if somewhat ‘turgid’ and none-too-popular translation of the New Testament (‘in modern phrase, and with a Socinian twist’, as James Boswell put it) which was published by subscription in 1768 and sold by Johnson in London, John Gore at Liverpool and booksellers in Bristol and Warrington. Harwood was subsequently forced to leave Bristol on account of his views and lived and worked rather obscurely (mainly on literary projects) in London. Boswell records meeting him at Thomas Davies’s bookshop in Covent Garden in 1776, at which time Johnson was involved in bringing out his version of the New Testament in Greek. As late as 1790 Johnson acted as the main London seller of another of his religious tracts, although none appear to have won a particularly sympathetic response, even from among his fellow-dissenters.21 Harwood’s works, though, were not the only evidence in the bookseller’s output of the growing tendency to adopt more openly ‘rational’ opinions. In 1766, for example, he and Davenport sold the first of several sermons by the Reverend


William Hazlitt (father of the essayist), preached and printed during his short tenure as a dissenting minister in Gloucestershire. Hazlitt’s zealous preoccupation with ‘disputed texts of scripture’ had already turned him into something of a fledgling Unitarian, for which, like Harwood, he paid the price by being obscurely ‘tossed about from congregation to congregation’.22 Three years after he had re-published the first, Johnson brought out a second volume of Thomas Amory’s eccentric but much-admired Life of John Buncle (2 vols, 1763–66). This was an oddly infectious mix of personal reminiscence and novelistic ramblings (memorably in the north of England) interleaved with distinctly pro-Socinian theological comment. Taking up a copy of Buncle would convert the pioneering remainder bookseller James Lackington from ‘a poor ignorant, bigoted, superstitious methodist’ and force him to ‘reason freely on religious matters’. Fifty years on, it would win praise from the younger Hazlitt in his series of essays The Round Table (1817).23 With Davenport, Johnson also issued a clutch of typically combative religious works by Caleb Fleming, a pastor at Pinner’s Hall (an independent meeting house on Broad Street used by various denominations in London) and Buncle’s original editor back in the 1750s. Fleming was one of the few to use his pulpit (as well as his pen) to rail against popery, priestcraft and all forms of church power and, like his good friend John Palmer (who continued to resort to Johnson with his sermons), had abandoned Calvinism for Socinianism. It was probably via this connection that Johnson and Davenport acted as main London publishers of The True Doctrine of the New Testament Concerning Jesus Christ, Considered (1767), the most important work of Paul Cardale. Cardale was one of Fleming’s closest friends and, though his Presbyterian congregation at Evesham found his advanced ideas and dry intellectual style hard to stomach and, like Fleming’s, was on the wane, his writings contributed to the stealthy spread of Socinian ideas among liberal dissenters throughout the Midlands. These tracts and treatises, by their very nature, stimulated religious debate and contributed to an active revival of the controversy about the agreed truths of revelation (what, in the light of closely-examined scripture and increased scientific knowledge, it was still reasonable to believe) that had not raged so intensely for half a century and that necessarily pushed and tested the limits of religious and intellectual liberty. For Joseph Johnson’s part, they reflected a liberal appreciation of the value of theological discussion, particularly when based upon the rational, almost scientific, evaluation of scriptural and historical evidence, a growing dissatisfaction with many of the mysteries and superstitions still tolerated by orthodox believers and, on a purely practical level, a keen ability to tap into the widening metropolitan and provincial network of contemporary dissent, particularly Baptist and Presbyterian strongholds in Bristol, Lancashire and London. They may also, however, have fuelled serious tensions with Davenport as, during the latter half of 1767, their partnership dissolved – a fact which

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some have attributed to a ‘radical’ shift in Johnson’s own religious views, largely under Joseph Priestley’s influence. Having left Warrington in September 1767 to become minister of the influential Mill Hill Chapel at Leeds, Priestley had immediately read The Letter on the Logos, a work by the Independent theologian Nathaniel Lardner. This maintained that there was only one God, ‘the Father’, and that Christ was a man, though ‘exalted’ above others by God, on the strength of which his religious beliefs (static virtually for ten years) had become Socinian.24 Johnson’s breach with Davenport some time after the summer would certainly coincide with Priestley’s ‘official’ move, although, theologically at least, his output would continue to represent all shades of dissenting and latitudinarian Anglican opinion. His association, for example, with the original ‘Antisocinus’, John Macgowan (who took over as pastor of the old Baptist meeting in Devonshire Square, off Bishopsgate, in 1766), actually became more marked and featured a set of Familiar Epistles to the Rev. Dr. Priestley (1771), protesting that ‘the charges brought by him against the orthodox, are applicable to none but people of the Doctor’s own persuasion’, and Socinianism Brought to the Test . . . in a Series of Letters to the Reverend Doctor Priestley (1773).25 Yet the mid-century decline in the Baptist movement had probably led the bookseller to consider other neighbouring forms of belief, like many members of his ailing church, and it seems unlikely he was immune to the wholesale drift among General Baptists towards Arianism, which was particularly pronounced in London and the south-east. Moreover, it is hard to see how his professional involvement with the group of dissenting divines who were, in effect, helping to lay the theological foundations of Unitarianism in England would not have hastened this development. It is telling that the split with Davenport coincided with (and even appears to have straddled) Johnson’s publication of works by another noted Socinian convert and long-standing friend of Nathaniel Lardner’s, Caleb Fleming.26 There is also the suggestion that, after Davenport, he first considered going into partnership with a fast-rising contemporary and regular collaborator of his on the Strand, Thomas Cadell, whose father (a Bristol bookseller) was involved in the sale of Harwood, Hazlitt and Cardale’s works and who himself had decided Unitarian sympathies. In the event, Johnson joined up with another bookseller on Paternoster Row, John Payne, who had already participated with him in several works but, not insignificantly, had just published a new edition of Lardner’s Ancient Jewish and Heathen Testimonies to the Truth of the Christian Religion (1768). He and Payne (and Cadell) were among the small group of booksellers to issue a set of Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Nathaniel Lardner (1769) shortly after Lardner’s death, and their output generally tended to reflect the wider upsurge in liberal anti-trinitarian theology from 1768 onwards.27 The years of Johnson’s brief partnership with Davenport were marked less by intense religious than political and economic strife, yet this barely


registered in any of their titles. There had been rioting in London (among disgruntled silk weavers in nearby Spitalfields) in 1765 and more widely throughout the country following poor harvests in 1766. In July 1765 Grenville’s diligent but divisive efforts to trim the national debt were brought to an end and he was dismissed as Prime Minister. His replacement, the arch-Whiggish Marquis of Rockingham, was equally distrusted and found himself out of office the following summer. Even the recall of the ‘Great Commoner’ Pitt (now ennobled as the Earl of Chatham) did nothing to end the period of ministerial instability. By 1768 Chatham was desperately ill and his former secretary, the Duke of Grafton, left lamely holding together a feuding cabinet. In March Parliament dissolved and, in the elections which followed, John Wilkes stood as MP for Middlesex. Though successfully voted in, he was promptly arrested on charges still outstanding over the North Briton. On 20 June he was tried, convicted and fined for libel and sentenced to 22 months in prison. It was in the midst of these events, and whilst briefly back to being a sole trader without Davenport, that Johnson combined with the distinguished Pall Mall bookseller James Dodsley and Thomas Cadell to publish his first significant political work – but one which set the tenor of much that was to come – Priestley’s Essay on the First Principles of Government (1768).28 This, in fact, was composed before the affair with Wilkes broke out and prompted chiefly by ‘Remarks’ Priestley had appended to his previous Essay on education, which Johnson now conveniently chose to reissue. In it, he stood up in defence of the venerable cause of ‘Truth’ and ‘Liberty’, professing to write freely, ardently and without party zeal, as became ‘a philosopher, a man, and an Englishman’. Like Harrington, Locke and other Whig theorists before him, he argued against the doctrines of non-resistance and passive obedience, maintaining that ‘all governments whatever have been, in some measure, compulsory, [and] tyrannical’ and that Man, who only submits to be governed temporally and conditionally, retains the ‘natural right of relieving himself from all oppression.’ The ‘happiness of the whole community’ was the ‘great standard’ by which everything had to be determined and, therefore, reason dictated that any government which did not amply provide for the ‘general good’ was unlawful: ‘salus populi suprema est lex. That must be done which the good of the whole requires.’29 On these grounds, any lengths were justified when it came to deposing or punishing a bad king. Far from advocating violent change, however, (a ‘remedy’ which, in his view, might wreak greater havoc than the ‘disease’) Priestley could see much to be grateful for in the current ‘mixed’ parliamentary system in Britain, which remained the ‘best actual scheme of civil policy’ so far devised. This he attributed exclusively to the workings of divine providence which already, through a process of gradual but inexorable reformation, had brought mankind to its ‘present happy condition’ and, ‘if suffered to go on,

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may carry us to a pitch of happiness of which we can yet form no conception’. He was not inherently opposed to the idea of a hereditary monarchy (‘elective monarchies having generally been the theatres of cabal, confusion, and misery’) but rather whiggishly distrustful of the corrupt and manipulative exercise of power by ministers.30 Nor was he averse to the possession of rank or titles, provided they were exercised for the public good, although his reservations on both these points would increase over time. He did not believe that a state of absolute political liberty was necessary or even possible, given that some men were naturally ‘more powerful, more enterprising, and more successful’ than others. He did, however, question the wisdom of allowing none but the wealthy to occupy the highest political offices but only to argue that those ‘born to a moderate fortune’, who were often ‘generally better educated’, had ‘more enlarged minds’ and were, therefore, ‘more truly independent’, should have access. Revealing himself very much a spokesman for middle-class dissent, he referred contemptuously to the ‘lowest and most illiterate of our common people’ who could easily be bought, overawed or swayed and, rather than favouring universal suffrage, proposed a graduated system of elected offices whereby the lowest classes were restricted to voting for the lowest officers.31 Priestley was never any kind of social leveller but an ardent champion of the new bourgeois virtues of self-help and industry, like a number of his ministerial colleagues, and it was a striking feature of both his theology and his politics that he remained completely unsentimental in his attitude to the poor. Whereas political liberty had, to some degree, to be ‘restrained’, religious liberty (in many respects a more important question for Priestley and to which he devoted most of his Essay) should be perfectly ‘unbounded’. Scripture demanded that Christians think and act for themselves. Religion, therefore, was ‘intirely a personal concern’ and, like education, should not be encroached upon by the state. Priestley naturally declared his opposition to ecclesiastical establishments which did nothing to serve the true interests of religion and impudently replaced the commandments of God with those of men. Once they may have been useful for preserving order but over time they had transformed the clergy from being independent ministers of the gospel into mere civil servants employed by the king. Most iniquitously of all, by ‘laying an undue bias upon the mind’, they had tended to obstruct freedom of enquiry in religious matters, thus inhibiting the discovery of truth and preventing Christianity from supporting itself by its own evidence. Again, though, he was not keen to push for immediate disestablishment (as ‘too hazardous an experiment’) but chiefly sought reforms on some basic points: namely, a (rather sweeping) reduction in the number of articles to which the clergy were required to subscribe, an equalization of church livings, the confinement of clergy to their ecclesiastical duties (effectively banning the Bishops from the House of Lords) and complete toleration for all religious minorities.32


On the freedom to dissent from received opinion without fear or injury, the Essay remained uncompromising. Intellectual liberty was held to be the first principle of any ‘rational’ enlightened government, with all the implications that carried for a free and unfettered press: It is for the interest of truth that every thing be viewed in fair and open day light, and it can only be some sinister purpose that is favoured by darkness or concealment of any kind. My sentiments may be fallacious, but if no body were allowed to write against me, how could that fallacy be made to appear?33 In true Whig dissenting fashion, Priestley had placed himself at the forefront of a long intellectual reformist tradition rooted in ‘polemic and pedagogy’, which implicitly set out to challenge age-old, ‘unalterably fixed’ systems of belief and transcended traditional political and religious loyalties, as his clarion call towards the end of the Essay made clear: Whatever be the particular views of the numerous tribes of searchers after truth, under whatever denomination we may be ranked, whether we be called, or call ourselves christians, papists, protestants, dissenters, heretics, or even deists (for all are equal here . . .) we stand in need of the same liberty of thinking, debating, and publishing. Let us, then, as far as our interest is the same, with one heart and voice, stand up for it.34 An Essay on the First Principles of Government provoked widespread comment when Johnson began selling it at three shillings a copy during the spring of 1768, its timely and (for the most part) welcome re-statement of traditional Whig Protestant views overshadowed by its singularly controversial plea for the full toleration of Catholics. In this, it was roundly condemned by politicians and clerics of every church and party, including many of Priestley’s own closest friends and dissenting colleagues.35 Priestley was not, in fact, remotely pro-Catholic (which he described as an absurd and happily dying faith) but rather anti-persecution, and his arguments for toleration – ‘let every member of the community enjoy every right of a citizen, whether he chuse to conform to the established religion or not’ – were concerned more with the position of dissenting Protestants who were still penalized by the Test Act and the anti-trinitarian provisions of the 1689 Toleration Act.36 Anti-Catholic alarmism, however – a perennial feature of dissenting discourse – was running high, to the extent that Johnson’s list could boast several warnings against popish doctrines including an anonymous Letter from a Protestant-Dissenting-Minister, to the Clergy of the Church of England, Occasioned by the Alarming Growth of Popery in this Kingdom (1768), possibly by Caleb Fleming (one of the most vocal of anti-Catholic dissenters), and The Pillars of Priestcraft and Orthodoxy Shaken (2nd edn, 1768), a four-volume

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collection of anti-prelatical tracts edited by Fleming’s nearest rival as a critic of the established church, the late Richard Baron. Baron’s anthology, too, though, was boldly designed to serve ‘the glorious cause of liberty and truth’ and consisted chiefly of ‘Independent Whigs’, as well as anti-Jacobite orators, from earlier in the century.37 Like Priestley’s Essay, it formed part of a concerted outpouring of attacks on church authority from Johnson at this time, which also included James Murray’s popular Sermons to Asses (1768) – an appeal to the whole body of Protestant dissenters no longer supinely to ‘couch down’ between the ‘two burdens of civil and religious oppression’ – and which contributed to making the principles of the dissenters ‘pretty much the subject of conversation’.38 It was Priestley again, however, who led the assault, his works accounting for more than a third of Johnson’s output over the next 12 months, many of them developing the religious and political arguments propounded in the Essay on Government. Among these were his first serious controversial pieces: to the Huddersfield vicar and leading evangelical Henry Venn, who had been angered by his Free Address to Protestant Dissenters, on the Subject of the Lord’s Supper (1768); to the Archdeacon of Winchester, Thomas Balguy, refuting a sermon he had given on church authority which argued that complete religious freedom was socially destructive and that, rather than tolerate dissenters, the church should openly separate from them; and, most memorably of all, to the prominent jurist William Blackstone. In the fourth volume of his Commentaries on the Laws of England (1769) which covered ‘Offences Against God and Religion’, Blackstone had definitively stated that nonconformity was still technically a ‘crime’ and the penalties for dissent only ‘suspended’ by the Toleration Act, that (though ‘all persecution and oppression of weak consciences’ was unjustifiable) toleration remained essentially an ‘indulgence’ and that a religious establishment was vital to ensure peace and national stability.39 This flew directly in the face of a landmark ruling by Lord Mansfield at the end of the long-running ‘Sheriffs’ Case’ in 1767 (in which the rights of a small group of dissenters were pitted against the might of the Corporation of London) that dissenting worship was not criminal but itself established by law under the terms of the Toleration Act. Johnson and his partner Payne rushed out Priestley’s response which accused Blackstone of ‘party rage’ and of behaving like ‘a man who, finding a house already in flames, either wantonly or wickedly, throws another faggot into it’.40 Priestley’s pamphlet conveniently took account of the wider state of public affairs, the fact that Blackstone’s remarks coincided with a period of intense political and industrial unrest, when strikers and demonstrators were on the streets and the popular agitation aroused by Wilkes was at its height. Priestley had already sent a presentation copy of his Essay on Government to Wilkes and denounced the Commons’ vote to expel him as rightfully-elected representative for Middlesex and replace him with the candidate he had


defeated as ‘a thing so unprecedented’ and ‘so dangerous to the constitution’ that it struck a blow to the ‘very basis of all our liberty’. Like Blackstone’s legal rounding on dissent and Balguy’s sermon, it could be seen to offer further evidence that they were living under an arbitrary administration.41 The Wilkites, for their part, tended to sympathize with the dissenters, some of whom figured prominently in their ranks, and inevitably this led to accusations of the two camps being in thrall. Directly in response to such ‘Tory’ rumour-mongering in the London Evening Post, Johnson put out a short, anonymous defence of those few dissenting freeholders who had allegedly ‘given Umbrage to the Ministry’ by happening to vote for Wilkes and elsewhere in his activities strove to maintain a sympathetic but respectable distance.42 He could still be found openly associating with John Almon, Wilkes’s staunchest defender in the press at this time, who was himself convicted and fined for selling ‘Junius’s’ ‘Letter to the King’ in 1770, and another bookseller strongly linked to the cause of ‘Wilkes and Liberty’, William Bingley, although, in both cases, the publications proved wholly inoffensive. His name also appeared on an anonymous 12-page Ode to the People of England (1769) which condemned the current discord got up by the ‘foes of Liberty’ and hoped that ‘Exalted GEORGE’ (like his great Brunswick ancestors) would ultimately defer to the wishes of the people.43 Yet he was equally involved in distributing a celebratory ode in 1769 composed by Thomas Gray and performed at the installation of Wilkes’s reluctant opponent, the Prime Minister (the Duke of Grafton), as Chancellor of Cambridge University. Much in the Wilkite reform programme would in principle have appealed to Johnson as a bookseller, not least its sturdy commitment to bolster freedom of the press by improving the system of trial by jury. This was a pertinent point in libel cases (as John Almon’s experience showed), where juries were excluded from judging whether the actual content of a book was seditious – that was a given. Certainly the injustice of the libel laws now began to emerge as a recurrent grievance in the bookseller’s output.44 In practice, however, he was keen to keep religion and politics separate, like the majority of dissenters, and it was very much in this spirit that he and Payne issued Priestley’s next assault in the Blackstone controversy, A View of the Principles and Conduct of the Protestant Dissenters (1769), written expressly to refute the charge that these were not designed to make them good subjects. Just because dissenters acknowledged no earthly religious head, it argued, this did not mean they had ‘contracted a fondness for equality’ and, though ‘unfriendly to arbitrary government in any form’, they still believed their liberty ‘better secured in a limited monarchy’ than in a republic. Similarly, they were by no means hostile to church establishments and would happily contribute to the support of one, so long as it was ‘accompanied with a toleration of thinking, speaking, writing, and acting with perfect freedom . . . for all that chose to dissent from it’. But, whilst careful to damp down any

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political hint of sedition, Priestley stepped indiscreetly beyond the pale of the main body of dissenters and publicly declared himself ‘an oppugner of the doctrine of the trinity’.45 In this, he claimed to speak for a growing band, thus implicating by association the bookseller whose name was boldly twinned with his on the title page and who at this moment had already undertaken to publish the first of his scriptural assaults on Calvinist orthodoxy. Since the autumn of 1768 news of an important project involving Priestley, Johnson and Payne had been circulating among their dissenting friends and associates. Caleb Fleming, for one, had been informed that a periodical entitled the Theological Repository was soon to make its appearance. During October Priestley had busily solicited contributions and advice, locally, but also from Warrington, London and the south-west. Two months later, Johnson placed an advertisement in the St James’s Chronicle (rather fearlessly) announcing that In this Repository not only will room be given to the freest objections to natural or revealed religion, but they are sincerely requested; and nothing that is new shall be rejected, if it be expressed in decent terms. A number of this work will be published every three months, unless notice be given to the contrary; but the price will vary according to the materials. It will never be less than sixpence, nor hardly ever exceed half a crown.46 It was not to be ‘crouded, like a common magazine’, and would deliberately shun all ‘forms of expression calculated to irritate the passions, and not to enlighten the understanding’.47 Articles and letters were to be sent either to Priestley in Leeds (where the sheets were typically printed and made up) or Johnson, who agreed to act as official publisher and main London distributor. The first issue came out in January 1769. Priestley described the Repository as ‘an occasional publication, for the purpose of preserving such original observations as could otherwise probably never see the light’, and certainly he used it as a vehicle to encourage more heterodox and uninhibited forms of debate and express his own deeply challenging views on the trinity, the unnecessary and vicarious doctrine of atonement, the divinity and pre-existence of Christ and the reasoning and limited inspiration of the authors of the scriptures.48 From the outset, there was no mistaking the scheme was ‘radical’ and uncompromising – in the ‘Preface’ to the first number, Priestley pronounced that he was willing to print the views not just of all denominations of Christians but of unbelievers, and casually proposed that ‘we ought [not] to cherish the least partiality for a system, which will not bear examination.’49 It is easy, perhaps, to underestimate how close this potentially brought him to infringing the laws on blasphemy. Only a few years earlier a deist schoolmaster from Liverpool, Peter Annet, had been fined and sentenced to one month


in prison and a year’s hard labour for publishing The Free Enquirer (1761), in which he was deemed to have ridiculed the Old Testament. The century’s only other subject of a civil prosecution under common law for heresy and blasphemy had been Edward Elwall, arraigned for Unitarian views back in the 1720s, and it was some measure of Priestley’s growing iconoclasm that he should not only have defended and almost identified with Annet in his Essay on Government (‘So far are deists from having free liberty to publish their sentiments, that even many christians cannot speak out with safety’) but would also soon arrange with Johnson to reprint an account of Elwall’s trial.50 Despite its editor’s characteristic pledge to keep the price within bounds (on a par with the shilling typically charged for one of Johnson’s pamphlets and well below the usual four to six shillings for a book), the Repository only ever achieved a very limited sale – many purchasers thinking it ‘too dear’ even at 1s 6d. Reportedly, it was ‘very little read by any but theologians of the Liberal school’ and threatened to alienate many of those since it ‘purposely deserted the beaten track of opinion’.51 This was hardly surprising since the bulk of those who (pseudonymously) submitted articles – William Turner (a close friend and dissenting colleague of Priestley’s at Wakefield, who came up with the work’s original plan), Newcome Cappe (the son of one of Priestley’s predecessors at Leeds who ministered to a small but increasingly liberal congregation in York), William Graham of Halifax, Samuel Merivale (theological tutor at Exeter dissenting academy) and the Reverend William Hazlitt (who wrote as ‘Rationalis’) – tended towards Socinianism. There was a conspicuous failure, however, to attract the views of deists or atheists, despite several attempts to solicit such objections, which may have helped transform it into something other than a small, virtually parochial exercise run by Priestley and a few of his friends (who sympathetically bought up copies). Priestley, who largely took on the expense of publication, incurred considerable losses (as he would with many of his theological works) but was evidently advised to keep quiet about them so as not to hearten his opponents. Johnson, for his part, must barely have met his costs.52 After three years and three volumes, the experiment was temporarily abandoned for want of enough buyers, the bookseller having suggested as much as early as February 1771. Priestley, however, still hoped to revive it at the earliest opportunity. Having denounced literary timidity in his Essay on Government, Priestley clearly failed in the Repository to overcome the fears of his readers. Too ‘radical’ and Unitarian-leaning in its views to be countenanced by middlebrow clergy, it was also too professedly academic and self-scrutinizing an organ of inquiry to strike much of a popular chord. In this, it stood in marked contrast to the small, simple and direct addresses to dissenters which Priestley simultaneously had printed at Leeds to instil church discipline, which he felt to be sorely lacking among his hearers, reject Calvinist doc-

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trine and counter the pervasive spread of Methodism. Again issued in the cheapest manner possible, in some cases for as little as a penny so they might even be read by poor families, these made ‘a good deal of noise’ locally and, according to Priestley, proved greatly effective in establishing liberal principles of religion. Copies were snapped up by the dozen and only when a second extensive print run of 2000 was under way were unbound copies of the most popular of these – An Appeal to the Serious and Candid Professors of Christianity (1771) – sent down to Johnson in London. The bookseller, then, pumped out several new editions which were distributed to booksellers in Bristol, Exeter, Liverpool (John Gore), Manchester, Warrington and West Yorkshire.53 As severe in their strictures on dissenters as Priestley had earlier been towards members of the established church, these works, too, aroused considerable resentment and, whilst revealing their author to be admirably disinterested, also placed him in the unenviable position of Ishmael: ‘My hand . . . against every man, and every man’s hand against me’. Less than two years after his Essay on Government, Priestley estimated that he had made ‘more enemies among the dissenters than in the church’ by his polemical tracts and theology. Not for a moment, however, did he regret what he had published (convinced that Christianity would be ‘a gainer by such freedoms’ as he had taken), nor were he or his bookseller in any way deterred.54 * Early on the morning of 8 January 1770 Johnson and Payne’s shop and entire stock on Paternoster Row were destroyed in a terrible fire and the two booksellers ‘slightly burnt in making their escape’. For the next six months Johnson operated out of temporary lodgings at No. 44, which meant that Priestley (and doubtless other of his provincial authors) was ‘at a loss for a lodging’ in London when he made his annual visit early in March.55 By August, however, with the help of friends, he had managed to set himself up again in business only a street away and directly in the shadow of Anglicanism’s high command at No. 72 St Paul’s Churchyard. His first publications from these narrow, old-fashioned premises were by Priestley and his prominent dissenting acquaintance in Lancashire and Yorkshire, including the newly-installed director of the Warrington Academy, William Enfield, the surgeon John Aikin (son of its divinity tutor and an external lecturer), and his friend Thomas Percival, a leading physician in Manchester and one of its very first students. Enfield had graduated from the same dissenting academy as Priestley (at Daventry) and the two had met during the 1760s whilst he was a minister in Liverpool. Johnson at this time published other members of their coterie such as Philip Holland, a Presbyterian minister who ran a feeder-school for Warrington at nearby Bolton, and Richard Godwin, minister at Gateacre near Liverpool and a trustee of the Academy. Priestley’s recent efforts to drive home the principles of the dissenters had, in fact, given rise to criticism from Enfield who felt they were


damaging to relations with the Anglican church. By mid-1771, however, the two were back upon very good terms and their mutual bookseller was able to advertise himself as exclusive London agent for the Academy. Henceforward, theological and scientific works by almost half its complement of resident tutors and several of its small but influential set of graduates to the dissenting ministry were entrusted to him for London sale. Most of them were struck off locally by the Academy’s distinguished printer, William Eyres. Among the roll-call of former medical students at Warrington whom he published were the respected West Country physician Samuel Farr, a friend of Thomas Percival’s based at the Bristol Infirmary, and the eminent Lancashire-born surgeon Edward Rigby (a descendant of Dr John Taylor) who made a great impact with his medical and philanthropic activities at Norwich. Johnson also issued a set of Observations on the General Highway and Turnpike Acts (1773) by another Lancashire-based promoter and future Vice-President of the Academy, Thomas Butterworth Bayley.56 The transition to St Paul’s Churchyard, however, was not completely seamless. For one thing, it spelled the end of Johnson’s partnership with Payne and for the next thirty years he acted on his own in business, helped only by a former schoolmaster named ‘Redman’ – a ‘clever, steady, well conducted man’ who served as his shopman for many years – and later another servant, ‘Mr. Day’.57 There was also the pressing question of how to repair the loss of printed works and manuscripts consumed by the blaze. In Priestley’s case, virtually all the property he had (including articles for the Repository) was in Johnson’s hands. Most of the copies of his ‘Answer’ to Dr Balguy had been destroyed and, as it was not worthwhile reprinting by itself, he decided to ‘incorporate every thing of value in it’ into the revised edition of his Essay on Government which he and Johnson were planning to publish. For this, he asked some friends of recent acquaintance in Yorkshire to suggest any improvements, particularly what they had to ‘allege against the toleration of Popery’, which he promised to include.58 Archdeacon Francis Blackburne and his son-in-law, the Reverend Theophilus Lindsey, were both liberal-minded members of the Anglican church but, like many dissenters, fanatical anti-Catholics. They did, however, share Priestley’s views about the primacy of scripture and the inviolability of private conscience. Lindsey was a friend and contributor to the Theological Repository whom Priestley now tended to consult before any of his works went to press. Blackburne was theologically more conservative and horrified by the lurch towards Unitarianism exhibited in the Repository, though he himself had been responsible for re-igniting the controversy over subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles with his publication The Confessional (1766). In his original Essay Priestley had praised The Confessional and, though he took no further notice of the debate surrounding it in his new edition, he defended its author and his ‘respectable friends’ and all those who proposed a reformation in the church from within its ranks.59 His bookseller, however,

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had fully launched himself into the fray by bringing out A Short and Seasonable Application to the Public, In Behalf of A Respectful Address to the Parliament, to Procure a Legal Redress of Notorious, Religious Grievances (1768) by ‘Tyro-Theologus’. The author – an Anglican rector from Essex, Francis Stone – urged that ‘unitarian believers of weight’ (both within the church and among the dissenters) set up a society in London to organize ‘a vigorous, respectful, and solemn application’ to Parliament to relieve them from the burden of subscription.60 Stone’s pamphlet formed the basis of a meeting which took place on 17 July 1771 at the Feathers Tavern on the Strand, chaired by Lindsey and attended by around 20 other learned and respectable Anglicans, including Blackburne. At this it was resolved to form an ‘Association’ to conduct the application and to accept a petition (drawn up by Blackburne) calling for exemption from compulsory subscription which would be circulated nationwide and then submitted to Parliament. Johnson had already published a series of pamphlets in defence of The Confessional by Benjamin Dawson, a rector in Suffolk, who proved an influential if somewhat controversial figure in the Feathers Tavern movement, having trained for the dissenting ministry but conformed to the established church.61 Moreover, his connections with the leading Cambridge booksellers Thomas and John Merrill (with whom he co-distributed works from the mid-1760s) had linked him to a group of ‘Reforming’ Anglicans at the University who were to become leading supporters of Blackburne and his petition. Led by the Reverend Thomas Edwards, a former fellow of Clare College, these mainly included students and fellows of Peterhouse, among them Edmund Law (a long-time friend of Blackburne’s and Master of the College, who had recently been appointed Bishop of Carlisle), John Disney (his chaplain and later, like Lindsey, a son-in-law of Blackburne), Richard Watson (soon-to-be-made Professor of Divinity) and John Jebb, who set in motion a parallel campaign to abolish subscription at Cambridge.62 In November 1771 Lindsey spoke of ‘friends in and about London’ not being ‘idle’ in the cause – an allusion most obviously to his fellow lay and clerical petitioners but which may indirectly have encompassed Johnson’s activities for, whilst the Feathers Tavern petition was circulating, the latter published an anonymous Letter to a Friend in Defence of Religious Liberty ([1771]), which touched on appropriate confessions of faith for dissenters, and A Letter to His Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury, on the Subject of the Intended Petition to Parliament (1771) by ‘A Clergyman of the Church of England’. Lindsey by this stage was certainly aware of his existence, having been instructed by Priestley earlier in the year to ‘Direct to me at Mr Johnson[s] Bookseller, No. 72. St Paul’s Churchyard’. He and Johnson may even have met at the time of the first Feathers Tavern meeting in July since Lindsey remained in London ‘trotting from place to place’ until the end of the month. Certainly, like all Priestley’s acquaintance, the bookseller was a ‘well-wisher’ to the petition.63 In general, however, the dissenters showed


little active interest in the Feathers’ campaign, though they were not overtly hostile like the Methodists. Even Priestley found it hard to reconcile the basic difference in their positions, despite their common grievance, and frankly confessed himself bemused at ‘an application to the powers of this world for a reformation in the business of religion.’ Despite the scale of Lindsey’s efforts, only 250 signatures were raised and, though introduced and debated at length in the Commons on 6 February 1772, the Feathers Tavern petition was rejected by 217 votes to 71.64 Barely a handful of dissenters were present in the Commons Gallery and yet some of the speeches they heard proved so encouraging that a meeting of dissenting ministers was immediately urged in London to organize their own application for relief. Priestley, again, had some purely random misgivings, ‘afraid that so many applications of the same kind would disgust our statesmen’ and conscious that, whatever the outcome, it would do nothing to protect him as a Unitarian, but he promised heartily to cooperate in anything that aimed to help the dissenters and also the Anglican petitioners. On 10 March he set out for London intending to stay five weeks at St Paul’s Churchyard.65 There he found his bookseller engaged in a steady stream of pro-dissenting works, including A Serious and Earnest Address to Protestant Dissenters Representing the Many and Important Principles, on which their Dissent from the Establishment is Grounded (1772), the debut of a graduate from Hoxton Academy, Joseph Cornish. Originally from Taunton, Cornish was about to take charge of a small Presbyterian congregation at Colyton in Devon, from which time Johnson published his Brief and Impartial History of the Puritans (1772), A Blow at the Root of all Priestly Claims (1775) and Life of Mr. Thomas Firmin (1780), one of the earliest antitrinitarians. Priestley may also have been able to browse through a set of Queries Recommended to the Consideration of the Public, With Regard to the Thirty Nine Articles (1772) by an Arian curate long renowned for his assaults on church authority, William Hopkins, and some Free Remarks on a Sermon Entitled, ‘The Requisition of Subscription to the Thirty Nine Articles and Liturgy of the Church of England Not Inconsistent with Christian Liberty’ (1772) by a dissenting minster and former divinity student of his at Warrington, John Palmer.66 On 3 April Priestley attended the Commons, possibly with Johnson in tow, to hear the dissenters’ bill for the abolition of subscription introduced by the dissenting MP for Preston and future President of Warrington Academy, Sir Henry Hoghton. There were only two opposing voices and Edmund Burke came out in support, ‘contending for a strict establishment and a large toleration’, illustrating, as Priestley pointed out to Lindsey, ‘the difference between your case and ours’, and the bill was allowed very quickly to pass without a division.67 Six weeks later, however, it was rejected in the Lords, chiefly owing to the unanimous opposition of the bishops. One view among supporters of the bill was that they had been ‘deceived by an artful

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administration’ which had knowingly left it to the upper hence to throw out the bill so as not to lose the dissenters’ goodwill at the next election.68 Many had long suspected as much and were not surprised, including Priestley who, though he had deliberately refrained from using his pen to promote the bill, had ironically done much by his recent theological writings to stoke up clerical and court hostility. Whilst in London, he and Johnson had arranged to print an anonymous set of Familiar Illustrations of Certain Passages of Scripture (1772) relating to the atonement, original sin and the divinity of Christ, which effectively put a Unitarian spin on ‘all the Texts of which the Orthodox avail themselves’ and was condemned as nothing more than barefaced effrontery by the Methodist clergyman Martin Madan in the London Evening Post and Henry Venn in the London Chronicle. Johnson also brought out the first of his Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religion (3 vols, 1772–74), which aimed simply to set out the evidence for Christianity but rejected the veneration of Christ and urged their young dissenting readers to ‘Respect a parliamentary king’ yet have ‘nothing to do with a parliamentary religion, or a parliamentary God.’ It was no surprise, therefore, that, during the Lords debate on 19 May, the Bishop of Llandaff railed against the principles of some current dissenting ministers by directly quoting extracts from Priestley’s works which even Chatham himself (who introduced the bill) interrupted with cries of ‘Monstrous! horrible! shocking!’69 Priestley appears always to have accepted such fall-out as the necessary and almost inevitable consequence of his attempts at ‘candour’, but the countervailing effects of his work, particularly on the fortunes of the antisubscription lobby which was desperate to keep doctrinal questions out of the argument, were undeniable and served considerably to entrench the ministry in its view that, with the Presbyterians ‘so much more resembling Socinians than Christians’, ‘the Test was never so necessary as at present’.70 Despite ructions and disagreements among the dissenters, it was not their intention to abandon the campaign and a meeting of the General Body of Dissenting Ministers in June ‘resolved to keep the important object in view’. At the start of December Priestley and Lindsey both arranged to travel to London: Lindsey for the next meeting at the Feathers Tavern, Priestley to decide one matter only – whether to accept the post recently offered him as librarian to the liberal Chathamite statesman Lord Shelburne. Johnson, not insignificantly, was the first to remonstrate with Priestley about this, convinced that the connection would be ‘too dependant and humiliating, and not leave [him] sufficiently master of [his] own conduct.’71 Shelburne’s too-obvious cleverness and covert ways of dealing already inspired a large measure of scepticism and distrust and, having initially attached himself to Bute and then served under both Grenville and Chatham, he was widely regarded as something of a political chameleon. Johnson certainly did not think at all favourably of his character, notwithstanding the fact that he had spoken in favour of the dissenters’ bill in the Lords in May, after heavy


lobbying from Richard Price. Given the losses he had sustained as a result of his recent publishing ventures, the economic temptations of the offer proved all too great and, flying in the face of his bookseller’s protests, Priestley resigned from the Mill Hill Chapel on 20 December. Faithful as ever, Johnson still published his farewell discourse, as well as the inaugural sermon preached by his replacement, William Wood, newly arrived from Ipswich on the recommendation of Price and Andrew Kippis. On 23 December a meeting of the General Body of London dissenting ministers determined to renew their application to Parliament. Two months later, on 22 February, a second dissenters’ bill (slightly amended from the first and proposing a generalized form of subscription rather than its abolition) was submitted by Sir Henry Hoghton. Again it passed through the Commons unimpeded, despite a damaging lack of unanimity between ‘rational’ and orthodox dissenters which surfaced during the debate. Notwithstanding the efforts of Rockingham and Shelburne, it once more met with defeat (albeit by a reduced majority) at the combined hands of the king and bishops in the Lords in April. Johnson’s activities at this time signalled a definite upping of tempo in the debate, which was documented in its entirety in A Short View of the Controversies Occasioned By the Confessional, and the Petition to Parliament for Relief in the Matter of Subscription (1773) compiled by the active Feathers Tavern member John Disney. This showed the bookseller to have been responsible for around a fifth of the anti-subscription works published since 1766. A set of Objections Against Allowing Any Human Authority in Matters of Religion, (Occasioned By A Late Application to Parliament [1773]) by an Essex cleric, Charles Case, and some Loose Hints on the Subject of Non-Conformity. Addressed to the Right Reverend the Lords Bishops of England (1773) by ‘A Gentleman’, also made their way onto his list, as did two much-celebrated Letters, Addressed to the Right Rev. Prelates, who a Second Time Rejected the Dissenters’ Bill (1773). The anonymous author (whom some thought might be ‘Junius’) turned out to be Ebenezer Radcliff, a friend and dissenting colleague of Priestley in London who had succeeded Nathaniel Lardner at Poor Jewry Lane. The following year Johnson brought out two further unsigned letters aimed at those presently opposed to any further reformation. The first was addressed to the Archbishop of Canterbury (again by Disney), and the second to the Bishop of Llandaff (who had proved so eloquent against the dissenters in Parliament) by a nonconformist minister close to Shelburne’s estate in Wiltshire, Benjamin Thomas. Both maintained that the spirit of the times was clearly running against the bishops and that attempts at repeal could not be indefinitely put off.72 Alongside these, he published two discourses by the Reverend William Hazlitt, under the title Human Authority, in Matters of Faith, Repugnant to Christ (1774), and Two Letters on the Late Applications to Parliament By the Protestant Dissenting Ministers (1774) from the Taunton-based General Baptist Joshua Toulmin.

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Toulmin was another product of the dissenting academy which had preceded Hoxton and, in company with Priestley, he had rejected Calvinism and by the early 1770s made the logical step to Socinianism. Indeed, as well as contributing to the Theological Repository, he had just undertaken to write the Memoirs of the Life, Character, Sentiments, and Writings of Faustus Socinus (1777) which he would later sell in London through Johnson. Toulmin’s Letters criticized the present system of toleration as nothing more than a ‘temporary relaxation of tyranny and persecution’ which kept dissenters in perpetual fear of being fined or imprisoned. They should now call for the restoration of their natural rights rather than settle for mere ‘liberty by connivance’.73 Priestley likewise had penned an anonymous Letter of Advice to those Dissenters who Conduct the Application to Parliament, in which he urged them (rather optimistically) in their next bill to be much more daring and comprehensive. They should now put forward their cause, not simply as Christians, but as men pleading ‘the common rights of humanity’, and demand the repeal of all laws regarding religious opinion.74 As usual, Priestley sent a copy of his Letter to Lindsey (‘sensible that my disposition led to precipitancy, to which [his] coolness was a seasonable check’), requesting his opinion of it. Lindsey had no doubt that it would disserve the dissenting cause and that, as Priestley was now more in the public eye, he should be more ‘correct and well considered’ in what he published. It was printed (evidently with Johnson’s name on the title-page) late in 1773 but, by the time it appeared, the prospect of a third dissenting application had virtually been abandoned.75 Naturally quieter than his friend and less enamoured of controversy, Lindsey may also have been worried that such remarks would rebound upon his own cause. The Feathers Taverners had already been accused of harbouring dangerous Socinian opinions, like the dissenting petitioners, and no opportunity had been spared to depict both as ‘fellowlabourers’ of the rebellious Wilkites. However, by the time their case received its rather paltry second hearing on 5 May 1774, the ‘Association’ had all but disbanded and Lindsey himself had left the church, no longer able to square his anti-trinitarian views with those of his colleagues.76 Even before Lindsey arrived in London in January, Johnson had received the sheets of his farewell address to his parishioners at Catterick (which friends at Cambridge had encouraged him to publish) and arranged for a small number to be printed. He had also made up the proof sheets of an Apology (1774) which outlined Lindsey’s reasons for resigning his lucrative living (worth £400 a year) and also gave a comprehensive view of the arguments for Unitarianism that had been diplomatically edited down on the advice of friends. Ironically, in view of Lindsey’s caution, various moves were made to block its appearance, in case it damaged the petitioners’ cause, but Johnson still went ahead and published it at the beginning of January. It received a warm reception and sold surprisingly well, reaching three editions in its first year.77 Johnson was surely one of those who visited Lindsey


to ‘testify their regard’ and ‘offer their services’ to him at his modest lodgings in Holborn. (Lindsey had been forced to sell his library, so he may well have volunteered to re-supply him with books.) Certainly, it is easy to see how Lindsey’s pious and disinterested example would have appealed to the bookseller; particularly in view of just how much a contrast it presented with Priestley’s recent decision to leave the dissenting ministry (and a salary of only a hundred guineas a year) for £250 per annum, a house and ‘a certainty for life’ under Shelburne. At the same time, however, Lindsey’s theological project – to remove ‘the shocking snares that are in the way of conscientious men, and the impure idolatries of Christian worship’ – was closely in tune with Priestley’s. Priestley, indeed, attributed much of his zeal for the Unitarian cause to Lindsey and, especially after 1774, noted ‘an entire concurrence in every thing that we thought to be for the interest of Christianity’.78 Johnson immediately struck up a close friendship with Lindsey and threw himself into helping him realize his plans to open the first Unitarian chapel in London. After a long search, he finally negotiated with a well-known but financially hard-pressed Unitarian book-buyer and auctioneer, Samuel Paterson, to rent his rooms on Essex Street, just off the Strand, and arranged for them to be temporarily fitted up as a chapel.79 He also led the slightly drawn-out attempts to obtain a licence from the Westminster Justices and exerted himself in obtaining subscriptions to support the new chapel which in its first two years required around £200 – this, despite the fact that it was chiefly projected as a resort for disillusioned Anglicans. The revised liturgy which Lindsey prepared for the use of his congregation on the plan of Samuel Clarke (with modifications by John Jebb and a few other of his learned colleagues at Cambridge) was sent to St Paul’s Churchyard to be published. Like Clarke’s, this only contained addresses to ‘the One God’, used the word ‘minister’ instead of ‘priest’, replaced ‘Holy Ghost’ with ‘Holy Spirit’, dropped the Apostles’ Creed and, in the prayer for Parliament, omitted to call the king ‘our most religious and gracious’. According to Lindsey, it won praise from ‘many wise and good men’ (including Priestley and Price) but was roundly condemned as ‘forward’ and ‘schismatical’ by senior Anglican clergy.80 Seven hundred copies were sold by Johnson within six weeks and he immediately reissued it, together with A Collection of Hymns for Public Worship (1774), edited by Lindsey. Despite receiving many hostile letters through the post and a request from two MPs not to persist in a plan which would invariably turn public opinion against them, neither Lindsey or Johnson was dissuaded from opening the chapel, an event which finally took place on Sunday 17 April. Preaching before a 200-strong congregation, however, Lindsey was deliberately discreet in expressing his Unitarian views and used his inaugural sermon broadly to assert that it was never God’s design that all Christians should hold to one opinion in religion and that his aim in forming a

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separate congregation was simply to be ‘at liberty to worship God alone, after the command and example of our Saviour Christ’. He may have been aware that there was a government spy in the room who visited regularly for some time after. But he had also vowed not to dispute sensitive theological or political points from his pulpit and to depart only as far from the established mode of worship as was ‘necessary to edification’ and his own conscience.81 Though nominally it may have acted as ‘a focus for many in London who held radical religious and political views’, members of the congregation at Essex Street were, in fact, ‘mostly of the Establishment’ and eminently ‘persons of condition’, like Lindsey himself, and the spy was doubtless surprised to find himself surrounded by wealthy landowners, peers of the realm, bankers, barristers, physicians and several MPs. Certainly, after it was found that Lindsey’s preaching was less than inflammatory, his visits appear to have dropped off.82 Priestley, however, was in the audience and continued to attend and sometimes officiate for Lindsey whenever he was in London. So, too, were his friends, the Yorkshire Whig MP Sir George Savile and dissenting barrister John Lee, who both supported the anti-subscription cause and Wilkes, and who were among the chapel’s first trustees. Joseph Johnson was also present and, within a week, had rushed out Lindsey’s opening sermon, which sold 500 copies in only four days. Thereafter, he became a permanent member of the congregation, just like his fellow bookseller Thomas Cadell, who also acted as a trustee. Rather than Cadell, however, it was Johnson who was entrusted with the publication of sermons that were delivered there, as well as all Lindsey’s future theological works and those of other members of the growing body of Unitarian apologists. By the mid-1770s Johnson had placed himself at the heart of a new ‘rational’ religious movement which, though provincial in origin, was now firmly centred in London with headquarters off the Strand and its main press office in St Paul’s Churchyard. Johnson’s zealous support for Lindsey and the Essex Street Chapel has to be seen as evidence of his own personal commitment by this stage to, at the very least, a genteel form of Unitarianism. In professional terms, too, it shows that he was keen to contribute by the publication of books in ‘so glorious a cause’ to what Lindsey called the spread of ‘gospel light and information’. Within the liberal dissenting community at least, it was not long before there was evidence that these activities were starting to pay off, as one contemporary correspondent observed: We were induced to change our sentiments by what we read in the Theological Repository, and in other earlier, and subsequent publications, particularly Cardale’s True Doctrine of the New Testament. . . . I am possessed of a small collection of some of the writers on this side of the question. I have Cardale’s True Doctrine, with three pamphlets by the same author. – Mr. Lindsey’s excellent Apology & Sequel – The Theological Reposi-


tory & what I value much Dr. Priestley’s Appeal, Triumph, Letters & Queries, and Familiar Illustration. I hold these small publications in very great esteem, as they may be circulated at a small expence, and by this means greatly serve the cause of Truth. I ardently wish that such small pieces were frequently published, as I think they could not fail of doing much good in diffusing rational Christianity among us common people.83 There was still, however, nothing rigidly dogmatic about Johnson as a bookseller, just as there had been nothing remotely prescriptive or doctrinal about either of the campaigns mounted by the clerical or dissenting petitioners with which he was associated, but rather a fundamental concern to protect individual liberty and conscience. In uniting the twin strands of liberal dissenting and Anglican opinion and in proving himself willing to publish hazardously pro-Catholic, deist and even atheistical views (most notably in the Theological Repository), as well as those of traditional orthodox Calvinists, he had already gone some way to proving his activities were not remotely sectarian or partial. Indeed, his policy, necessarily reflecting that of many of his more ‘rational’-minded authors, was to remain extraordinarily open and receptive to all forms of criticism, correction, counterargument and improvement. Yet this enlightened pluralistic approach was also seen by its opponents as inherently permissive, opening the door to all forms of unhealthy questioning and scepticism, and at odds with the stable virtues of established religion and authority. It gave a positive sanction to those seeking not to elucidate but to undermine the very basis of Christian belief and who queried in their works the fundamental principles of sovereignty, uniformity and the propriety of state control and influence. These were issues which had long preoccupied (and, indeed, helped to define) dissenters but which again by the 1770s had assumed an added political resonance, threatening the spread of disaffection from Church to State, not only in the light of the constitutional crisis raised by Wilkes but also the rumblings of discontent now coming from America.

2 Striving for Independence

[T]he American war, (the only instance since the accession of the house of Hanover, when the Dissenters, as a body, opposed government) . . . Analytical Review (1790) On 13 June 1769 Joseph Priestley wrote to Anna Laetitia Aikin at Warrington asking for a copy of her poem ‘Corsica’, together ‘with permission to publish it for the benefit of those noble islanders’ who a year earlier had been invaded by the French: In this case you have only to send a corrected copy to me at Leeds, to Mr. Johnson in London, and I will take care to introduce it to the notice of Mr. Boswell . . . or some other of the friends of liberty and Corsica in London. James Boswell had recently achieved fame with his prose Account of Corsica (1768) in support of the island’s struggle to regain its independence and, in her poem, Aikin praised ‘generous BOSWEL’ for his ‘patriot zeal’, as well as the Corsican rebel leader, General Paoli (ll. 19, 27).1 The presiding presence in the ode, however, was Priestley, whose concern for civil and religious liberty and free intellectual enquiry informed its enlightened political sentiments. Aikin’s father, the Reverend John Aikin, was divinity tutor at Warrington Academy and both she and her brother, John, had been heavily influenced in their education by its guiding liberal spirit. Priestley, in fact, had encouraged Aikin in her first attempts at verse and, on this evidence, was also responsible for soliciting some of the most noteworthy dissenting works which Joseph Johnson published during the 1770s. ‘Corsica’ was eventually printed in Warrington by William Eyres and sold in London through St Paul’s Churchyard from the end of 1772 when it formed part of Aikin’s first collected volume of Poems (1773). This included another more timid and playful appeal for liberty, ‘The Mouse’s Petition’, 30

Striving for Independence 31

prompted again, this time somewhat ironically, by Priestley and one of his experiments on animals with different kinds of air.2 In it, we find the mouse ‘forlorn and sad’, ‘a pensive prisoner’ significantly praying (like its Muse) in the trap in which it has been confined all night. One of nature’s representative ‘commoners’, it sighs in the knowledge that the morning ‘brings impending fate’ and cries for compassion that the heart of man never be ‘shut/Against the wretch’s cries’: If e’er thy breast with freedom glowed, And spurned a tyrant’s chain, Let not thy strong oppressive force A free-born mouse detain. (ll. 1–12, 26) In truth, there was a good deal more devotional verse in Aikin’s volume than politics, although in her closing sequence of hymns she heavily confirmed her religious leanings (‘JEHOVAH reigns, unbounded, and alone’, ‘let no inferior nature/Usurp, or share the throne’) and, in several affecting personal tributes to family and friends (including Priestley’s wife), revealed her intimacy with the domestic and intellectual milieu at Warrington. In her lighter moments – ‘The Groans of the Tankard’, for instance, in which the overly ‘Puritanic’ habits of the Presbyterians compare equally with the dull worldly excesses of the ‘rosy Prebend’ and ‘gouty Dean’ (ll. 63, 70–1) – she showed herself no lover of extremes and, in some ‘Verses on Mrs. Rowe’, invoked an earlier nonconformist writer, noted for having led both a cheerful and a ‘spotless’ life, as her poetic Muse and model (ll. 2, 4, 16). Though too unfeminine for some critics’ taste, the merits which Priestley first detected in Aikin’s writing – her strong judgment, even temper and elegantly polished lines – clearly won readers for her Poems which proved a tremendous success, meriting three editions within a year. Warrington Library immediately ordered a copy and, a quarter of a century later, they were still being recommended to ‘every person who has any pretensions to taste, and every library in the kingdom’.3 In addition, Aikin’s libertarian instincts as a poet, her prescient brooding over ‘the stubborn gripe of fate;/And war, and sharp distress’ (‘Corsica’, ll. 156–7), and her support for even the lowliest and most distant of subjects petitioning for redress, did bring her to the attention of metropolitan free-thinkers and reformers, among them the celebrated historian Catharine Macaulay, herself author of A Short Sketch of a Democratical Form of Government in a Letter to Signor Paoli (1767), the leading ‘Bluestocking’ Elizabeth Montagu (who greatly admired ‘Corsica’ and presented a copy to the exiled Paoli), the printer and journalist William Woodfall (brother of ‘Junius’s’ publisher) who possibly saw her work in manuscript and reviewed it in the Monthly, and also members of

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the distinguished ‘Club of Honest Whigs’. These were the ‘Friends of Science and Liberty’ who met fortnightly on Thursday evenings at the St Paul’s Coffee House close to Johnson’s bookshop, and included Andrew Kippis, Richard Price and several other leading ‘rational’ dissenters with whom Priestley was acquainted, James Boswell (to whom Priestley read ‘Corsica’ aloud in April 1772) and the Americans’ chief agent in London, Benjamin Franklin. To them, Aikin’s work, like the example of Corsica itself, fed into a wider and much more ominous political debate that was beginning to take shape around the natural rights and liberties of the subject, fuelled by the separate activities of anti-subscription reformers and Wilkes, and increasingly by Britain’s own heavy-handed attempts to manage her American colonies. Priestley had intimated as much in his original letter to Aikin when he informed her that he was about to make his own potentially libellous bid for the pillory or King’s Bench Prison. He was chiefly referring to a short pamphlet written partly at Franklin’s request and which appeared under the anonymous but politically charged persona of ‘an Englishman’ already used to such great effect by Wilkes, The Present State of Liberty in Great Britain and Her Colonies (1769). In this, Priestley endeavoured to accelerate that process, already outlined in his Essay on Government, of giving all subjects a just idea of their natural and civil rights at a time when these were seen to be under invasion.4 The Present State of Liberty was divided into three sections: ‘On Government in General’, ‘Of Liberty in England’ and the ‘Affairs of America’. Its engagingly simple, straightforward ‘Question and Answer’ format (redolent of the catechisms Priestley simultaneously published) was designed to make it ‘sufficiently plain and intelligible’ to all manner of readers and its concern not to seem superior was very much in keeping with its arguments. Priestley stressed the equal and common interest which existed between Britain and her colonies. He described the people of the two countries not as parent-and-child – the way in which the relationship was conventionally perceived, at least in England – but as fellow-subjects and urged the British not to indulge their sense of paternalism and ‘enslave a great and magnanimous nation’. He again raised the memory of the ‘bad’ Stuarts and their arbitrary exercise of power which had forced the colonial settlers to flee during the previous century. A hundred years on and the ‘iron hand of oppression’ was again seen to be extending itself across the Atlantic in a series of arbitrary and oppressive measures enacted by Parliament.5 In February 1765 Grenville’s ministry had introduced the Stamp Act, the first of a series of legislative attempts to recoup some of the massive debts incurred by the Seven Years War and finance the colonies’ defence by imposing internal duties (mainly on legal documents and newspapers). This had immediately sparked violent protests in Boston against what the Americans saw as a discriminatory tax without their consent. Further widespread peti-


tioning by British merchants and an American boycott of British goods had resulted in the Act being speedily repealed under Rockingham in February 1766. The Declaratory Act which accompanied repeal, however, proved more than merely a face-saving exercise since it affirmed the total supremacy of the British Parliament ‘to make laws and statutes of sufficient force and validity to bind the colonies and people of America, subjects of the Crown of Great Britain, in all cases whatsoever’, and served to raise deeper and more divisive constitutional issues than simply the right to levy taxation. In May 1767 the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Charles Townshend, had attempted the same ill-judged trick again and brought in legislation designed to raise revenue indirectly from the colonies by imposing import duties on tea, paper, glass and lead. But the Townshend duties again only succeeded in provoking hostility, particularly in Boston where disturbances had to be put down by troops. On 1 May 1769 Parliament had decided to repeal all the duties, except that on tea, although it still held in principle to the Declaratory Act. In The Present State of Liberty, it was the authors of these measures whom Priestley chose to deplore for their ideological ‘infatuation’ and downright folly in believing that tax revenues gained by such duties would not be offset by massive resultant losses in trade – an emotive concern for the wealthy dissenting merchants and manufacturers in his congregation.6 Contrary to the principles enshrined in the Declaratory Act, he argued, the British government had no right to interfere in the colonies’ domestic affairs and Englishmen of both nations now had less to fear from the king than from his ministers, who could more fairly be suspected of having designs upon their liberties. With explicit reference to Wilkes, he catalogued recent disturbing attacks upon the essential rights of the subject: among them, the use of general warrants, the evasion of habeas corpus and trial by jury, the growing restrictions on the liberty of the press (‘that great security for every other branch of our liberty’), the expulsion of a legally elected representative from the House of Commons (thus infringing the Bill of Rights), and the repeated use of military force (in Boston but also close to where Wilkes was being held at St George’s Field in London). In the light of these, he advised every well-wisher to the country to spread alarm throughout the kingdom and instruct their representative to petition for redress of basic grievances, namely, the exclusion of all Commons’ placemen, pensioners and sons of the nobility, oath-taking for MPs against bribery and corruption, freer and more frequent elections and the abolition of small insignificant boroughs. (Here Priestley drew keen parallels between the lack of adequate representation in New York and large English towns such as Liverpool and Manchester.) Still, however, he did not feel that every individual should have an electoral voice but only those who could safely be considered above being corrupted. Also, far from advocating civil disobedience, he defused any obvious political threat by displacing the capacity for change and casting

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himself, and all men, in an essentially passive role, taking refuge from present evil in prayer and the ‘unsearchable ways of Divine Providence’.7 Joseph Johnson published The Present State of Liberty with his partner, John Payne, during the summer of 1769. Though the Gentleman’s Magazine thought its subject ‘too superficially treated to afford any considerable share of information’, it quickly won the notice of Opposition Whig MPs, particularly Sir George Savile who, together with some of Priestley’s other friends, circulated it in large numbers and to some effect, and cheap editions were run off and distributed throughout the country.8 It was one of the first of the bookseller’s works to deal specifically with the colonial crisis and a notably provocative one since, as Priestley acknowledged, it amounted to a direct assault on government. Moreover, the work both chimed with the rhetoric of pro-Wilkite publicists and much of the rising propaganda of the American revolutionaries through the shared influence of earlier political thinkers such as Locke, their common respect for the 1688 Whig constitution and distrust of the present government.9 However, it stood virtually alone among Johnson’s list of publications at this time in its preoccupation with the colonies. In the two decades up to 1784 it has been estimated that more than a thousand titles on the subject of America were published, the majority of them by British authors. Yet the immediate press fall-out, though it made itself more felt in newspapers than in pamphlets on both sides of the Atlantic, was not reflected in any concerted way in the bookseller’s output. This contrasts strongly with other London booksellers such as George Kearsley (whose American Gazette (1768–70) was possibly ‘the largest single body of American material’ to be published prior to 1776), Zachariah Stuart (a noted publisher of ‘Americana’ on Paternoster Row) and, above all, John Almon and Edward and Charles Dilly.10 Almon’s Impartial History (1763) had been among the first of Johnson’s publications to touch on the colonies (within the context of an imperial war) and, by the end of the decade, he had emerged as possibly the most energetic and determined pro-American, pro-Wilkite publicist. Notable for his efforts in agitating for repeal of the Stamp Act, he had enthusiastically taken to reprinting important American political tracts in London, such as James Otis’s influential The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved (1764) and John Dickinson’s Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania (1768), one of the most widely read and quoted colonial works of the period. Like Almon, with whom they often co-operated, the Dilly brothers also solicited and reprinted pamphlets by important American propagandists such as William Smith of Philadelphia, Arthur Lee, Josiah Quincy and Amos Adams. They were, in fact, commercially dependent upon strong links with the colonies (which, like many city merchants, may account for their extreme conciliatory views) as a large part of their business involved exporting sermons and pamphlets across the Atlantic. Indeed, together with Almon, who made ‘a handsome fortune in the business of political controversy’ and


whose allegiances (like Wilkes’s) were always remarkably fluid, the Dillys have been much criticized for not ‘allowing political principles to compromise [their] desire for profit’. Johnson’s friend, the printer Luke Hansard, for instance, described their business as principally ‘a money-getting concern’. Nevertheless, their shop directly to the east of St Paul’s Churchyard at No. 22 Poultry, the ‘Rose and Crown’, established itself as a well-known meeting place for visiting colonists and their ‘patriotic’ friends in London and, after 1776 at least, they virtually dominated the market for pro-American books in the city.11 As a keen dissenter and fast-rising newcomer to the trade, Edward Dilly had associated with Johnson’s mentor George Keith on an assortment of religious works in the late 1750s, including sermons relating to the Seven Years War, decrying it as a desolating judgement upon the nation’s wickedness but pleading the righteousness of Britain’s claims and the goodness and importance of the Protestant cause in America. Johnson, for his part, had kept up the connection but, up until 1774 at least, this centred upon fairly innocuous, non-political works and, initially at least, neither the Dillys’ nor Almon’s colonial enthusiasms appear to have made any significant impression on his output. However, at a time when, as Samuel Adams of Massachusetts remarked, ‘all the writings relative to the revolutions in England became fashionable reading’, Johnson was notably involved in publishing works which rejuvenated the ideas of seventeenth-century Commonwealth writers and which, though chiefly pertinent to the dissenters, were drawn upon by the colonists.12 He appears to have had no direct concern in the straight reprinting of earlier republican works, such as the separate editions of Locke or the collected Works (7th edn, 1768) which came out during this period, chiefly under the auspices of the distinguished Scotsborn bookseller Andrew Millar. Millar had brought out successive editions of such Real Whig classics throughout his career, including Sidney’s Discourses on Government (a work which arguably became ‘more of a bible to the revolutionaries than any of the other works of his century, Milton only excepted’) and Harrington’s Oceana.13 Probably via his connection with Millar’s successor, Thomas Cadell (who issued his own edition of the Oceana and Other Works (1771) and a new edition of Sidney’s works in 1772), Johnson did choose to serialize Harrington’s work in the Monthly Record of Literature (1767), a periodical he briefly ran with Benjamin Davenport whose pages were ‘chiefly occupied with essays in the interest of religion, virtue, and civil liberty.’14 Like Cadell, he also assumed a stake in the next edition of Locke’s Works (8th edn, 1777) edited by Edmund Law, although it was not until ten years later that he seriously began to play a part in reprinting Locke, Milton or Sidney. By the late 1760s, however, his reputation as a friend and publisher of many modern ‘Lockeans’ could already be said to have been established. Priestley’s Essay on Government, for example, had invoked the memory of ‘such brave, though unsuccessful . . . friends of

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liberty, and the rights of mankind, as . . . Russel [sic] and Sidney’ and ‘glorious Hampden, Pym, and many others, who figured at the opening of the Long Parliament’ had been lauded in his reply to Blackstone.15 The work of the ‘Independent Whig’ Thomas Gordon had featured heavily in The Pillars of Priestcraft and Orthodoxy Shaken (1768) by Richard Baron, himself a fervent republican who had done much to disseminate and re-popularize the Real Whig canon. Like Lindsey and Caleb Fleming, Baron had been friendly with the zealous Whig patron and propagandist Thomas Hollis, who supervised Millar’s editions of Sidney and Locke (in some cases, hiring Baron to correct the press) and who encouraged and privately funded much of the Dillys’ and John Almon’s pro-American pamphleteering. Hollis not only kept Lindsey and other dissenters well-stocked with colonial pamphlets, he also circulated Priestley’s essays and various dissenting addresses among his friends and even presented copies to Harvard College. Again with Cadell, and very much in the same vein, Johnson and Payne had brought out a new edition of The Dignity of Human Nature (1767) by the dissenting schoolmaster James Burgh. Like his friend and neighbour Richard Price at Newington Green, Burgh was a member of the ‘Club of Honest Whigs’ and intimate with Priestley, Kippis and the other ‘philosophical gentlemen’ who gathered together every fortnight over beer and porter to talk (‘sometimes sensibly, and sometimes furiously’, as Boswell put it) on science, politics and religion.16 Prior to 1760 his writings were chiefly concerned with moral and educational matters but, stimulated by the discussion and activities of the ‘Honest Whigs’, most notably Franklin, they had become significantly politicized and charged with heavily reformist, proAmerican sentiment. Originally designed for the benefit of Burgh’s pupils, The Dignity of Human Nature was an attempt to bolster the ‘drooping’ fortunes of religion, knowledge and virtue (in the face of widespread luxury, infidelity and corruption) by calling ‘the attention of mankind to objects worthy of their regard as rational and immortal beings’. Widely praised on its first appearance in 1754, its obvious didactic qualities would have recommended it to Johnson, particularly as it stressed the value of a general education (in which the works of Locke, Sidney, Harrington and Milton were deemed helpful for studying ‘the theoretical part of government’), charting similar territory to Priestley’s Essay.17 Its musings on Arianism and Calvinism, and its preoccupation with the virtues of prudence, ‘Integrity in Dealing’ and modesty (especially ‘in disputing’), would also have won the bookseller’s approval. The impetus to reprint, however, may well have come from Cadell, whose predecessor, Millar, had been one of the work’s original publishers, or for that matter John Payne, since it was reissued hard on the heels of Burgh’s Crito (1766–67) – two volumes of topical and highly critical essays on the current state of British politics, religion and education – in which he had taken a share. Both, though, bowed to Johnson (probably on grounds of seniority) in the imprint and all were clearly capitalizing on the


reputation of a writer just beginning to emerge as one of the most articulate and respected spokesmen in the pre-revolutionary debate. The Dignity of Human Nature eventually went through at least five separate editions in America (Harvard Library owned a copy by 1773) and was the most celebrated of Burgh’s works next to his Political Disquisitions (3 vols, 1774–75). These appeared just before Burgh’s death in 1775 and immediately became a standard text and important reference work for ‘patriots’ and reformers on both sides of the Atlantic. They were not, however, given to Johnson to publish but to the Dilly brothers, whose shop Burgh had regularly visited from the late 1760s. There he mixed with members of Mrs Macaulay’s circle (Sylas Neville, Thomas and Timothy Hollis, Thomas Brand, and the American physician Benjamin Rush, a future signatory of the Declaration of Independence) and had access to many of the American tracts the Dillys and John Almon were reprinting.18 Johnson had continued to collaborate (sparingly) with the Dillys during this period but, whilst they had grown intimate with the more vocal republican-minded groups in London, he had closely aligned with the ‘rational’ dissenting interest. There was always, though, some degree of interchange between these respective groups and, by 1774, even a noticeable level of convergence as, in the same year as Burgh’s Disquisitions, Johnson, the Dillys and John Almon all came together to publish an anonymous set of Considerations on the Measures Carrying On With Respect to the British Colonies in North America (1774). This was the work of Elizabeth Montagu’s brother, Matthew RobinsonMorris, a self-confessed republican and former MP (for Canterbury), who penned a series of pamphlets specifically against the colonial policy of Lord North’s government between 1774 and 1777. Advocating the principles of seventeenth-century Whigs such as Hampden, Sidney and Locke (‘names, which must surely by all Englishmen ever be revered’), he argued that the costs of the Seven Years War were not chargeable on America and that it was unnatural and unconstitutional for a colony to be taxed and governed by anything other than its own assembly. Writing freely, disinterestedly and ‘without offence’, however, he urged greater forbearance and moderation in the hope that some middle path between ‘vigorously enforce[d] obedience’ and full-blown independence might be found. First printed and sold from around May 1774 by a bookseller of ‘mild and conciliatory manners’ on Paternoster Row, Robert Baldwin, the Considerations passed through three editions and were reprinted more than once in Boston, New York and Philadelphia.19 Johnson’s name, like Almon’s, features on the second edition (although he may well have sold copies of the first) and both the timing and their additional presence suggest there were concerted pro-American and dissenting energies at work when it came to Baldwin splitting the risk with other booksellers. After four years of relative political calm in which Wilkite demands for parliamentary reform had been forced down and most of the obnoxious

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Townshend duties repealed, the situation had changed dramatically by 1774. The infamous Boston Tea Party in December 1773 had signalled a fresh and permanent rupture in British and American relations and, though radicals were divided over such a flagrant act of defiance, the illicit dumping of imported East India tea by a band of patriot colonists into Massachusetts Bay served only to inflame the debate over ‘taxation without representation’ and the real or imaginary encroachments of ministerial power. In the spring ‘the first important [English] tract’ of the pre-revolutionary period – American Independence, The Interest and Glory of Great Britain (1774) by John Cartwright – appeared, first as an anonymous series of newspaper articles and then a pamphlet sold by John Wilkie, only to be countered on the proBritish side by the Dean of Gloucester Josiah Tucker, whose The True Interest of Britain (1774) proposed that all connections with the colonies should be severed only because it was doubtful whether any good could come from winning them by force. Between March and June coercive measures were passed by the British government, closing the port of Boston and empowering the king to appoint members of the council in Massachusetts. On 22 June came the Quebec Act, allowing the Catholic church to retain its privileges in Canada and extending that country’s boundaries further southwards. For many Americans and their sympathizers, the long-suspected threat of popery and arbitrary power had finally shown itself and they, like other aggrieved minorities, proceeded to derive strength and a good deal of publicity from the fact that they could now view themselves as collectively endangered and oppressed. Barely a year after Benjamin Franklin had noted a complete ‘want of attention’ and ‘unwillingness even to read anything’ about ‘what passes in such remote Countries as America’, the dispute and the emotive issues it raised finally began to figure in Joseph Johnson’s output.20 It was no coincidence, then, that he should have felt sympathetic enough to issue Mary Scott’s The Female Advocate (1774), a 500-line poetic survey and appraisal of the work of British women writers from the Renaissance to the present, prompted by her reading John Duncombe’s The Feminiad (1754). This doubled the number of entries in Duncombe’s poem (which featured 25 women writers dating from the seventeenth century) and included her contemporaries Catharine Macaulay and Anna Laetitia Aikin.21 In her ‘Preface’ Scott railed against the intellectual oppression of her sex, perennially disadvantaged and dispossessed by men’s ‘Salic Law’, and cited her enemy (‘Man, seated high on Learning’s awful throne’ who ‘Thinks the fair realms of knowledge his alone’, ll. 437–9) in much the same territorial and tyrannical terms as those adopted by the colonists in their struggle against George III. Echoing Aikin’s arguments in ‘The Mouse’s Petition’, she depicted men as supreme in scientific knowledge but selfish and unmagnanimous. More damagingly still, she blamed the new philosophers of the industrial age, in suitably mechanistic terms, for their complicity. It was not


just that they had prohibited women ‘from cultivating an acquaintance with the sciences’, but that they ‘regard the woman who suffers her faculties to rust in a state of listless indolence, with a more favourable eye, than her who engages in a dispassionate search after truth’.22 The rational, Unitarian ethos of Mary Scott’s work, the inestimable value it placed on knowledge and the values of ‘deep research’ and ‘unremitting study’ (ll. 456, 459), as well as its Priestleian optimism (the Muse ‘raptur’d looks to future years’ when women, as well-endowed with genius as men, compete on equal terms with Shakespeare and Newton, ll. 445–52) squared it firmly within Johnson’s established canon. Yet, together with Anna Laetitia Aikin’s work, it offered the first intimations of a new long-term interest in and support for women’s writing on his part.23 Moreover, Scott’s talk of fairness, freedom and opportunity evoked striking contemporary parallels with the rhetoric of home-grown dissenting and American ‘patriots’, as it put the case for another group of fellow-subjects who were themselves the victims of too much concentrated power but now bravely struggling to assert their own worth. Developments directly affecting the bookselling trade in 1774 may have added to Johnson’s sense of personal (and political) grievance. In February the House of Lords upheld an appeal by the bookseller Alexander Donaldson against an injunction preventing him selling a ‘pirated’ edition of James Thomson’s poem The Seasons, originally published by Andrew Millar. A native of Edinburgh, Donaldson had come to London specifically to ‘wage . . . warfare against high prices’ by selling cheap reprints of works he no longer held to be in copyright, and was proving highly successful in business.24 The consequences of the verdict were far-reaching since they defeated the claims of London booksellers to perpetual common-law copyright and sowed the seeds of battle between members of the English and Scottish trade that would last until well into the nineteenth century. On 28 February the leading copyright-holding booksellers in London petitioned the Commons against the Lords’ decision. Despite a rather weak defence (hinging upon the many thousands of pounds that had been invested in buying up ‘ancient copy-rights’ rather than any definite point of principle) and concerted opposition from members of the Scottish and provincial (mainly Yorkshire) trade, leave was granted to bring in a bill for the ‘Relief of Booksellers and others, by vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Purchasers of such Copies from Authors or their Assigns’ for a limited but agreeable length of time.25 This passed through the Commons and on to the Lords in May. Edmund Burke, who had vigorously defended the booksellers’ bill in the Commons, wrote to the Marquis of Rockingham, leader of the Opposition in the Lords, lobbying for support. Rockingham’s reply on 1 June (in which he admitted that most of the Lords were ‘much set against the Printers Bill’) anticipated the response it was to receive, though it did raise the issue of

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the booksellers’ ‘fair claim for some degree at least of compensation’. It ended: I will be in Town if possible by eleven oClock tomorrow morning, I wish you would meet me in Grosvenor Square and if you can I should be glad Mr Johnson was with you. I may at least shew a disposition tho’ from circumstances, it may not be of any consequence in the present moment.26 This was not a reference to Joseph Johnson but most likely William Johnston, who had recently retired as a bookseller but who was called as a principal witness during the committee stage of the bill and claimed that ‘three-fourths of the books in trade had his name, as part proprietor’. Johnson, however, did contribute to the debate by publishing a two-shilling set of Observations on Literary Property (1774) written by William Enfield at Warrington in May, which urged the proper legal establishment of perpetual copyright to protect the natural right of authors.27 Though not listed as one of the main respondents in the case, he also found himself in the thick of all the associated fund-raising and lobbying as many of the main protagonists were based close by him in St Paul’s Churchyard. Alexander Donaldson, for example, was by this stage trading at No. 48, at the corner next to Cheapside. William Johnston had until recently been at the ‘Golden Ball’ and the other main petitioning bookseller to give evidence, John Wilkie, who had acted as agent for the London booksellers for the past twenty years, was Johnson’s immediate next-door neighbour. Wilkie crudely condemned his fellows within the trade who opposed the bill as mere itinerant ‘sellers of books on walls, at the corners of streets, and at the doors of alehouses.’ Lord Mansfield (who invited him before the Commons) also bemoaned the innate mischief of an unrestricted press ‘overrun with a kind of literary packmen’. The Attorney-General, Thurlow, however, who defended Donaldson, was much struck by the booksellers’ arrogance and decried Johnston as one of ‘a set of impudent monopolizing men’ who had illegally combined to maintain their (un)competitive advantage by the most iniquitous and oppressive measures. A majority of the Lords agreed and the bill was thrown out by 21 votes to 11. As a result, an ‘era of quasi-legal monopoly’ was (officially, at least) brought to an end and booksellers were left to rely on copyright legislation drafted at the start of the century which protected their property for a maximum period of 28 years.28 The ‘Plan of an Association of the Booksellers for the Preservation of their Trade’ was drawn up immediately after the defeat and, if Johnson had no concern in this, then he did come to play a part in the ‘Chapter Coffee House’ group of booksellers, headed by Becket and Cadell, whose rights had been most intimately challenged by the Donaldson case. This featured many of the best-known and most important members of the trade, including the


leading orthodox religious bookseller at the ‘Bible and Crown’ in St Paul’s Churchyard, John Rivington; the King’s printer William Strahan; Thomas Longman; the Dilly brothers; Boswell and Dr Johnson’s bookseller friend Thomas Davies in Covent Garden, who owned a stake in many important Elizabethan and Jacobean works; Peter Elmsley, an eminent dealer in foreign books on the Strand; and the most celebrated antiquarian bookseller of the period Thomas Payne – a group which was essentially the petitioning copyholders in another guise. Popularly known as ‘the princes of the trade’, they were described by one of their number (Edward Dilly) as ‘a select number of the most respectable booksellers’ in London and by the prominent Oxford printer and bookseller Daniel Prince as ‘a formidable and discerning body’. They met monthly, possibly in the noisy north-east corner of the coffee house (affectionately dubbed ‘the Wittinagemot’, the Anglo-Saxon equivalent of Parliament) over a glass of ‘Chapter-punch’ to plan large-scale literary offensives against rebels such as Donaldson. The most celebrated of these, The Works of the English Poets (58 vols, 1779–81), to which Samuel Johnson contributed his famous ‘Lives’, was deliberately designed to rival a ‘little trifling edition’ of The Poets of Great Britain (1777) printed in Edinburgh to be sold cheaply in London by John Bell. Indeed, so intense was the rivalry that many of the ‘Chapter’ group reportedly refused to honour country booksellers’ orders for Bell’s edition.29 Johnson continued to be involved with such consortia throughout the rest of his career and was evidently still a regular at the Chapter on Paternoster Row in the 1790s. Much of his surviving business correspondence after 1795 relates to the infringement of copyright (particularly of William Cowper’s Poems) principally by Scottish booksellers, and suggests that, during the latter stages of his career, this remained very much a live issue. Indeed, one of his final acts as a bookseller was to chair a meeting of the city’s booksellers at the London Coffee House (in June 1808) which again decided to petition Parliament to delay an amendment to the Copyright Bill.30 In no way, however, could Johnson be construed as a defender of inflated book prices or any other form of restrictive practice which potentially might jar with the idea of a free press. He harboured a prim dislike of all unnecessary expense and his business was predicated upon providing useful and eminently affordable books at a time when prices were rapidly starting to outstrip most other consumer items. Hence his muchcommented-upon tendency to ‘consult cheapness rather than appearance’ in his works (occasionally to the dismay of some of his authors). Yet, at the same time, he managed to acquire a reputation for fairness and liberality in his bargainings, to the extent that John Bell even used him to arbitrate in a disputed case referred by the Court of Chancery. His margins were generally modest, so much so that late on in his career he claimed to have been ‘carrying on a losing trade’ in which his profits did not amount to ten per cent.31 What is more, he once claimed that probably no bookseller had had

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as much to do with provincial printers and booksellers (including several of the leading counter-petitioners), although, on the basis of his experience, he did not rate them particularly highly as a breed. Partly perhaps as a pre-emptive measure, his contact with Scottish booksellers, including William Creech of Edinburgh, actually began to increase from the mid1770s. Creech, however, was resolutely not on the side of the pirates. Indeed, a letter of his, produced by Lord Mansfield during the copyright debate, complained of the number of presses that were springing up in every ‘little inconsiderable town’ and that cobblers had ‘thrown away their awl’ to start up as printers.32 Johnson, for his part, had dutifully upheld all the time-honoured rules and customs of the trade from the outset of his career, believing that ‘[r]egulations are necessary to keep bodies of men in order’. In 1774, then, he too was certain to have been aggrieved that the value of literary property (once sacred and perpetual but now deemed ‘incorporeal’) was being debased and abused and the traditional common-law rights of booksellers unfairly disregarded. Following hard on the failure of the dissenting petitioners, the London booksellers’ unsuccessful petition for relief can only further have disillusioned him with the supposed ‘wisdom and equity of the British legislature’ and strengthened his sympathies for those who (as William Enfield put it) were asking ‘nothing of government, but what every Englishman hath a right to expect from it, LIBERTY and PROPERTY.’33 Unlike the Dilly brothers or John Almon, Johnson does not appear to have personally instigated links with the American community or openly cultivated them. What relations and sympathies he had were mainly the product of association, in particular through Priestley and Lindsey, both of whom enjoyed close ties with Benjamin Franklin. Priestley, indeed, had been introduced to Franklin at the same time as he began his acquaintance with Johnson, at the height of the Stamp Act repeal debate in London. In one of his first letters to Franklin, written from Warrington in March 1766, he had asked if the American would ‘desire Mr. Johnson’ to send him books and material for his new work on electricity. Franklin willingly, it seems, undertook all Priestley’s requests and continued to act on small matters of business for him directly with the bookseller. From Franklin’s own papers, we know that (prompted by Priestley) Johnson himself wrote to ‘the Dr.’ on 4 November 1766 from Paternoster Row, enclosing the original sheets of Priestley’s History of Electricity (1767) for him to look over. He was subsequently entrusted with other deliveries for Franklin, whose Craven Street lodgings were not far from Essex Street, just off the Strand.34 Franklin was the principal spur to many of Priestley’s scientific experiments and a great admirer of his Essay on Government but their friendship deepened noticeably as Britain’s relations with America deteriorated during the years 1773 to 1775. On 29 January 1774 Priestley went to the Cockpit in Whitehall (with Edmund Burke) to hear Franklin famously attacked by


the Solicitor-General, Alexander Wedderburn, over a petition from the Massachusetts Assembly demanding the removal of its loyalist governor. Over the next few months his bookseller would have encountered Franklin whilst he was busily helping to organize Lindsey’s new Unitarian base. Franklin had supported the dissenters in their application for relief (even sending pamphlets on their petition back to correspondents in America) and, though a redoubtable atheist, was one of the chief money-raisers for the Essex Street Chapel. Essex Street, in fact, had several prominent Americans and friends of America in its congregation and Franklin was among those who attended its opening service.35 When in London, Priestley and Lindsey spent every Sunday together and often met for dinner with Franklin and Richard Price. On 26 January 1775 Johnson accompanied Priestley on his regular Sunday visit to Lindsey. The same month, Josiah Quincy Jr of Massachusetts was a dinner guest and Lindsey recorded that their conversation ‘began and ended with the Americans’.36 Lindsey, Priestley and Thomas Percival in Manchester were each fed American tracts and information by Franklin. Other friends of Johnson to circulate material included Thomas Bentley, who busily sent pamphlets up to his partner Wedgwood in the Midlands from their new London pottery works in Soho.37 Most of the leading American pamphlets were available in British bookshops within months of their publication and Bentley may have been able to procure them through Johnson, although it is difficult to establish how many of these the bookseller may personally have stocked. Though clearly in touch with Franklin (via Priestley), Johnson himself never supplanted William Strahan as the American’s closest friend and contact within the London trade. Nor does he appear to have acted as a ‘place-man’ (like both Strahan and Almon) for letters and articles which Franklin wanted to appear in the English press. By 1774, however, it is clear that the American dispute had become a binding point of interest to him and his circle, not only given the colonies’ laudable political stand but also because (unencumbered by a test or state prelacy) they were seen as the last bastion of religious liberty. * On 30 September 1774, six months before the completion of its full seven-year term, George III decided to dissolve Parliament and call a general election. Local issues ritually dominated the trustings but, this time, the future state of the American colonies formed part of the platform of a small but influential number of Opposition candidates, most notably John Wilkes in Middlesex and Edmund Burke in Bristol. It was also still somewhat unusual for electoral propagandists to attempt to appeal to voters on a national level, but at least five such appeals are known to have been made prior to the 1774 election, three of them significantly by dissenters. According to some reports, the one which was most busily and effectively circulated was Joseph Priestley’s anonymous Address to Protestant Dissenters of All

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Denominations, on the Approaching Election of Members of Parliament (1774). It was published cheaply at 2d (or 5s for 50 copies) by Joseph Johnson as a 16-page pamphlet and reprinted in Philadelphia and Boston before the end of the year.38 This was a re-run of many of the arguments Priestley had used in The Present State of Liberty and, though he admitted he could put forward nothing new, his aim was to present a few simple considerations on ‘a business of so much consequence’ and ‘comprise the merits of the case in a very small compass, which may give it a chance of being better understood’. Persuaded into producing the pamphlet by Franklin (who also helped revise it), Priestley this time focused more sharply on the American issue, drawing strong and increasingly anxious parallels between the present dispute and the ‘noble and strenuous exertions of the old Puritans’, and also between the colonists (who were ‘chiefly dissenters and whigs’) and their English counterparts, whose rights and liberties were seen as inextricably linked: Do you imagine, my fellow-citizens, that we can sit still, and be the idle spectators of the chains which are forging for our brethren in America, with safety to ourselves? Let us suppose America to be completely enslaved, in consequence of which the English court can command all the money, and all the force of that country; will they like to be so arbitrary abroad, and have their power confined at home?39 From the point of view of the Address, the election clearly marked a critical juncture both for Anglo-American relations and the fortunes of dissenters who had been sorely treated under Lord North’s government. It also provided an opportunity to protest against what Priestley, endorsing the views of the revolutionaries, called ‘the vindictive schemes of the present ministry’ and the scourge of electoral bribery and corruption. His aim, therefore, was explicitly to influence dissenting voters, particularly ‘those who have not yet taken their part’ or were open enough to listen to both sides of the question. Despite their small numbers (approximately 8 per cent of the population), dissenters were known to carry a great deal of political weight, especially in large towns in the North and Midlands. Burke, for instance, described them as ‘a set of Men powerful enough in many things, but most of all in Elections’, and his cultivating their support at Bristol (a city dominated by dissenting merchants and businessmen and heavily dependent upon colonial trade) in no small way helped him to victory at the polls.40 The first section of the Address recommended that dissenters vote for candidates who actively favoured the removal of punitive religious legislation. The second, which dealt with the American case against the British government, ended by advising its readers


to oppose, at the next election, every candidate, who, in the present parliament, has concurred in the late atrocious attempts to establish arbitrary power over so great a part of the British empire, to the imminent hazard of our most valuable commerce, and of that national strength, security, and felicity, which depend on UNION and on LIBERTY.41 As ever for Priestley, civil and religious liberty were seen as inseparable, and the demands of maintaining an empire whilst granting the colonists their freedom as not inconsistent, at least in England. Opinion in America, however, was already set to outpace him as the first meeting of the Continental Congress in Philadelphia would shortly produce a series of ‘resolves’ denying Britain’s right to tax the colonies, calling for resistance to her recent set of coercive measures and recognition of the Congress as a legally valid body. Moreover, although Franklin may have thought Priestley’s Address contributed to the premature dissolution of Parliament, its impact, in the event, was clearly limited. Many (even among the dissenting community) still remained unmoved by or opposed to the American cause and traditionally loyal to the Hanoverian monarchy. Despite Opposition MPs winning support in high-profile dissenting areas such as Liverpool, Bristol and particularly London, Lord North’s ministry was returned with a significant majority and all subsequent efforts at reconciliation with the colonies failed. The power of the dissenting ministry as a source of predominantly antigovernment, pro-American feeling continued to be reflected strongly in Johnson’s output. This was particularly the case with the series of fastday sermons he began to publish once hostilities had officially broken out. These were preached on the national days of humiliation proclaimed by George III, when the king’s subjects were commanded ‘to send up our prayers and supplications to God for obtaining pardon for our sins and for averting those heavy judgements which our manifold provocations have most justly deserved’, as well as to beseech God’s blessings to help His Majesty’s troops and restore peace and prosperity to the empire. According to Henry Ippel, around 139 printed sermons survive for the period 1776 to 1782 in which fast days were declared. The majority of these were delivered outside London by members of the established church and supported the British government in opposing the rebellion. Protestant dissenters contributed only around one fifth of the total number but among these were some of their most powerful and effective controversialists.42 The first of those which Johnson rushed into print was a fast-day sermon preached on 18 and (again on) 25 February by Joshua Toulmin in Taunton and whose title, The American War Lamented (1776), offered a telling key to its sentiments. Taunton had been the site of repeated clashes between Parliamentarians and Royalists during the Civil War and was known as ‘one of the centres of Commonwealthman ideas in Western England’.

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Owing to its dissenting academy, it was also a renowned ‘citadel’ of Arianism.43 Dissenters formed two-thirds of the population and put up firm opposition to the government during the American war, petitioning and agitating against its coercive measures. Toulmin himself was a signatory to the conciliatory petition sent by the townspeople to Parliament in 1775 and, though this was the only sermon he printed on the dispute, in it he flatly condemned the actions of untrustworthy ministers and a sinful nation lustful for conquest and power which had brought down war upon itself as a judgement of God. The fast day held on 13 December 1776 produced a further flurry of dissenting sermons and Johnson published and distributed those delivered by George Walker, Ebenezer Radcliff (who belonged to the ‘Club of Honest Whigs’) and Newcome Cappe of York. Walker had briefly been mathematics tutor at Warrington Academy but in 1774 had been appointed minister at the High Pavement Presbyterian Chapel in Nottingham, where he preached moderate Arianism to a well-established and affluent congregation of dissenters. A friend and business associate of John Cartwright, he also played a leading role in local politics, chairing meetings and giving speeches and, like Joshua Toulmin, had signed (as well as drafted) the city’s petition to Parliament pleading for conciliation with the Americans. Well-noted as a hot-bed of agitation, Nottingham was described in 1777 as without exception the most disloyal [town] in the kingdom, owing in great measure to the whole corporation . . . being Dissenters, and of so bitter a sort that they have done and continue to do all in their power to hinder the service by preventing as much as possible the enlistment of soldiers.44 Walker in no small part helped foster this sense of disaffection locally from his pulpit, where his stance was unflinching and uncompromising. He argued that corruption was endemic in the monarchy, central government, the established church, and all levels of the community, and that neglect of religion and basic human virtues had led to the present deplorable state of suffering between Britain and America. Radcliff was more forbearing: neither party was innocent and both deserved reproach (‘the one as aiming to be absolute, the other independent’) and ‘on all sides there [was] occasion for candid constructions and generous concessions’. Yet, behind these apparent evils, he, too, discerned the hand of God, who ‘often punishes guilty nations and ambitious princes’. Cappe’s sermon took the same heavily moralistic line, strongly denouncing the war with America and attributing it to the intemperance and hypocrisy which governed English society. It quickly passed through two editions and brought him to the attention of members of the Whig opposition. John Lee showed it to


Sir George Savile, who was reportedly ‘delighted beyond measure with it’, and (like Walker’s) it also received praise from Burke who circulated it in the Commons.45 Johnson went on to issue Walker’s sermon for the fast day on 27 February 1778, which again plainly rebuked the nation (but especially the ‘Great’) for persisting in its vices and urged a sincere return to God to avert complete and utter ruin. He also published a discourse on The Duty and Character of a National Soldier (1779) preached by Walker before Cartwright’s Nottinghamshire militia which somewhat daringly urged the cause of liberty and the people, rather than the crown. There were further increasingly political sermons from Cappe preached on 4 February 1780 and 21 February 1781, both days of ‘national humiliation’, which criticized a war conducted ‘at the price of much blood’ and trying of the people’s patriotism. Though guided by Providence, ‘unrighteous governors’ were still accountable both to God and man who was ‘under no obligation . . . to a tame acquiescence and an abject non-resistance’.46 Cappe even dared to speculate on the shortcomings of hereditary monarchs. The Christian Duty of Cultivating a Spirit of Universal Benevolence Amidst the Present Unhappy National Hostilities (1781), a sermon preached on 4 July by Cappe’s dissenting colleague in Yorkshire, William Wood, was printed and sent to be published by Johnson in London, as were some Considerations on the Propriety and Expediency of the Clergy Acting in the Commission of the Peace (1781) by John Disney. On the verge of quitting his Lincolnshire parish to join the dissenters, Disney would also deliver a sermon for the fast day on 8 February 1782, whose publication was again handled by the bookseller. The impetus was kept up even as late as 1784 when, following the national day of thanksgiving for peace on 29 July, Johnson sold sermons by Cappe, Walker and another former Warrington tutor and intimate new acquaintance of Walker’s at Nottingham, Gilbert Wakefield.47 Often well-articulated critiques of government, these fast-day sermons were not only unusual but potentially subversive and disruptive. Ethically charged and ideologically independent, they contrasted sharply with the majority of Anglican sermons which urged their listeners to fear God but also subserviently honour the King and, by extension, his priests and ministers. In his exhaustive work on eighteenth-century nonconformity and politics, James Bradley has sought to show how dissenters’ loyalty to government in England explicitly fragmented during the years of the American War, unlike other sections of the community. If, as Bradley argues, this was in some measure due to the powerful oppositional rhetoric and ‘charismatic’ sermonizing of ministers like Walker and Toulmin, then Johnson’s role as a sympathetic publisher of their works, enabling them to transcend their local audience and circulate nationally (often for as little as sixpence a copy), must be seen to have helped facilitate this process.48 As a form, the sermon had always been central to his activities. Yet his publica-

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tion of such a relatively high proportion of fast-day sermons, whose motivation was expressly moral and political (delivered and published, as they were, solely in response to the American conflict), does tend to signal a more purposive strategy on his part and that of the wider dissenting community he represented. Further illustrating this, Johnson also became involved in issuing what was probably the most influential English defence of the colonists, Richard Price’s Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, the Principles of Government, and the Justice and Policy of the War with America (1776). This first appeared in February 1776 through the offices of Price’s main bookseller, Thomas Cadell, a month after Thomas Paine’s Common Sense (1776) in Philadelphia. It was received with immediate enthusiasm by ‘radicals’ and free-thinking intellectuals won over by its Lockean principles, its conviction that America was fighting to preserve liberty and the purity of the constitution and that, instead of encouraging freedom, the British government had unjustly demanded subordination by such oppressive means as the Declaratory Act. Lindsey thought it ‘noble indeed’ and Priestley, who was sent a copy by Price, ‘sat up till after one o’clock to read it.’ He duly sent a copy to Franklin, declaring it an ‘excellent pamphlet’, which he hoped would ‘make some impression upon this infatuated nation’. ‘If anything can unite us,’ he told the American, ‘it must be the immediate adopting of the measures proposed by Lord Shelburne and mentioned in Dr. Price’s pamphlet’.49 An edition of a thousand sold within a few days and 13 more printings were run off during the year, with sales reaching 60,000 copies. It also swiftly came off the presses in New York, Boston and Philadelphia. Price’s Observations won him the freedom of the City of London but they also marked him out as politically ‘obnoxious’, brought threats upon his life and prompted a controversy with Burke who thought them ‘combustible’ and scorned the idea of dissenting (though not Anglican) ministers engaging in politics.50 The work’s extraordinary success may have meant that several other hands were needed simply to print and distribute enough copies (in a range of formats at different prices) to keep up with demand. Having been intimidated with warnings of prosecution from City bankers, however, Cadell may also conveniently have sought to spread some of the risk. The Dilly brothers’ name appears from the sixth edition, probably in April, and Johnson’s from the eleventh – a smaller duodecimo version, priced cheaply at ‘Four-pence, or One Guinea per Hundred’ – in the latter half of the year. Their connections with Cadell through the ‘Chapter House’ conger, their dissenting background and pro-American sympathies all clearly suggested them as trusted colleagues, but Price’s reputation and the affinity of his arguments with the ‘political’ sermons that Johnson himself had begun to publish doubtless made the prospect doubly congenial. Certainly, in response to a fierce attack on Price’s pamphlet by John Wesley in A Calm Address to the American Colonies (1776), he was not slow to publish an anony-


mous sixpenny letter to the Methodist leader entitled Political Empiricism (1776). This was a searing 30-page attack on Wesley’s motives in choosing mercenarily to defend George III and his right to tax the colonists and call for the Americans to submit. There were obvious religious as well as political grievances at work as Wesley was accused of ‘pour[ing] oil into the flame’ by attributing American resistance to ‘the traitorous designs of some persons on this side of the water’, namely the dissenters, whose principles, if put into practice, would ‘overturn all Government and bring in universal anarchy’. Like Price, whom he praised as ‘a respectable writer’, the author condemned the slavish doctrines of passive obedience and the divine right of princes and charged Wesley, for having blatantly propagated these, with ‘treason against the Constitution, and rebellion against the Majesty of the People.’51 On 21 March 1776 John Wilkes called for leave to bring in ‘a Bill for a just and equal Representation of the People of England in Parliament’. This proposed giving a vote to every free man (even the ‘meanest mechanic, the poorest peasant and day-labourer’) and abolishing small, dependent rotten boroughs in favour of the new ‘rich and populous manufacturing towns’ of Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield. This was meekly withdrawn without a vote but a similar programme of reform (advocating ‘one man, one vote’ and annual parliaments) was floated before the public by John Cartwright in his pamphlet Take Your Choice (1776) in October. Wilkes’s acknowledgement of the ‘important truth’ that ‘all government is instituted for the good of the mass of the people to be governed’ served as a timely reminder of Priestley’s arguments and, indeed, there were several areas of principle upon which many of the writers with whom Johnson was involved (notably Price) concurred.52 Cartwright thought that Price’s Observations upheld and justified every principle he had laid down in his American Independence (1774) and that there was ‘a very remarkable agreement in our sentiments’. Like Priestley, however, Price was as much appalled by the ‘licentiousness of little men’ as ‘great men’ and opposed to Cartwright’s idea of universal suffrage: . . . if a state is so sunk that the majority of its representatives are elected by a handful of the meanest persons in it, whose votes are always paid for . . . it will be an abuse of language to say that the state possesses liberty.53 He also had no objections to a hereditary second chamber or head of state which he thought operated as a useful check upon the legislature and served to give it unity and vigour. In this, there was no appreciable difference with Cartwright and Wilkes in that all fundamentally supported the idea of a balanced and well-constituted government as the best guard against the

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excesses of both mobs and princes and held that economic influence by the court was the main tool being used to unsteady these arrangements. For Joseph Johnson, too, such jobbery and profligacy would have aroused strong anti-ministerial resentment, just as it did among many independent middle-class traders who were often worse hit by the conflict, especially in London. And it was perhaps only natural for someone so prominent in the propaganda campaign against sinecures and preferments in the Church of England to have lent his support to an analogous movement to weed out state bribery and corruption. The expenses of government, exorbitant taxes and the national debt had been the focus of one of Priestley’s Warrington lectures outlined in his Essay (1765) and his 1774 election Address had cited the most ‘radical fault’ in the constitution as the administration of public revenue.54 But the subject was now taken up in more detailed and systematic fashion in several of the bookseller’s titles, among them A New, Easy, and Expeditious Method of Discharging the National Debt (1776) by the former Feathers Tavern petitioner Francis Stone, and a new edition of The History of the Customs, Aids, Subsidies, National Debts, and Taxes of England (1778) by Timothy Cunningham, the compiler of several valuable legal works, including A New Treatise on the Laws Concerning Tithes (1777) which Johnson also reissued. Moreover, some of the associations he forged during the late 1770s show him drawing closer to some of the standard-bearers in the cause of ‘economic’ parliamentary reform, though still predominantly along the lines of ‘rational’ dissent. In 1777 Johnson came into contact with another ex-Wilkite and former member of the Society of the Supporters of the Bill of Rights, John Horne (later Tooke). Horne was at this time ensnared in controversy, having been fined and imprisoned for a year for starting a subscription to help the families of those Americans who had been killed by the British at Lexington and Concord. At a time of high anti-American feeling after the British defeat at Saratoga, Johnson agreed to act as sole publisher of his Letter to John Dunning (1778). This appeared whilst Horne was holed up in the King’s Bench and cast a minutely critical eye over the phrasing of the legal information filed against him.55 The aim of this seemingly pedantic task was to alert men to the fact that ‘words, without meaning, or of equivocal meaning, are the everlasting engines of fraud and injustice’ and the Letter went on to form the basis of an even more laboursome philological study, The Diversions of Purley (the first volume of which appeared through Johnson in 1786), in which Horne set out to prove that the English language (like politics) had been corrupted from its Anglo-Saxon origins and that the study of grammar and grammatical definition was ‘absolutely necessary in the search after philosophical truth’.56 It was in the early part of 1780, however, that Horne made his first really significant contribution to the parliamentary debate with an anonymous set of Facts: Addressed to the Landholders, Stockholders, Merchants, Farmers,


Manufacturers, Tradesmen . . . and Generally to All the Subjects of Great Britain and Ireland (1780), written in conjunction with Richard Price. These were intended to highlight the disturbing growth in the violence of the royal prerogative (which had ‘burst’ through ‘all the bars and bolts of law’ which ‘our ancestors have shut up’) and to set out ‘both the necessity and means of a thorough reformation’. The integrity of Parliament was the cornerstone of the constitution and, since almost half the members had been awarded places of profit or lucrative contracts, it was now clearly beholden upon the public to act to ‘close the avenue of corruption, through which the influence of the crown now threatens our final ruin’, and ensure that those who frame the laws were no longer ‘prostituted to infamous and sordid gains’.57 The Facts were originally written with the quietly nodding approval of Priestley’s patron, Shelburne, whose thinking on political economy was heavily directed by Price and whose acquaintance Horne had renewed shortly after leaving prison. Shelburne had been broadly in favour of the changes proposed by John Cartwright in 1776 and two of the motions he had put forward for economic reform (on 15 December 1779 and 8 February 1780) were included by Horne for the public to consider. Well used to putting pragmatism before principle, however, (which may account for much of Joseph Johnson’s antipathy), by the time Horne’s pamphlet was ready for the press Shelburne had changed his mind and asked for it not to be printed. It is telling that Priestley, who claimed to have been ‘careful not to publish any political pamphlet or paragraph whatever’ on politics during his years with Shelburne, at this point decided to quit his service.58 There is no evidence to suggest that it was an unwritten condition of his employment that he avoid making any public political statements or that Shelburne actively discouraged him from doing so. Indeed, in addition to supervising the education of Shelburne’s sons, his remit was expressly to keep his patron abreast of parliamentary debate and socially it enabled him to move in the highest political circles. As Chatham’s former secretary of state, Shelburne was and remained a warm friend to America and held great personal regard for Benjamin Franklin. However, his continuing eagerness to promote all possible means of reconciliation with the colonies was offset by his open declaration (in March 1778) that ‘he would never consent that America should be independent’ – a line which Priestley, Price and even Shelburne’s uneasy partners in Opposition, the Rockingham Whigs, had since conceded.59 More troubling still, attempts were made by some of Shelburne’s friends to suppress the publication of Priestley’s most important philosophical work, Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit (1777), which argued for the utter materiality of man’s existence and that the idea of a soul surviving the body in the grave was a heathen notion unsupported by scripture. Some of Priestley’s preliminary speculations on this subject (notably his commentary on David Hartley’s works) had caused him to be lambasted

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in the press as ‘an unbeliever in revelation, and no better than an Atheist.’60 The Disquisitions even led to a friendly but candid exchange of letters with (the Arian) Richard Price which Johnson published in 1778. Though a friend to dissenters and religious toleration, it was clearly not in Shelburne’s interests to be associated with such controversial divinity. The would-be censor in this case appears to have been a close adherent of Shelburne and former pupil of Priestley’s at Warrington, Benjamin Vaughan, who confessed that, while Priestley was at Bowood, he ‘could only stop a publication for six months, though it was to hurt his patron with the public and the court, appear when it would’.61 Like Priestley (whose Disquisitions he read), John Horne refused to be silenced and blithely went ahead and published his Facts through the joint offices of Johnson and John Almon. This was pumped out in eight quick editions during 1780, adding extraparliamentary weight to the successive motions by Burke, Dunning and Sir George Savile to curb financial corruption and undermine the government in the Commons. Sympathetic links between St Paul’s Churchyard and the Whig Opposition in Parliament had actually been reinforced during the previous year which had seen the dissenting cause openly and unexpectedly championed in the Commons. On 22 March 1779 a bill was introduced to grant equal toleration to those who refused to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles, but this time without insisting upon the need for any form of declaration. This came in the wake of a Catholic Relief Bill brought in for reasons of expediency (to quell discontent in Ireland and win Canadian volunteers for the American war), which had been passed virtually unopposed the previous May. The inconsistency of granting relief to Catholics and not Protestant dissenters aroused considerable discontent, even among some bishops, and finally obliged MPs to relax the rules on subscription. Unlike earlier applications, however, it was a relatively quiet affair. There was no printed extraparliamentary debate or campaign to speak of but, crucially, the dissenters received considerable support within Parliament from Burke, Fox, Dunning, Savile and Sir Henry Hoghton, who formed part of a group of 14 MPs entrusted to bring in the bill. It met with little opposition, except in Oxford where a High Church petition was got up, on the strength of which an amendment was moved (re)imposing a declaration on all candidates for the ministry that, as ‘a Christian and a Protestant’, they believed that the scriptures contained the revealed will of God. Reluctantly accepted by the General Body of Protestant Dissenting ministers, the bill was approved in the Commons on 28 April and carried unanimously in the Lords on 12 May.62 Johnson published the first volume of Priestley’s Experiments and Observations Relating to Various Branches of Natural Philosophy (1779), which was dedicated to Savile, and further affinities with the Rockinghamite ‘connexion’ were pointed to by his involvement in a work by the evangelical minister


and influential local magistrate Henry Zouch, who acted as Rockingham’s political agent in Yorkshire.63 A key figure in the West Riding, Zouch was also a linchpin of the newly formed Yorkshire County Association – a wealthy and respectable group of around 600 ‘Nobility, Gentlemen, Clergy, and Freeholders’ – which first met at York on 30 December 1779 and resolved to petition Parliament ‘to inquire into and correct the gross abuses in the expenditure of public money’, in terms closely echoing those of John Horne: . . . much public money has been improvidently squandered, and . . . many individuals enjoy sinecure places, efficient places with exorbitant emoluments, and pensions unmerited by public service, to a large and still increasing amount; whence the crown has acquired a great and unconstitutional influence, which, if not check’d, may soon prove fatal to the liberties of this country.64 Johnson could have learned of the Association via his Essex Street connections, since it was the brainchild of an old friend of Theophilus Lindsey’s from his Catterick days and a veteran of the Feathers Tavern movement, the Reverend Christopher Wyvill. Sir George Savile, who had served as a useful interface between Westminster and the ‘rational’ dissenters throughout the 1770s, was also a leading member. On 8 February 1780 he presented the 8,000-strong Yorkshire petition to Parliament demanding the abolition of sinecures and all unwarranted pensions. Other petitions followed, including one from Bristol courtesy of Burke, and similar county-level Associations formed around the country, each with their own committees appointed to promote the object of the petition and other measures designed to restore the independence of Parliament. According to Wyvill, dissenters were involved ‘with signal unanimity throughout the kingdom’, especially in Yorkshire (where a number of merchants belonging to Priestley’s former Mill-Hill congregation joined), Nottinghamshire (where John Disney and his cousin John Cartwright both enlisted), Cambridge and London.65 Two months later, in April 1780, the Society for Constitutional Information (SCI) was founded in London by a small number of the same dissenting, intellectual, reforming élite who were in touch with Wyvill, and several high-profile Opposition Whig peers and MPs. Unlike his County Association model, however, it did not organize large meetings or petitions, nor was it solely concerned with ‘economic’ reform but freely distributed tracts and pamphlets with the express aim of building up support for political change at all levels by informing the public (even the humblest ‘peasant’ and ‘mechanic’) about its lost rights. In its first three years it managed to publish 88,000 copies of 33 different titles, including 14,000 of Cartwright’s Declaration of Those Rights of the Commonalty of Great Britain Without Which

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They Cannot Be Free (1780). The ideal of extensive circulation, however, certainly among the lower classes it sought to enlighten, proved harder to achieve in practice and its policy of free distribution occasionally brought it into conflict with commercial booksellers, copies of whose works (as in John Almon’s case) could effectively be rendered worthless. There is no reason to suspect Joseph Johnson of formal involvement in the SCI at this stage, although his colleague Charles Dilly joined (and characteristically found it ‘rewarding for business’) and extracts from Priestley were planned to appear in one of its early titles. However, he was professionally linked to several of its original members, including its most energetic promoter, John Jebb.66 A prominent Feathers Tavern campaigner, Jebb had emulated his close friend Theophilus Lindsey by resigning his living in the established church in 1775. Lindsey, indeed, had given a copy of Jebb’s farewell address to Johnson, recommending it be published, and even asked him to officiate with him at Essex Street. Jebb, however, had elected to re-train for a career in medicine. Arriving in London from Cambridge in 1776, he had attended anatomical lectures given by the celebrated surgeons William Hunter and Percivall Pott and taken chemistry classes with the St Thomas’s physician Dr George Fordyce (a close friend of Johnson’s on Essex Street), each of whom published medical works through St Paul’s Churchyard at this time. Johnson had brought out Priestley’s controversial The Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity Illustrated (1777) which carried a dedication to Jebb in honour of his unfailing attachment to the ‘unadulterated principles of Christianity’ and ‘ardent zeal for the cause of civil and religious liberty’.67 Two years later he published two biblical dissertations by Lindsey to which Jebb had contributed a postscript. By the end of the decade, then, Jebb was very much a fixture of the Essex Street community which Johnson served as a bookseller and acted as an important personal bridge between the closely interweaving worlds of medicine, liberal dissent and politics. On 20 December 1779 a paper written by Jebb was read to a large meeting at the Free Masons’ Tavern in Great Queen Street in London for the purpose of agitating for electoral reform. It was Jebb’s first appearance before the public in a political guise, fired by recent government attempts yet again to manoeuvre its own candidate into one of the vacant seats for Middlesex, and in it he gave a ‘general sketch’ of his current sentiments. Like John Cartwright, he argued for the establishment of a new rejuvenated body of the Commons outside Parliament, by which every county would appoint a number of deputies (calculated according to the amount of property, the size of population and also its comparative manufacturing or commercial importance) to its own standing committee ‘for the purpose of deliberating with the committees of like-disposed counties, upon the state of the nation’. These committees would exercise all such powers ‘as by immemorial usage’ belonged to MPs but also


[the] further power of assenting, in conjunction with the King and Hereditary Nobility, to such regulations, as may be proposed, for the purpose of establishing an equal and adequate representation of the People, in annual Parliaments, agreeable to the ancient constitution and customs of this Realm.68 Under the signature ‘Salus Publica’, Jebb’s Address to the Freeholders of Middlesex (1780) was immediately printed as a sixpenny pamphlet and quickly ran through three editions, the third appearing through the offices of ‘J. DIXWELL, No. 148, St. Martin’s Lane, near Charing Cross; T. CADELL, in the Strand; J. ALMON, Piccadilly; J. JOHNSON, No. 72, St. Paul’s Church Yard; and J. BEW, Pater-noster Row’.69 The printed version did not differ in any material way from Jebb’s original paper, except for a few sentences and some additional notes. Yet these proved to be a good deal more provocative than the main body of the text itself. For, whereas Jebb was more concerned in his Address with abstract political formulae, in the notes he was much more dramatic and incisive, arguing that, should such a House of Commons as he proposed be established, never again would it be in the power of an abandoned administration, with its dependent tribes of placemen, pensioners and contractors, to riot unrestrained in the public plunder – sacrificing, with unbounded prodigality, at the shrine of despotism, the resources of the present generation, and the just inheritance of millions yet unborn; while discontent, distress, and disgrace prevail, in every part of this once glorious, happy, and extensive empire.70 Like ‘the good Dr. Price’ (who had ‘so ably touched’ upon this subject and to whose ‘sound and catholic doctrine’ he subscribed), Jebb believed that the people of England had had their minds inflamed against ‘their Brethren on the other side of the Atlantic’ and that, instead of war, a more equal and adequate representation would probably bring about a federal union with the American states, ‘productive of the greatest commercial, as well as other political advantages’. Since the first edition he had also re-read Cartwright’s Take Your Choice (1776), as a result of which he now tended to the view that every individual ought to possess a vote. Moreover, in the spirit and language of Jebb’s notations to his Address, one can see the draft outlines of the Society for Constitutional Information’s manifesto: Great advantage would be derived to the community, were our Fellow Citizens, of the lower classes, properly instructed in the just and constitutional meaning of such terms as the following, viz. Majesty – Subject –

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Sovereign – Republic – Loyalty – Allegiance – Treason – Prerogative – King’s Bread – King’s Armies – My People, &c. We never can expect to behold a proper exertion of the natural good sense, and spirit of the Nation, until the understandings, and affections, of all orders of men, are emancipated from the influence of the false ideas, which ignorance, or the art of designing Politicians have annexed to these expressions.71 The addition of the notes was clearly pointed up in an opening ‘Advertisement’ by Jebb, and Johnson would have assumed a share in the third edition of the work in the full knowledge of its outspoken reformist sentiments. His name, however, did not feature in the imprint of the fourth edition, which was printed with Jebb’s name in 1782 for the Piccadilly bookseller (and John Almon’s former shopman) John Stockdale. By this stage its author had risen to a position of some prominence in ‘radical’ circles: he was an elected deputy for the County Association of Huntingdonshire, an important pen-wielding member of the Westminster Committee (through which he channelled his democratic energies) and founder of the Quintuple Alliance of the five metropolitan constituencies for parliamentary reform. Unashamedly pro-American, he revelled in the colonists’ victories and during 1782 was involved in drafting an anti-war remonstrance from the electors of Westminster and demanding immediate recognition of American independence. Politically, he had demonstrated that his was not a moderate voice and that, for him, the constitution could ‘never be restored gradatim’ – a view which was to upset relations with many of his reformist colleagues, including Wyvill.72 The pattern of Johnson’s involvement in the Address, however, was most likely dictated as much by religion and simple book-trade economics as politics, and by access to the influential liberal dissenting readership his presence could offer. Certainly, his affiliation with Jebb had arisen mainly from their shared connections within ‘rational’ dissent, not City ‘radicalism’, and it was chiefly on that basis that it was set to continue. During the early months of 1780 Johnson showed considerable daring and impartiality by publishing solely on his own account the first collected edition of Benjamin Franklin’s Political, Miscellaneous and Philosophical Pieces (1779). This was very much the product of Priestley’s Bowood connections, assembled and edited by (the half-American) Benjamin Vaughan, who had previously tried to protect his mentor Shelburne from the pen of Priestley. Vaughan, though, was also an early mover in the SCI with Jebb and wellconnected in City politics through business. Like his father Samuel, a rich West Indies merchant with colonial interests and a frequent visitor to the ‘Club of Honest Whigs’, he was a warm friend of Franklin’s and (like Priestley, Price and Shelburne) had kept up their correspondence in spite of the war. Franklin by this time had signed the treaty of ‘amity and commerce’ bringing France into the war and been damned for his treason (notably by


Chatham) in Parliament. Vaughan boldly recognized Franklin on his title page as ‘Minister Plenipotentiary at the Court of Paris for the United States of America’ (still unrecognized by Britain) and ran ‘much risque’ by including two of Franklin’s letters to Priestley from 1775, which criticized Britain for ‘giving us such miserable specimens of her government’ and moralized over the ‘cutting of throats’ at Lexington and Concord. He also featured a letter by Franklin written in support of the dissenters’ bill in 1772. Vaughan keenly tried to inspire a candid and balanced reaction to the American’s works in his ‘Preface’, impressing upon the reader that, ‘how much soever you think you hate him, know that this great man loves you enough to wish to do you good’.73 It was too late by this stage for conciliation. Yet, when they did appear – expensively printed and bound and at the cost of half a guinea (a deliberate ploy perhaps on Johnson’s part) – Franklin’s works did manage not to generate too much controversy. The Critical Review chose to damn the pieces faintly as ‘uninteresting’ and ascribed their popularity to the ‘temporary fame of the author’ under the present ‘favourable circumstances’ and elsewhere, even among the pro-government press, the response was consciously muted.74 Franklin’s works were one of a modest but significant number of contributions made by Joseph Johnson to the colonial dispute between 1769 and 1783. His output, particularly during the mid-1770s, included some of the most important political tracts of the period, notably by Priestley and Price (both of whom were accused of acting as Franklin’s ‘tools’), and a series of influential pro-American sermons by prominent dissenting clergy who, through their public and printed oratory, promoted the values of individual autonomy, equity and justice and further embedded them within the reformist tradition. These were still outweighed by the number of purely theological and practical divinity tracts he continued to publish and which remained his staple business, though many of these were written by leading spokesmen and publicists for the dissenting cause (Andrew Kippis, Joseph Towers and Job David, for example), who not only held advanced Arian and Socinian views but were also avowed American sympathizers.75 Johnson was not as pro-active in reprinting colonial material as other of his contemporaries, notably the Dilly brothers or John Almon, who published the London edition of Paine’s Common Sense, the proceedings of the new American Congress and the Remembrancer (1775–84), a monthly journal designed to provide authentic up-to-date intelligence on American affairs. Rather his links with the pro-American movement were more closely tied to the fortunes of the dissenting community at home. Through their own ongoing struggle to achieve greater toleration and civil representation, dissenters found themselves appealing to a joint Puritan heritage and championing the same rights as the American revolutionaries: the right to petition for redress of grievances, the maintenance and protection of equal civil rights, and the inalienable right to liberty of conscience. On all these issues, the

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texts which Johnson published were memorable for the parallels they drew between the threatened liberties of the colonists and those of nonconformists in England. The concerns they expressed, however, were not delineated but only further exemplified by the crisis in America and were universal – to encourage scepticism and intellectual independence and produce change by enlightening the people.

3 A Friend to Reformation

When tumult lately burst his prison door, And set Plebeian thousands in a roar, When he usurp’d authority’s just place, And dar’d to look his master in the face, When the rude rabble’s watch-word was, destroy, And blazing London seem’d a second Troy, Liberty blush’d, and hung her drooping head, Beheld their progress with the deepest dread, Blush’d that effects like these she should produce, Worse than the deeds of galley-slaves broke loose. She loses in such storms her very name, And fierce licentiousness should bear the blame. William Cowper, ‘Table Talk’ (1782) In the early part of June 1780 London was besieged by fierce rioting, the fiercest, in fact, of the entire century, when members of the zealously antiCatholic Protestant Association led by Lord George Gordon went out onto the city’s streets to protest at recent legal concessions to popery. For several days, the mob went on the rampage, burning and looting chapels, attacking the homes of wealthy Catholics and their sympathizers, and storming and freeing inmates from Newgate Prison. Theophilus Lindsey’s Unitarian Chapel was fleetingly a target and in Leicester Fields the home of Sir George Savile, a prominent member of the Essex Street congregation who had sponsored the Catholic Relief Bill in the Commons, was singled out for attack. As Lindsey observed at the time, ‘Partly our connexion with Savile, but much more our heresy in denying the deity and worship of Christ, was said to be what made us next to, if not worse than the Papists’.1 The main conflagration, however, was in the City and crowds gathered ominously around the cathedral close to Joseph Johnson’s bookshop in St Paul’s Churchyard. Over the past decade he had published a series of controversial appeals for full religious toleration, including Catholics, by Priestley. Even more 59

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dangerously, he had just issued A Defence of the Roman Catholic Bill (1780) in answer to An Appeal from the Protestant Association, to the People of Great Britain (1779). The author (‘A Protestant’) remained understandably anonymous, yet Johnson’s name on the title page was plainly visible. Ten years after his previous business in Paternoster Row had been accidentally destroyed by fire, he must have feared himself again a victim, this time of the incendiarist’s torch. In the event, No. 72 St Paul’s Churchyard appears to have escaped the attentions of Gordon’s men – many of whom were respectable and orderly dissenters – who headed down Cheapside in the direction of the Bank or west up Newgate Street towards the Old Bailey. Johnson’s immediate response was to publish A Free Address to Those Who Have Petitioned for the Repeal of the Late Act of Parliament, in Favour of the Roman Catholics (1780), penned anonymously by Priestley. This applauded his fellow-Protestants’ religious zeal but urged persuasion instead of force, reasoning that Catholic minorities (like Protestant ones in Europe) deserved a full and friendly toleration, and ended by quoting ‘A Parable Against Persecution’ from Franklin’s Political, Miscellaneous and Philosophical Pieces (1779). Copies could be had for ‘2d., or 12s. per Hundred to give away’, although there was still a sufficient surplus for Johnson to be able to advertise them on the same terms a decade later. The struggle for what the bookseller was ‘pleased to call the cause of political religious liberty’ against the bigotry and crude populism of hard-line Protestantism, however unprofitable, would remain at the forefront of his activities for the rest of the 1780s. In this, his principled attachment to such high-profile dissenting spokesmen as Priestley, Lindsey and Price, whose free-thinking, reformist sympathies brought them increasingly under attack in the sensitive years following the Gordon Riots, would cast him squarely as the ‘Devil’s publisher’ and religious ‘radicalism’ as the mainstay of his business.2 Priestley had moved to Birmingham in 1780 where he had taken up the post of minister at the New Meeting, reputedly one of the most liberal congregations in England. For the next ten years he enjoyed complete freedom in which to pursue his researches at a remove from the hub of dissenting politics in the capital and Shelburne’s shadowy aristocratic influence at Bowood. His time was much taken up with natural philosophy and he was quickly invited to join the Lunar Society, the illustrious group of Midlands scientists and industrialists which gathered every month and included Wedgwood, Matthew Boulton, James Watt, Samuel Galton and Erasmus Darwin. United not by religion or politics but a mutual love of science (which, as Priestley himself observed, was ‘sufficient to bring together persons of all distinctions – Christians, Jews, Mahometans and heathens, Monarchists and Republicans’), its complexion nonetheless was decidedly middle-class nonconformist and served as yet another illustration of the

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close personal and intellectual links between the advocates of ‘rational’ religion and free philosophical enquiry.3 Johnson could have been kept informed about the Lunar Society by his old friend Thomas Bentley, Wedgwood’s business partner, who over the past ten years had acted as an important conduit between the bookseller’s circle in London and the Midlands. In at the inception of the Society for Constitutional Information, Bentley was also a member of an informal literary and scientific society which met once a week at Slaughter’s Coffee House, chaired by the famous surgeon and anatomist John Hunter. It was this group that provided the distinctly metropolitan base upon which Johnson steadily began to build his reputation as a serious medical and scientific bookseller.4 Priestley’s experimental influence, however, had initially done much to raise the profile of science on the bookseller’s list and, through his published experiments on electricity (in 1767) and air (in 1774), helped carry the fight against mystery and ignorance into the laboratory. So, too, had his academic colleagues at Warrington. Its tutor of natural philosophy, Johann Reinhold Forster, translated an important treatise by the great Swedish chemist Karl Wilhelm Scheele and dedicated it to Priestley, which Johnson published in 1780, whilst John Aikin followed up an English version of Antoine Baum’s Manual of Chemistry (1778) with a string of largescale works on medical history and biography. Other of Aikin’s friends from his days as a surgeon’s apprentice in Manchester were well-represented on the bookseller’s list: Thomas Percival, for instance, who loyally followed Priestley’s example by publishing his first medical and experimental essays through Johnson in 1767 and, over the next ten years, produced a pioneering set of investigations into water, lead, air, inoculation and population which were valuable in promoting preventative medicine and public health among the city’s large and poorly-housed manufacturing population; the Unitarian apothecary Thomas Henry, who sold his patented preparation known as ‘Calcinated Magnesia’ in London through St Paul’s Churchyard, together with his printed chemical experiments and translations of the French chemist Lavoisier; and Dr John Haygarth, physician (and a typhus expert) at the Chester Infirmary, whose printed pro-inoculation tracts were sent down to Johnson for sale in London. Aikin’s roving interests in medicine, nonconformity, polite literature and education, and his extensive acquaintance (he was friendly with Erasmus Darwin from the 1770s) made him a key figure in the expansion of Johnson’s provincial network and the cross-fertilization of dissenting ideas in this period. Through Priestley, Aikin and Warrington, Johnson was able to tap into the embryonic literary and philosophical communities that were just beginning to emerge in and around Liverpool and Manchester and whose improving and progressive ethos would necessarily involve them in later forms of social and political agitation.5 With Priestley’s arrival in Birmingham, Johnson’s list of authors

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and contacts could similarly start to expand along the lines of his new-found religious and scientific acquaintance. As early as the spring of 1781 Priestley was assuring friends that he would ask Johnson to send them copies of the sermon he had preached on taking up his new ministry. Like most of Priestley’s works in this period, this was printed in Birmingham (where it was easier for Priestley to correct the press) and given to the leading firm of Thomas Pearson and James Rollason, who were also sizeable booksellers themselves and proprietors of the Birmingham Gazette. Other presents were soon requested from St Paul’s Churchyard for the use of Priestley’s classes in the vestry and also for the shelves of the new public library-room opened chiefly by dissenters in which he took a concern. Before the year was out, Johnson had begun to distribute another work printed by Pearson and Rollason and by Priestley’s friend and former pupil John Palmer – An Examination of Thelyphthora (1781), a rather curious and controversial work by the Reverend Martin Madan which argued the case for polygamy as a cure for prostitution and in response to which the bookseller also issued a 20-page satirical poem, ‘Anti-Thelyphthora’, by William Cowper (Madan’s cousin). Palmer had recently resigned his dissenting ministry at Macclesfield (after some of his more orthodox hearers had withdrawn) and was now one of a small advisory coterie of clerics gathered around Priestley at Birmingham, who ‘met and drank tea together every fortnight’ in between meetings of the monthly Lunar Society. ‘[I]n general,’ Priestley recollected, ‘our conversation was of the same cast as that with my fellow-tutors at Warrington.’6 In other words, dissenting, ‘rational’ and speculative. More so than the Lunar Society, the ideas and discussions which were formulated in this group led to the boldest and most important of Priestley’s work of the 1780s which was not in science but theological controversy. In March 1782 Priestley made the coach journey down to London and received a warm reception from Johnson at St Paul’s Churchyard. He had with him the rough copy of a work, designed as the fourth part of his Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religion, in which he attempted to trace the origins and progress of the main Christian tenets and show that they were not professed by the first true Christians. For Priestley, it was ‘consonant to reason’ and the ‘plain doctrine of the scriptures’ that the Messiah was not a divine being (and had no pretensions to be) but was human and fallible and seen by his contemporaries simply as ‘a man approved of God, by signs and wonders that God did by him.’ It was only due to the transforming ideas of heathenish and Platonic philosophers that Christians had at length come to believe him equal to God and a member of that absurd tritheistic notion, the trinity. Linked to the false divinity of Christ were a string of other ‘depraved’ and ‘disfiguring’ ideas, such as the doctrine of original sin and the atonement, which Priestley denounced as ‘a gross misrepresentation of the character and moral government of God’, making him appear


vengeful, gratuitously violent and unbenevolent. His aim, then, was to apply ‘the refiner’s fire’ and purge Christianity of those errors which over time had crept in to debase it, thus returning it to its native simplicity and purity. Opening and ‘enlarging the minds of men’ on this subject was now clearly more important to him than ‘any discovery we can make in other branches of knowledge’.7 Following his visit, Priestley decided to keep his manuscript a few months for revision. Changes seem likely to have been suggested by friends such as Lindsey, to whom the work was dedicated but who was still shocked by parts of it, and by Johnson who evidently gave ‘directions’ for the work (though these were probably confined to the nature of the press). The revised draft was again given to a local firm in Birmingham, Piercy and Jones, some time towards the middle of June and nearly printed off by October. In December, at the end of a year in which a copy of Priestley’s edition of Hartley’s works was burned in Brussels, Johnson began selling An History of the Corruptions of Christianity (2 vols, 1782), a work which would suffer the same fate at the hands of the common hangman in Dort, Holland, three years later.8 Priestley hoped, and Johnson likewise, that it would be one of the most useful of all his publications but he also feared that, as it had been so anticipated, it would disappoint his friends when they saw it. Certainly, among members of the small but tight-knit ‘rational’ dissenting community, this does not appear to have been the case. Lindsey, for example, wrote from London saying that he ‘rejoiced’ at the approval Priestley’s History of the Corruptions had met with from ‘some excellent judges, such as Dr. Jebb’. However, its argumentative, as well as historical, method proved too challenging for many orthodox dissenters and liberal Anglicans, including Francis Blackburne, while its rigorous doctrinal attacks and the welcome way in which it appeared to greet the (violent) dismantling of Church and State inevitably alarmed and offended most established clergymen and churchgoers: It is nothing but the alliance of the kingdom of Christ with the kingdoms of this world . . . that supports the grossest corruptions of christianity; and perhaps we must wait for the fall of the civil powers before this most unnatural alliance be broken. Calamitous, no doubt, will that time be. But what convulsion in the political world ought to be a subject of lamentation, if it be attended with so desirable an event?9 Indeed, its proposed introduction into the Birmingham Library (by mischiefmongering Anglicans on its committee) stirred ill-feelings towards dissenters which were to have a damaging effect on events and relations in the city over the course of the next decade.

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The Monthly Review was forthright and impersonal in its criticisms of the work the following summer, even claiming to admire its confessed object. Impulsive as ever, Priestley complained to its owner, Ralph Griffiths, who invited him to send in a reply. Priestley did so but wrote to Johnson saying that he considered his article ‘too soft’ and wished to withdraw it in favour of another, to be used or not, as Johnson thought fit. Johnson’s reply to Priestley does not appear to have survived but the tenor of Priestley’s next letter two weeks later (which begins by thanking the bookseller kindly for his advice) suggests that he urged Priestley not to demean himself by publishing anything more on the subject, including a more formal Reply to the Monthly he had written. His bookseller’s chief worry seems to have been that, by ‘lowering’ his sights in responding to the reviewers, Priestley was also lowering his guard.10 By pitting his little pamphlet against an influential and widely read journal, he was risking retaliation on a grand scale, one hugely disproportionate to the size and influence of his own readership. He knew only too well, however, that his author relished controversy and also was never personally affected by strictures either on himself or his writings; and his tactics, in the end perhaps rather naïvely calculated, were casually but firmly brushed aside. Priestley went ahead and bore the costs of printing his Reply to the Animadversions on the History of the Corruptions of Christianity in the Monthly Review (1783) in Birmingham and circulated it to friends.11 The final version had been much improved and Priestley hoped that this would make his bookseller easier. Johnson was sent a copy on 1 August, with the assurance that the bulk of the impression would arrive in a few days, and evidently did not object to selling the work, despite lingering misgivings and the fact that the bishops and senior clergy were ‘exasperated to the greatest degree’ with it. Priestley’s close dissenting acquaintance generally welcomed the Reply and, though Johnson had earlier been seen to equivocate, he was not slow to publish an anonymous set of Remarks in Vindication of Dr. Priestley (1783) written by Newcome Cappe and printed partly at the request of Priestley, who thought them much better than his own.12 Despite this show of dissenting support, Johnson’s apprehensions proved fully justified as the Monthly Review in September contained an extraordinarily indignant 34-page notice of Priestley’s Reply. This coincided with several attacks from within the established church, most notably by the Archdeacon of St Albans, Samuel Horsley, who preached a sermon against Priestley’s ‘open and vehement’ assault on the creeds and practices of ‘every church in Christendom’, which he was quickly called upon to publish as a pamphlet. Mercilessly deriding his authority and imperfect scholarship, Horsley accused Priestley of attempting to ‘unsettle the faith, and break up the constitution, of every ecclesiastical establishment’. Indeed, the ‘whole energy and learning of the Unitarian party,’ he argued, was now ‘exerted to wrest from us the argument from tradition.’13 Johnson sent a copy of


Horsley’s sermon to Priestley, who thought it a poor effort but responded with the first in a series of Letters to Dr. Horsley (1783), thus fuelling a controversy which would run until the end of the decade. By the autumn, Johnson’s main author (in Lindsey’s words) had been ‘driven out to sea by the adverse power, and violent storms and tempests conjured up against him’.14 It was hardly the most seasonable moment at which to launch another key Unitarian initiative, as the bookseller’s more heedful attitude may have implied. On 29 September 1783 at Lindsey’s chapel on Essex Street a ‘Society for Promoting Knowledge of the Scriptures’ was officially instituted for ‘maintaining the right of free inquiry and of private judgment in religious matters’ and for ‘receiving and circulating critical and philological tracts, explanatory of the old and new Testament.’ Among its founding members in London were Lindsey himself, his brother-in-law and new assistant at Essex Street John Disney (who acted as Secretary), Andrew Kippis, Richard Price and John Jebb and, in the country, Priestley, William Turner, Edmund Law and Joshua Toulmin. Jebb was responsible for composing the ‘Sketch of the Society’s Plan’ published shortly after its inception. This declared that its chief purpose was to combat and remove many of the prejudices and false tenets promoted by traditional methods of religious instruction which placed too much faith in the authority of custom at the expense of proper factual investigation. Following Priestley’s method and example in the Corruptions, its aim was to ‘inform the mind of the true believer with just and proper sentiments of the benevolence of the great creator’ by encouraging an ‘analytic’ mode of enquiry into the scriptures, as opposed to the ‘synthetic’ method whereby a position was first assumed and attempts then made to demonstrate its truth. What the Society sought to advocate was an openly evaluative and entirely impartial form of bible criticism, holding it to be the unalienable right and primary duty of mankind to employ its ‘noblest faculty’, reason, upon its ‘noblest object’, religion. Its main business was to be conducted in the capital but ‘serious and liberalminded Christians’ of all denominations throughout the country were encouraged to lend their assistance. Notwithstanding this, the Society for Promoting Knowledge of the Scriptures remained a distinctly Unitarian, London-based body (with 30 to 40 members in all) and, as conceived by Jebb, strikingly akin to the religious arm of the Society for Constitutional Information.15 To help with the printing, sale and distribution of its essays and pamphlets, the Society naturally turned to Johnson to act as its official bookseller. Careful not to appear dogmatic about the kind of tracts it would publish, its only criterion was that the primary intention of the author should be to ‘elucidate the sacred text’. Essays written in support of specific tenets and forms of doctrine were actively discouraged and ‘communications’ welcome only from believers in revealed religion (unlike Priestley’s

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Repository). The Society did not intend to confine itself to a regular periodical but to publish its papers ‘occasionally, in successive numbers’. These proved to be even more sporadic than Jebb had originally envisaged – an initial set of Commentaries and Essays appeared through Johnson probably in 1784 and a second (priced 1s) in 1789 – and, by all accounts, the Society did not flourish. The less official basis of a ‘rational’ religious publishing society, however, continued in the form of Johnson’s own theological output which was dominated by Arian and Socinian tracts from the pens of most of the Society’s leading members. Among these were John Disney’s Reasons for Resigning the Rectory of Panton and Vicarage of Swinderby, in Lincolnshire; and Quitting the Church of England (1782), very much in the style of Lindsey’s Apology; Lindsey’s own Historical View of the State of the Unitarian Doctrine and Worship (1783), virtually a standard textbook for the Society; some Forms of Prayer, and Other Offices, for the Use of Unitarian Societies (1783) and A General View of the Arguments for the Unity of God (1783) by Priestley; and a set of Dissertations on the Internal Evidences and Excellence of Christianity: and on the Character of Christ (1785) by Joshua Toulmin. These were supplemented by various anti-trinitarian offerings from Lardner, An Essay to Show that Christianity is Best Conveyed in the Historic Form (1782) by another Warrington graduate and Priestley supporter, John Simpson, and An Enquiry into the Opinions of the Christian Writers of the Three First Centuries Concerning the Person of Jesus Christ (1784) by Gilbert Wakefield. At the same time, however, Johnson could also be found selling works which set out to prove the divinity of Christ, offered ‘Scripture Evidence of the Holy Trinity’ and defended the ‘Reality and Importance of Atonement for Sin by the Death of Christ’, specifically against the objections of critics like Priestley. In approaching texts with a ‘calm and composed temper’ and not ‘warped in favour of any specific opinion’, he was, in fact, doing nothing more than enacting Priestley, Jebb and the Society’s credo that, ‘Unblinded by system, and exempt from every species of prejudice, we, without partiality, avail ourselves of all those lights of criticism, which the learned labours of others, as well as our own unbiassed judgment may afford,’ and proving himself to be, above all, a patron of ‘rational’ inquiry from whatever quarter and, though predominantly, not solely a bookseller of ‘rational’ dissent.16 Liberal reviewers in the Monthly and Critical tended to treat these works reasonably, criticizing or commending them on the qualified merits, dexterity and scholarship of their arguments. More conservative-minded critics and churchmen, however, found the kind of ‘free, ingenuous inquiry’ promoted by members of the Society deeply questionable, not ‘restorative’ in its appeals to early Christianity but subversively doubting, and fanned fears about the concomitant political damage such a concerted and advanced theological body of opinion might cause. Priestley’s publications, in particular, were condemned as jesuitical (a crude but effective way of


rousing anti-Catholic sentiment which flew directly in the face of his own arguments), an open invitation for ‘assassins to stab religion in the dark’, and symptomatic of ‘the insidious shyness of present Presbyterianism’.17 This was especially the case after 1784 when, with support from his longserving bookseller, he decided to revive his pet project the Theological Repository. Again, this was to be deliberately controversial (contributors as before were advised to conceal their names) and open to any queries regarding religion, and to be ‘published occasionally, as proper materials are received for it.’ Priestley’s small group of five ‘judicious’ clerical friends in Birmingham were to act as editorial advisers and it was to be printed locally (by Pearson and Rollason) with Johnson again acting as main London publisher and distributor.18 The first issue of the new series was published on 1 December 1784 and a second ready for publication at the beginning of February 1785. In the wake of his History of the Corruptions of Christianity, Priestley had begun to question profoundly many of the ideas relating to the person and status of Christ and, at this time, was expanding his thoughts into a newer, much larger history on the subject which was finished and transcribed for the press by April 1785. In this, he again stuck scrupulously to his historical method (composing ‘the whole from original writers, to whom I have not less than 1500 references’) in order to provide ample evidence of the state of opinions on the subject in the period immediately after that of the apostles and thus helping to prove that the first Christian church was essentially Unitarian. Arguments that were highly original or particularly doubtful he decided not to use in this work but instead inserted in the next number of the Repository.19 This, emerging towards the end of 1785, together with An History of the Early Opinions Concerning Jesus Christ (4 vols, 1786) the following spring, contained Priestley’s most provocative and sectarian statements on the divinity and pre-existence of Christ so far, in which he rejected the idea of the miraculous conception and virgin birth as highly improbable, lacking proper historical foundation and only partially and somewhat dubiously mentioned in the Gospels. Nowhere was it said that God sent ‘a person of a higher rank than man, to be his messenger to them’, nor was Christ instructed or prepared for his office in any special, learned or supernatural way.20 He was simply a common man and regarded as such by the common people. The levelling tendencies which could be assigned to such arguments were obvious and Priestley acknowledged that so uninhibited a discussion, in which even Arians came in for attack, was bound to create alarm. Resolute in his faith in the reasonableness of human nature, however, he hoped that ‘consternation’ would quickly give way to a dispassionate consideration of his arguments and a temper more appropriate for the discovery of truth. Predictably, the History of Early Opinions only created more antagonists, whilst the sale of the Repository continued to be ‘trifling’ and barely sufficient to

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cover the advertising.21 After spending three weeks in London in April 1785, Priestley again found himself writing to friends trying to mount a subscription. Most probably this was at Johnson’s suggestion as it was only by rallying support among sympathetic dissenting clergy that the magazine was able to limp on until 1788. Expressly to counter some of the criticisms which the third number of the Repository had generated, Priestley devoted his 5 November sermon in 1785 to the ‘Importance and Extent of Free Inquiry in Matters of Religion’. This was delivered and then printed for Johnson in Birmingham, partly at the request of its audience, though it also had in view ‘another class of persons, who despise all such discussion’. As with all Priestley’s publications, the object of the sermon was the spread of truth. Its text was taken from Matthew, xiii. 9, ‘He that hath ears to hear let him hear’ – Christ’s summons to his audience to make use of their reason. According to Lindsey, it was intended to shew the necessity of carrying the Reformation still farther, and of people making all allowance to their ministers, and all of us bearing with and countenancing one another, in pursuing our researches into the truths of Revelation, though they may be carried to some things we may not at first, or not at all approve.22 For Priestley, the campaign to amend those great corruptions in doctrine and worship did not stop with Luther and Calvin, but was just as imperative in the eighteenth century if society were to continue to progress. There was some effort to assuage the fears of his audience by asking it to judge those whose views were said to be dangerous by their conduct not by their opinions (subsequently the dissenters’ most important intellectual line of defence) and he was at pains to stress that Unitarians were no different to any other Christians in that they too believed in the divine mission (if not the divinity) of Christ. Notwithstanding such disclaimers, the exceedingly ‘rational’ premise of Priestley’s theology could not fail to be disturbing, especially when it succeeded in carrying itself to its logical extreme: ‘. . . should free inquiry lead to the destruction of christianity itself, it ought not on that account to be discontinued. For we can only wish for the prevalence of christianity on the supposition of its being true.’23 But it was in the ‘Reflections on the Present State of Free Inquiry in this Country’ which Johnson published with the sermon that Priestley could really be seen to assume the role of a true sectary. For, in this, he stirringly advised ‘rational’ dissenters not to be discouraged, even though the present times were hostile to theological discussion: It is sufficiently evident that unitarian principles are gaining ground every day. Every attempt to suppress them by writing, or otherwise, has


hitherto been favourable to their spread, and we may be confident it will ever be so. We are now sowing the seeds which the cold of winter may prevent from sprouting, but which a genial spring will make to shoot and grow up; so that the field which to day appears perfectly naked, and barren, may to-morrow be all green, and promise an abundant harvest. The present silent propagation of truth may even be compared to those causes in nature, which lie dormant for a time, but which, in proper circumstances, act with the greatest violence. We are, as it were, laying gunpowder, grain by grain, under the old building of error and superstition, which a single spark may hereafter inflame, so as to produce an instantanious explosion; in consequence of which that edifice, the erection of which has been the work of ages, may be overturned in a moment, and so effectually as that the same foundation can never be built upon again.24 It was customary for Protestant dissenters to celebrate 5 November when their ministers would call attention to ‘the use of their reason in matters of religion, in order to vindicate the principles of the reformation’ and assert their liberty of dissenting from the established church. Priestley’s inflammatory rhetoric, however, conjured up not the spirit of 1688 and the landing of William of Orange on English soil to proclaim a ‘Glorious’ bloodless revolution but the earlier spectre of Guy Fawkes and the Catholic plot to blow up Parliament.25 The analogy was not lost even upon moderate minds and, with the Gordon Riots still fresh in the memory, it is not surprising that this passage was seized upon as proof that the dissenters were not to be trusted. In truth, Priestley’s political mission was no more than an extension of his more central theological one to purge Christianity of ‘those corruptions which prevent its reception with philosophical and thinking persons, whose influence with the vulgar, and unthinking is very great’, and it is somewhat ironic that, in this work, he was actually arguing for religious reformation not political revolution and advocating the formal separation of the church from state influence. It was, rather, in his uncompromising expression of his religious views that Priestley finally fell victim to his own zeal, offering proof (if, in some quarters, any more were needed) of his unconstitutional designs. In Christopher Wyvill’s words, he had become ‘too hardy a speculator for the temper of [his] age’, his theology ‘offended and alarmed the Clergy’ and ‘his Politics irritated the Ministry and their adherents.’26 Henceforward, and despite their reasoning protestations and objections, ‘rational’ dissenters were no longer regarded as pious, middleclass intellectuals, but branded subversive sectaries simply by public reference to Priestley’s works, and Joseph Johnson was now identified, certainly in political circles around Westminster, as bookseller to the infamous ‘Gunpowder Joe’. *

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The year 1785 was an important one for Johnson in terms of Priestley’s activities but it also marked the point at which two other authors, both of whom were dismayed at the publication of so many Unitarian works, rose to prominence and began to rival and (commercially, at least) far outstrip him on the bookseller’s list: the children’s author and didactic writer Sarah Trimmer, and the poet William Cowper. Mrs Trimmer was an eminently respectable and deeply pious Anglican who led a quiet but busy domestic life raising a large family at Brentford in Middlesex. Johnson had first encouraged her to write An Easy Introduction to the Knowledge of Nature, and Reading the Holy Scriptures (1780), which grew out of lessons she had given her own children. He subsequently contracted to sell her Sacred History Selected from the Scriptures (6 vols, 1782–85), ‘composed with a View of exciting in young Minds an early Taste for divine subjects’, as well as her hugely popular series of exemplary tales and histories. His interest in serious didactic publishing for children was not new but had been fostered by the dissenting educational impulse which ran through the works of Priestley, William Enfield, Thomas Percival (whose medical interests, like John Aikin’s, coexisted alongside a strong pedagogical streak) and Anna Laetitia Aikin (now Barbauld). Trimmer had been directly inspired by Barbauld’s Lessons for Children (1778) and Hymns in Prose (1781), which were drawn up during the ten years Barbauld and her husband spent running a boys’ school at Palgrave in Suffolk. Her works shared the same improving ethos as Barbauld’s, predicated upon piety and sound learning, a belief in education per se, not simply as a means of infusing sectarian propaganda, and with the interests of religion, not interdenominational differences, at heart. Trimmer, however, remained a true pillar of the establishment and was patronized by the Queen to whom she appealed as a devoted and obedient servant to lend her royal consent to her charitable schemes, particularly the creation of Sunday schools. This was the cause with which Trimmer became most closely identified – Johnson publishing her Account of the Establishment of Sunday Schools in Old Brentford (1787) and The Oeconomy of Charity; or, An Address to Ladies Concerning Sunday-Schools (1787) – and one in which Unitarians had already proved themselves pioneers.27 Dissenters, in fact, were sizeable contributors to Trimmer’s projects and she claimed to enjoy the ‘esteem and friendship of several persons leaning at least on that side’, although deeply averse herself to Socinianism. Johnson initially had the sole management of Trimmer’s works but at her request admitted Thomas Longman as a partner, thus rather selflessly giving up half the profits. The fact that his fellow-dissenter George Robinson, as well as the staunchly High Church Rivingtons, were subsequently brought in suggests that the diffusion of morally improving works and religious knowledge across the board took precedence over the pursuit of merely factional interests. For her part, Mrs Trimmer seems to have had no qualms at this stage about directing her friends to St Paul’s Churchyard, advising them that what they wanted could be got from Johnson’s shop.28


Nor (like Mrs Barbauld) did she mind being prevailed upon by the bookseller to offer motherly advice to a young teacher-governess and budding educational writer whom he had lately taken under his wing, Mary Wollstonecraft. Wollstonecraft had been introduced to Johnson by an Anglican cleric, John Hewlett, whose sermons he published, but fittingly had forged close personal links with members of the strong ‘rational’ dissenting community, including Richard Price, at Newington Green. She had recommended Barbauld’s hymns in the first work of hers which Johnson purchased, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), and was soon put to compiling a volume of extracts in verse and prose for the improvement of young female readers on the lines of William Enfield’s popular elocution manual The Speaker (1774). For this, she chose several examples from the Aikins’ joint Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose (1773) and Barbauld’s Poems (1773) and reprinted two ‘Didactic and Moral Pieces’ by Mrs Trimmer. Indeed, by the end of the decade, the works of all three women, together with those of Aikin, Priestley, Percival and Enfield, were advertised by Johnson in ‘A CATALOGUE of BOOKS composed for young Persons, and generally used in the principal Schools and Academies in England’. Like Trimmer, William Cowper was another author who had little truck with the ‘rational’ dissenters and yet, like Priestley, managed to forge an equally significant (if sometimes fractious) professional relationship with Johnson, despite never actually meeting him in person. Cowper was a devoutly evangelical Anglican and staunch Calvinist who considered himself, like all men, not a ‘perfectible’ saint but a wretched and worthless sinner. He probably first heard about Johnson through his friend the Reverend John Newton, who was curate of his village at Olney in Buckinghamshire and with whom he had collaborated on a set of hymns for the congregation. Newton was an old friend of the bookseller’s who had previously lived and worked in Liverpool. He had attended John Johnson’s ministry and been friendly with John Gore and sold his first devotional works through George Keith in the 1760s. Ordained in the ministry but with an unsavoury past in the slave trade, he was a curious amalgam of piety, worldliness, liberal reasoning and almost ‘methodical’ fervour, who had flirted with dissent but now occupied a prominent and influential position in the evangelical wing of the established church.29 Newton, however, was no High Calvinist. He found the ‘noise and party contentions of the religious world’, especially in London, immensely disagreeable, viewed dissenters as his ‘brethren’ and described himself as glad of any opportunities to discountenance bigotry and factionalism. His congregation was made up, he said, from ‘various and discordant parties, who, in the midst of differences can agree in one point – to hear patiently a man who is of NO PARTY.’ Unlike his friend John Wesley, he stood accused of ‘meddling with politics and ranking on the side of the complainers’ during the American War, adding his own contribution – The Guilt and Danger of Such a Nation As This! (1781) – to the list of fast-day sermons which Johnson published. However,

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he also professed himself a lover of ‘peace and submission’ and wished ‘to be found amongst those that are quiet in the land’.30 Newton had recommended Johnson to his patron, John Thornton, as a possible publisher for the Olney Hymns (1779) on the grounds that, ‘though he is not a professor, I believe him a man of honour and integrity’. In agreeing to sell them, Johnson had not gone over to the side of the ‘salvationists’ (so detested by Priestley) but simply shown himself receptive to those who preached their own moral sentiments ‘plainly but peaceably’, especially to the poor, and were generously opposed to no one.31 Like James Buckland, Charles Dilly and the Rivingtons, he already owned a lucrative stake in Isaac Watts’s Hymns and Spiritual Songs, which had proved just as popular among Anglicans as Independents, and similarly recognized the broad interdenominational appeal of Newton and Cowper’s Hymns, several of which were reprinted for dissenting congregations and incorporated in later Unitarian collections he published by William Enfield and Andrew Kippis.32 There was also the prospect of almost certain profit since Thornton had agreed to buy 1,000 copies, leaving Johnson and his partner in this case, Buckland, with only 500 to dispose of. In 1780 Newton had been appointed minister of St Mary Woolnoth Church on Lombard Street in the City of London, from which time he had entrusted most of his works (mainly religious letters and sermons) to Johnson and Buckland. Johnson, however, had firmly kept up the Olney connection, selling works by the Reverend Thomas Scott, whose conversion from Socinianism back to moderate Calvinism under Newton (whom he succeeded as curate) was recounted in his ground-breaking confessional work The Force of Truth (1779). He also agreed to undertake the risk of William Cowper’s debut collection of poems – consisting of eight lengthy moral satires (‘Table Talk’, ‘Progress of Error’, ‘Truth’, ‘Expostulation’, ‘Hope’, ‘Charity’, ‘Conversation’ and ‘Retirement’) and a similar number of smaller pieces (including an ‘Ode to Peace’) – after being approached with them by Newton. This appeared on 1 March 1782, in a single volume priced at 4s, but only after the bookseller had suggested extensive amendments (which Cowper gratefully accepted) and the last-minute omission of a ‘Preface’ by Newton, whose pious and damnatory tone, he thought, might damage sales by frightening away readers of different opinions. Some anti-Catholic verses were also deleted from possibly the severest of the poems, ‘Expostulation’, though at Newton’s rather than Johnson’s behest and without removing all traces of residual hostility: ‘Rome with sorceries and magic wand’ still ‘rais’d a cloud that darken’d ev’ry land’ (ll. 508–9). None of this, however, appears to have made much difference to the reception of the poems which were denounced as dull, overly wrathful, ‘unpoetical’ sermons. Printed on lowgrade paper and (notwithstanding Cowper’s own corrections to the press) full of errors, reportedly ‘there was not a review that did not load them with the most scurrilous abuse, and condemned them to the butter shops’


and, for some time afterwards, they sat in a corner as an ‘unsaleable pile’ at St Paul’s Churchyard.33 Owing entirely to his bookseller’s benevolence, the poet did ultimately see some of the profits, but only after another ten years. The Task (1785), then, was the culmination of much dedicated but by no means gainful poetic employment by Cowper and represented an equivalent investment in terms of time, effort and money by Johnson. Cowper claimed it was ‘a matter of indifference’ to him ‘what publisher sends me forth.’ Had Johnson refused, it would have been offered straight to Longman but he was confident of its acceptance since it was ‘more ad captum populi’ than his previous volume.34 The bookseller again readily took on the work at his own risk – indeed, he may not even have seen the complete poem before handing it to the printer, though (as previously) he did suggest possible alterations to the proofs – but this time found his faith thoroughly vindicated. Despite some misgivings about its long, discursive (and often slim) associational thread, which unusually charted the turn of the poet’s own mind as it was touched by contemporary scenes and events, The Task was widely praised when it eventually appeared in July 1785 and its sale did much to revive the fortunes of his earlier volume. Yet it is not hard to see how a poem which was chiefly concerned with diagnosing contemporary ills and pressing the need for a speedy reformation of abuses to restore the nation’s fortunes would have recommended itself to Johnson. After all, it was a task undertaken by many a dissenting orator. Cowper’s taste for the natural pleasures of the countryside (gardening, botany and rural walks – which dominated the middle books of The Task) had also been anticipated elsewhere in Johnson’s works, notably John Aikin and Thomas Percival’s writings on poetry and natural history. What the bookseller probably most appreciated, however, was the poet’s independent provincial viewpoint, the fact that he was writing from within a long and distinguished ‘Country Whig’ tradition, censuring the courtly libertine excesses of London and Westminster (‘a common and most noisome sewer’, I. 683) whilst extolling the virtues of modesty, self-restraint and plain ‘unadult’rate’ rural living (IV. 750).35 This was particularly the case in the fifth (and most political) book of The Task which dwelt at some length on the subject of kingship and revealed its author a firm friend to limited constitutional rather than ‘wanton’ arbitrary authority: We too are friends to loyalty. We love The king who loves the law; respects his bounds And reigns content within them. Him we serve Freely and with delight, who leaves us free. But recollecting still that he is man, We trust him not too far. King, though he be,

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And king in England too, he may be weak And vain enough to be ambitious still, May exercise amiss his proper pow’rs, Or covet more than freemen chuse to grant: Beyond that mark is treason. (V. 331–41) Cowper lamented the war-mongering tendencies of monarchs, ‘whose infirm and baby minds/Are gratified with mischief, and who spoil/Because men suffer it, their toy the world’ (V. 190–2) – a bitter but salutary charge at a time when the nation was still struggling to come to terms with the loss of America. He also took up the cudgels against parliamentary bribery and corruption and deliberately drew comparisons between Britain’s present leaders, all selfishly grasping for power, and those who had presided over her last moment of greatness (ironically, triumphing over France for possession of the colonies) in 1759. Shelburne, for example, reviled for the peace negotiations he had conducted in 1782, was satirized as ‘ambition’ (‘On the summit, see,/The seals of office glitter in his eyes;/He climbs, he pants, he grasps them’) and Charles James Fox as the ‘demagogue’ ‘Close at his heels’ who, ‘with a dext’rous jerk soon twists him down’, only to be ousted, in his turn, by the young William Pitt (IV. 58–63). Cowper’s stock response here to the infamous 1783 coalition between Fox and Lord North mirrored that of many of Johnson’s authors who, like the majority of dissenters, had necessarily gone over to Pitt at the 1784 election.36 Pitt, to his credit, had introduced a reform bill in the Commons in April 1785, designed to reduce the number of rotten and pocket boroughs, extend the vote to copyholders and increase the number of independent County MPs. Christopher Wyvill described it as ‘a plan of reformation, the most extensive and effectual, and at the same time the most mild and practicable which had been devised’ but, curiously, it excited little interest outside Parliament (even in large unrepresented towns like Birmingham) and did nothing to win over more ‘radical’-minded reformers such as Jebb and Cartwright.37 As a result, leave to bring in the bill had been defeated and, with it, much of Pitt’s reformist enthusiasm. In Cowper’s poem, the ‘age of virtuous politics’ was clearly past, debased into one of ‘cold pretence’ and party factionalism, in which none of the contenders for power could be seen as in any way ‘trusty to the gen’ral weal’ (V. 493–6, 514). ‘Albion’s sons’ were not like that ‘of old’ (V. 515, 517), he protested, clearly bitten by a nostalgia for ‘ancient days’ (II. 699) and reserving his praise instead for the likes of King Alfred and the seventeenth-century Commonwealthmen Hampden and Sidney. It was patently a lack of private virtue which had caused England’s glory to ‘wax pale’ (V. 510) and Cowper traced the rot back to indiscipline in the schools and universities and laxity among the clergy, especially those


who were ‘Ambitious of preferment’ (II. 387). Together, these had created a breeding-ground for folly and irreligion, especially in the towns, which had inflicted greater internal damage than any foreign enemy. Cowper, however, proved just as unsympathetic towards ‘rational’ dissenters as the orthodox clergy, including a thinly-disguised attack on Priestley, Lindsey and the destructive tenets of the Unitarians (especially those who dishonestly retained their livings): They now are deem’d the faithful and are praised, Who constant only in rejecting thee, Deny thy Godhead with a martyr’s zeal, And quit their office for their error’s sake. Blind and in love with darkness! yet ev’n these Worthy, compared with sycophants, who knee Thy name, adoring, and then preach thee man.38 (VI. 881–7) Not only experimental religion but science formed the butt of Cowper’s satire in another seeming rebuff to Priestley and his meddling investigations into air and electricity: God never meant that man should scale the heav’ns By strides of human wisdom. In his works Though wond’rous, he commands us in his word To seek him rather, where his mercy shines. (III. 221–4) For Cowper, reason could never be a proper substitute for revelation, which ‘satisfies all doubts’ and ‘Explains all mysteries, except her own’ (II. 527–8), and he applauded those ‘friends of science’, such as Milton and Newton, who had also managed to remain firm friends to piety (III. 249–50). Cowper’s pessimistic Calvinism and the progressive outlook of ‘rational’ dissent may have been temperamentally poles apart but they did have certain moral and spiritual imperatives in common. For example, a wish to praise and uphold justice, a mutual faith in providence and an unswerving belief in individual liberty and conscience. Not surprisingly, one of the chief evils Cowper identified was slavery, which he condemned in most of his major poetry and specifically in Book II of The Task, where he opened with an extended entreaty on the subject: I would not have a slave to till my ground, To carry me, to fan me while I sleep,

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And tremble when I wake, for all the wealth That sinews bought and sold have ever earn’d. No: dear as freedom is, and in my heart’s Just estimation priz’d above all price, I had much rather be myself the slave And wear the bonds, than fasten them on him. We have no slaves at home. – Then why abroad? (II. 29–37) The intellectual attack upon slavery had begun in earnest during the 1770s but, as early as 1764, Johnson had published John Newton’s anonymous account of his experiences as a ‘gaoler’ on board a slave ship working out of Liverpool, which had ‘awakened a good deal of attention’ and horror. Whilst trying to account for his own part in such a ‘vile traffic’, Newton roundly condemned it as ‘a national sin of a scarlet and crimson dye’. However, his Authentic Narrative appears to have been seen at that time less as an indictment of the slave trade than as an exemplary tale of the wonders of divine providence in delivering a ‘poor sinner’ from it.39 It had passed through five editions by 1782 and was just about to enter a sixth. Johnson had also collaborated with the printer William Eyres on a descriptive poem by a young Whig Unitarian lawyer well-known in Warrington circles, William Roscoe, whose commitment to ‘the great purpose of humanising and improving his countrymen’ led him to become an important forerunner and promoter of the abolition movement, according to one of its greatest proponents Thomas Clarkson. Mount Pleasant (1777) was Roscoe’s debut publication, named after a spot overlooking the port of Liverpool where he was born, and, in it, he expressed his first public opposition to the shameful trade underpinning the town’s prosperity.40 Johnson had afterwards teamed up with John Gore to publish The Dismember’d Empire ([1782]), a political work condemning the American war by another resident Liverpool poet Edward Rushton. Apprenticed to a firm of West Indies shippers at an early age, Rushton, like Newton, had witnessed and undergone a great deal of suffering on board slaving trips to Guinea (including the loss of his sight) and, by the end of the decade, had become yet another zealous anti-slavery convert. A coruscating piece on ‘Slavery and the Slave Trade’ (as well as on ‘Religious Establishments’ and the ‘Advantages of the Republican Form of Government Compared with those of Monarchy’) also appeared in a volume of Essays Historical and Moral (1785) which Johnson issued. The author was one of his close friends, George Gregory, an Anglican clergyman with strong dissenting sympathies who had worked as a merchant’s clerk in Liverpool. By the mid-1780s a public movement seeking abolition of the slave trade had begun to emerge, with Cowper and Newton on the periphery of the


respectable evangelical groups that were pressing for reform in London and Roscoe heading the revolt from within the walls of the stronghold of slavery itself up in Lancashire. In May 1787 a Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade was formed with Newton’s friend, the independent Yorkshire MP William Wilberforce, undertaking to advocate its cause in the Commons. It was from this point that works more overtly linked to the rising tide of abolitionism, as distinct from the free-thinking libertarian tracts which commonly characterized his output, began to feature on Johnson’s list. Their number was not large but, as ever, they were significant and what they again demonstrate is the extent to which religion was a dynamic for change in this period and the condemnation of slavery, like so many other of the reformist causes with which the bookseller was associated, theologically-driven. They included Newton’s own condemnatory Thoughts Upon the African Slave Trade (1788), meant as a deliberate boost to Wilberforce and the Abolitionist Society’s designs, and a set of Poems on Slavery (1788) by the teenage ‘Sapphos’ Maria and Harriet Falconar, who openly wished the ‘Friends of philanthropy’ well.41 A sermon by Priestley (a member of his local ‘Committee of Correspondence for abolishing the Slave Trade’ in Birmingham) decried the trade as ‘perhaps the greatest, and most crying evil under the sun’ but still used the issue as a sounding board for his views on dissenting equality: all mankind should be considered as ‘brethren and neighbours, intended to every good office’, and all Christians should be allowed to think and act as they pleased, provided they were not disruptive. Slavery, however, he stressed, was not the cause of Unitarians, Arians or Trinitarians, but simply that of humanity.42 During the year in which Wilberforce first spoke on the subject in Parliament, Johnson’s name appeared on a volume of Letters on Slavery (1789) by a former secretary to the Governor of Barbados, William Dickson, which (like Newton’s Thoughts) he sold in conjunction with a Quaker printer and bookseller in London, James Phillips. These purported to offer a ‘free and impartial sketch of negro slavery’ in the West Indies but did not hesitate to censure the evils of such a system or to prove the ‘natural equality of the natives of the immense continent of Africa to the rest of mankind.’43 Johnson also acted as London distributor of a bulky 500-page set of Tracts Ethical, Theological and Political (1789), printed in Warrington by William Eyres, which, besides giving a summary of Unitarian arguments, contained some ‘Letters on the Slave Trade’. These were written by Thomas Cooper, a committee member of the ‘Society for the Purpose of Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade’ in Manchester, by far the ‘most active provincial centre of anti-slave trade opinion’, and bore the opening lines from Book Two of Cowper’s Task on their title-page.44 Perhaps most significantly, Johnson’s name stood at the head of a dozen or so London booksellers on one of the most influential contributions to the anti-slavery debate, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789). This was the accom-

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plished autobiography of a former slave kidnapped by Africans at the age of ten and transported into captivity in the West Indies and Virginia. Bought by a ship’s captain (who gave him the name ‘Gustavus Vassa’), Equiano spent most of the next thirty years at sea, fighting during the Seven Years War and then plying the trade routes, both as a slave and eventually as a freeman. He had made his way to London in 1779 and over the next ten years became one of the city’s foremost black leaders and an active figure in the abolitionist movement. Compelling as an adventure story, a slice of geography and as travelogue, with only occasional lapses into abolitionist rhetoric, Equiano’s Narrative (which appeared in two handsome pocket-sized volumes, priced 6s) proved an immediate bestseller, reaching eight editions in five years, and could soon be had from ‘all the Booksellers in Town and Country’.45 Following the rejection of the bill for abolishing the slave trade in April 1791, Johnson arranged to print Mrs Barbauld’s consolatory Epistle to William Wilberforce (1791) and began the painfully protracted process of publishing John Gabriel Stedman’s Narrative, of a Five Years’ Expedition, Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (2 vols, 1796), for this commissioning over a dozen stark engravings (including the ‘Flagellation of a Female Samboe Slave’ and ‘A Negro Hung Alive by the Ribs to a Gallows’) from William Blake. He also put out a characteristically ironic Apology for Slavery (1792) by Alexander Geddes, which advised Wilberforce first to obtain the lifting of religious sanctions and a free and equal representation of the people at home, if the goal of abolishing colonial slavery was ever to be achieved.46 Even on this most incontrovertible of issues, however, he did not neglect to air all sides of the argument, responsive to the fact that many dissenting merchants (like the Vaughans) had strong West Indian interests. Considerations on the Emancipation of Negroes and on the Abolition of the Slave-Trade (1788) by ‘a West-India Planter’, for example, made no attempt to deny that slavery was an evil but insisted that abolition was both impolitic and impracticable and emancipation would only aggravate the problem. Such arguments, in George Gregory’s view, were ‘beneath the attention of a rational being’. Yet this was followed by The Negro and the Free-Born Briton Compared; or, A Vindication of the African Slave Trade ([1789]) and a second edition of some toughly-worded Thoughts on Civilization, and the Gradual Abolition of Slavery ([1790]) by ‘A Friend to Commerce and Humanity’, in which slavery in the ‘abstract’ was again condemned but its ‘instantaneous and unqualified abolition’ seen as ‘worse than the disease’, which suggests that Johnson’s overriding aim was always roundly and impartially to inform public opinion as the best means of countering ignorance, rather than simply peddle an alternative form of orthodoxy.47 *


Coterminous with the rise of the abolitionist movement, and after a gap of almost fifty years, the deputies of the Protestant dissenting community in London decided to renew their application to Parliament for repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts. On 5 January 1787 a 21-strong committee was appointed to conduct the application and, under the chairmanship of a London surgeon Edward Jeffries, quickly began to orchestrate its campaign. The Prime Minister, William Pitt, was approached, having been elected three years earlier on a wave of dissenting support, and agreed to give the matter his serious consideration, though he was soon swayed by the knowledge that the bench of bishops was fully opposed. During February the Jeffries Committee circulated copies of a single sheet publication, entitled ‘The Case of the Protestant Dissenters’, which simply enumerated their grievances (‘Every man hath an inalienable right . . . to judge for himself in matters of religion’, ‘In no other country is the Sacramental test required as a qualification for civil employment’) to both Houses of Parliament and to leading dissenters throughout the country. The ‘Case’ was greeted sympathetically by several MPs who were invited by Jeffries to become members of a larger and deliberately less partisan committee which, it was felt, would improve the dissenters’ chances. This included the lawyer, former Feathers’ Tavern petitioner and member of the Society for Promoting Knowledge of the Scriptures, Michael Dodson, John Lee MP, Benjamin Vaughan and another Warrington graduate and prominent ‘rational’ dissenting barrister, Samuel Heywood.48 In March Johnson was involved with John Almon’s successor John Debrett in publishing a hugely ambitious 200page historical account of the Test laws compiled by Heywood at the Jeffries Committee’s request. The Right of Protestant Dissenters to a Compleat Toleration Asserted (1787) was written and published (under the pseudonym of ‘a Layman’) in just over six weeks, ahead of the imminent debate on the subject in Parliament, and implies that Johnson was early and closely involved with the Committee’s press and propaganda activities.49 Heywood sought to give ‘an accurate narrative of facts, and a perspicuous view of the arguments urged by the Protestant Dissenters’ in favour of repeal, in plain and simple language. By exploiting previously unexplored material in the Parliamentary Journals, he was able to correct the ‘numberless mistakes of our best historians’ and show that the Test and Corporation Acts were originally devised to stem the danger from popish recusants. They were not permanently meant to penalize Protestant dissenters, who had loyally agreed to acquiesce in these measures only in the greater interests of the security of the state. Their persecution at the hands of Charles II, the current imperfect toleration obtained by William III, their isolation during the reign of Queen Anne and their more benevolent treatment under the Hanoverian kings were all fully documented as a history of injury without just cause. Further advances in toleration had been made under the present monarch and yet the Test Laws remained unaltered on the statute book. It

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was now time for Protestant dissenters to recognize the dangers which still existed to their civil rights, protected only by the liberal spirit of the times, and to ‘rouze’ themselves from ‘a state of disgraceful apathy’.50 In this vein, Heywood proceeded into the ‘argumentative’ second part of his treatise which put the case for the injustice of the religious test in more abstract terms and played down the supposed dangers that would attend its abolition. He was not arguing for a particular sect or party but for the right to private judgement and equal eligibility for office on the part of all nonconformists. He conceded the notion of an established church (‘for reasons of UTILITY’) but not penalties for those who did not conform and yet were still obliged to contribute to its support. Protestant dissenters, he argued, were friends of civil liberty, just like members of the Anglican church, and avowed the same principles which had underpinned the ‘Glorious’ revolution. Keen to display his credentials as a moderate, this was not, Heywood insisted, ‘the language of insolence, but of friendship, good order, tranquillity, and religion’. With no sign of danger to the church, no pretender to the throne, the nation no longer at war and a Prime Minister to whom the dissenters looked as ‘the hope and bulwark of religious as well as civil liberty’, the present prospects for obtaining relief looked favourable on all counts.51 On 28 March 1787 the Whig dissenting MP (and Warrington graduate) Henry Beaufoy introduced the repeal motion in the Commons, with Priestley and Lindsey listening from the gallery. Despite all the good omens and full-blooded support from the Opposition leader, Fox, the motion was defeated by 178 votes to 100, MPs from large dissenting constituencies such as Liverpool and Newcastle worryingly even choosing to withhold their support. Three days after the debate, Priestley put the finishing touches to A Letter to the Right Honourable William Pitt (1787) on the subject of toleration and church establishments which Johnson and Debrett again rushed into print. This plainly remonstrated with the Prime Minister for his desertion of the repeal cause and the betrayal of those who had previously supported him. Pitt had opposed lifting the religious test on the basis that it was too hazardous, that the ecclesiastical and political liberties of the country were inseparably united and that there was a danger to the state from dissenters being allowed into the civil service. In this, Priestley contended, Pitt had been woefully misled and, as a supposedly enlightened statesman, should have been able to persuade the bishops (‘the most jealous, the most timorous, and of course the most vindictive of men’) rather than be influenced by them.52 Going way beyond Heywood, he declared himself a member of that class of dissenters who were enemies to all ecclesiastical establishments and professed a Christianity which actively disavowed them. However, he was also conscious that during the Commons debate Sir William Dolben had quoted from his Reflections on the Present State of Free


Inquiry, drawing particular attention to its subversive ‘gunpowder’ imagery, and had dismissed Beaufoy’s claims that the dissenters were not levellers or republicans as ‘Nonsense!’ That he and Johnson lost no time in printing the Letter suggests not so much an impolitic spirit as a defensive need to correct many of the false impressions that earlier work had created and defuse the ammunition it had so spectacularly given the other side: . . . to quiet their apprehensions from the dangerous attempts of such furious sectaries as myself and my friends, and the terror which they have conceived from our gunpowder plots, &c. I shall inform them that the means we propose to employ are not force, but persuasion. The gunpowder which we are so assiduously laying grain by grain under the old building of error and superstition, in the highest regions of which they inhabit, is not composed of salt petre, charcoal, and sulphur, but consists of arguments.53 Priestley concluded his Letter by outlining a list of measures that would make the toleration complete. First, Pitt must repeal the Blasphemy Act of 1698 outlawing all non-trinitarians (‘whether the doctrine be true or false, give us the power of a free and fearless discussion of it’). Secondly, he must repeal all other penal statutes which apply to religion. Furthermore, he should allow dissenters to be married by their own ministers and according to their own forms, prohibit the clergy taking seats in the House of Lords and other corrupting interests and emoluments, and remove the obligatory payment of tithes. Above all, he should ‘confine the establishment to Christianity itself’ rather than any single denomination and not exclude from the benefits of it any who seriously profess their faith. In this, he touched on the practice of subscription at the universities, claiming it was counter-productive and overdue for abolition: . . . keeping the means of learning to yourselves, you may think to keep us in ignorance, and therefore less able to give you disturbance. . . . our institutions, being formed in a more enlightened age, are more liberal . . . Thus while your universities resemble pools of stagnant water secured by dams and mounds, and offensive to the neighbourhood, ours are like rivers, which, taking their natural course, fertilize a whole country.54 This unwittingly harked back to a point made earlier in the tract, when Priestley had maintained that there was ‘no more danger of the constitution suffering from this quarter, than of the river Thames rising so high as to overflow the whole city of London’. Such inconsistencies were always to prove manna for the opposition. Priestley’s references to Unitarianism as,

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in reality, not a mountain but a ‘molehill’ and a strong, deep-rooted plant with ‘vigorous shoots’ proved vain attempts to placate already ‘disturbed imaginations’, tending rather to confirm all their worst fears about possible subversion, and his requoting phrases from his earlier sermon on free enquiry again offered up tempting portents of revolution.55 Priestley soon suspected he would be a ‘considerable loser’ by the Letter which ‘greatly displeased the Dissenters in general’ and many of his most valued friends who long refused to forgive him, though he never actually regretted its publication. Notwithstanding its reception, at the end of the one-shilling pamphlet Johnson felt confident enough to append A CATALOGUE OF BOOKS WRITTEN BY

DR. PRIESTLEY, AND PRINTED FOR

J. JOHNSON, Bookseller, No. 72, St. Paul’s Church Yard, LONDON giving full details of the prices and bindings of 59 separate titles, including a new number of the Theological Repository and ‘The DOCTOR’s WORKS, complete’. Clearly he had no qualms about being associated in the public mind with Priestley, who at this point described their long-standing connection as ‘founded on friendship, as well as mutual interest’, and invited him to visit Birmingham that summer.56 On 25 April Richard Price preached a sermon at his meeting house on Old Jewry Lane. He took as his text a part of the Lord’s Prayer, ‘Thy Kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven’ (Matthew, vi. 10), declaring that the human mind must soon be emancipated from ‘the chains of church-authority and church-establishments’, for the ‘liberality of the times has already loosened their foundations’: The obstinacy of their adherents is increasing their danger; and the wise and virtuous of all descriptions should make themselves willing instruments in the hands of Providence to hasten their removal, not by any methods of violence, but by the diffusion of knowledge, and the quiet influence of reason and conviction.57 These sentiments directly echoed Priestley’s, as did the comparison of the progressive course of human improvement with ‘a wide-spreading stream, fertilizing and enriching all countries, and covering the earth as the waters cover the sea.’ Price called upon the great, by virtue of their money and influence, ‘the poor by their labour’ and ‘the learned by their instruction’ all to work together to restore Britain’s glory by improving the state of


her education and the representative nature of her civil government. However, he was at pains to remove any suspicions that he was in any way a democrat: . . . so far am I from preferring a government purely republican, that I look upon our own constitution of government as better adapted than any other to this country, and in theory excellent. . . . [And this] I believe to be true of the whole body of British subjects among Protestant Dissenters. I know not one individual among them who would not tremble at the thought of changing into a democracy our mixed form of government, or who has any other wish with respect to it than to restore it to purity and vigour.58 Price’s audience was made up of supporters of a new dissenting academy set up at Hackney and his sermon, immediately published by Johnson and Thomas Cadell, also helped publicize and promote its interests. Johnson had already issued the inaugural sermon preached at the Old Jewry a year earlier by the newly-appointed head of Hackney, Andrew Kippis, and would become closely bound up with its mission in the public eye by publishing similar discourses (on ‘The Advantages of Knowledge’ and ‘The Importance of Truth’) by other of its distinguished tutors: Hugh Worthington, Abraham Rees and (a prized convert to Unitarianism from the ranks of orthodox dissent) Thomas Belsham. Price himself would briefly lecture at the Academy, as would Priestley and Gilbert Wakefield, and, despite its staff’s disavowal of democratic principles, Hackney would meet with much opposition in the press over the next ten years as a fertile bed for atheism and sedition. Just over a fortnight later, on 13 May, Johnson, Cadell and John Stockdale each began selling the three-volume collected Works Theological, Medical, Political, and Miscellaneous, of John Jebb (1787), who had died the previous year. These had been assembled and edited, with a ‘Memoir’, by John Disney, who had undertaken the task out of friendship and from ‘a zeal for the interest of truth, [and] the civil and religious liberties of our country’.59 Jebb’s Works offered an almost panoramic survey of the struggle for religious and political reform from the era of Wilkes to the end of the American war and included his letters on the subject of religious subscription, his reasons for resigning from the church, remarks upon the system of education at Cambridge with proposals for its improvement, his Address to the Freeholders of Middlesex ([1780]) which Johnson had originally helped publish, the influential plan of reform he had compiled for the Westminster Sub-Committee in 1780 (advocating annual elections, equal electoral districts and adult male suffrage), and the ‘Sketch of the Plan for Promoting Knowledge of the Scriptures’. Subscriptions had been taken in at St Paul’s Churchyard during the past 12 months and the final list of 600 names featured most of the ‘rational’ dissenting and reformist élite.60 Moreover, the

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assault upon subscription at the universities, begun a decade earlier by Jebb, was once more taken up in works which Johnson sold by Priestley, Lindsey and another of the subscribers to Jebb’s Works, a young Cambridge academic William Frend. Johnson, by this stage, had already brought out Priestley’s Defences of Unitarianism for 1786 (1787) which contained letters to the ‘Young Men, who are in a Course of Education for the Christian Ministry, at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge’. Begun in the wake of the hostile reception to his Early Opinions of Christ and reiterating his arguments that the great mass of early Christians were Unitarian, these deplored a situation in which many had gone on ‘from generation to generation, subscribing what they have not considered, and then maintaining it because they have subscribed it’, merely for the ‘fruits’ it brought, and urged students to give some dedicated thought to the oath they were obliged to take. Priestley thought the letters profoundly serious and that (‘without any just cause’) they would give more offence than anything he had yet published. They had been printed in Birmingham by 17 March, by which time Johnson was under instruction to circulate copies to Priestley’s friends, and they were ‘much extolled’ in Oxford by the beginning of May.61 Over the next few months Priestley set about composing a further series of letters and pestered his bookseller to send him pamphlets on the Unitarian controversy which he could distribute in the Midlands. Asked to help carry on the debate, Lindsey began preparing his Vindiciæ Priestleianæ: an Address to the Students of Oxford and Cambridge (1788) which Johnson arranged to have printed early the following year. Priestley’s Defences of Unitarianism for 1787 (1788), a second set of letters railing against the mindlessness of subscription to ‘the Candidates for Orders in the Two Universities’, was again sold in London through St Paul’s Churchyard and distributed widely among his dissenting acquaintance. They were also reprinted by a ‘private society’ at Cambridge at their own expence, specifically for students.62 On 30 December 1787 Lindsey welcomed William Frend to his chapel on Essex Street. A fellow of Jesus College, Frend had long been sympathetic to the aims of the Society for Promoting Knowledge of the Scriptures but had only recently overcome his reservations about converting to Unitarianism.63 He had resigned his living near Cambridge and spent the past six months trying to bring a motion before the University senate to abolish subscription, but this had just been defeated. Frend told Lindsey that the main booksellers in Cambridge allotted no space to ‘heretical books’, so he had ‘engaged an inferior one to have a shelf’, and Lindsey agreed to supply him with Unitarian materials chiefly with Johnson’s help.64 The following May he went public in his rejection of several of the articles and parts of the liturgy of the established church by printing his Thoughts on Subscription to Religious Tests (1788). As with Priestley and Price, the question at issue for Frend had nothing to do with opposition to church government (as many


of their critics alleged) but quite simply whether a young man should ‘embrace, without hesitation, certain opinions, on which, men, the most respectable for learning and wisdom, have in every age been greatly divided.’ On this, he quoted Locke, deriding a breed of men ‘taught rather to obey than understand’ and who use their learning, ‘to justify, not to examine, what their superiors command.’ He also referred to the efforts of his predecessor Jebb, ‘a man, whose enlarged and comprehensive mind saw the folly of making barriers to the investigation of truth’.65 Subscription imposed a tyranny over the mind that was the result of policy not Christianity (‘to keep out a set of men, who are supposed to be unfavourable to our principles of government’) and it was plainly wrong, but also damagingly unpatriotic, to confuse a man’s secular and religious beliefs: The Dissenters are Men and Englishmen; they have distinguished themselves by their love to their Country, and their zeal for it’s liberties: they have produced within these few years some of the noblest supporters of Christianity. Are we not indebted to them for a TAYLOR, a LARDNER, and a PRIESTLEY? In future times, Philosophy will blush, when, at the name of the latter, she reflects on the number of her sons, who have disgraced themselves by their opposition to him; and neighbouring Nations observe with astonishment our inconsistency, when they perceive, that the greatest ornament of this country; he, whom every learned society in Europe is proud to enroll among it’s members, should be debarred by the absurd prejudices of superstition, from a place in our Universities.66 Frend’s Thoughts on Subscription were sold through the leading booksellers in Oxford and Cambridge and by Johnson in London for a shilling a copy. Lindsey swiftly got hold of one. He and Priestley avidly read it together and thought it gave such ‘manly proof’ of its author’s integrity as to ‘make the friends of truth rejoice & its enemies tremble’.67 By September Frend had produced his next pro-Unitarian blast, a ten-page Address to the Inhabitants of Cambridge and Its Neighbourhood, Exhorting Them to Turn From the False Worship of Three Persons, to the Worship of the One True God (1788), which he again had printed off locally and distributed cheaply at tuppence each. Predictably, it won an admiring response from the converted at Cambridge, including the Unitarian scholar George Dyer who was currently engaged in his own Inquiry into the Nature of Subscription (1790). The orthodox, however, began to inveigh against its sentiments from their pulpits and, on 27 September, Frend was suspended from his post at Jesus College. Barred from using the University Press, he naturally turned to Johnson who brought out a second edition of the Address, re-titled An Address to the Members of the Church of England, and to Protestant Trinitarians in General (1788), and arranged for it to be sold in Cambridge and

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Canterbury (Frend’s birthplace). A Second Address (1789) followed, republished by Johnson in similar fashion as a 12-page pamphlet priced 2d for ‘extensive circulation’. Priestley liked it as much as the first and asked Lindsey to send him more copies of both so he could ‘dispose of them to advantage’ in Birmingham and Manchester.68 In April 1789 Frend attended a meeting of the orthodox Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge armed with copies and asked that they be given out to members. Promptly alerted to this, the Society’s committee convened an extraordinary meeting to consider Frend and his writings, as a consequence of which (on 12 May) he was expelled. By this time a second edition of his Thoughts on Subscription had rolled off the presses and was being sold in London through St Paul’s Churchyard. Unlike the booksellers in Cambridge and Canterbury, Johnson’s name appeared boldly on the title-page, clearly undeterred by the ‘current wit’, ‘Frend of Jesus, Friend of the Devil’.69 By the winter of 1788 Unitarianism was perceived to be spreading, in no small part due to Priestley’s avid pamphleteering aided by Johnson and what Lindsey described as the ‘recent movement of the waters to prevent stagnation’ by Frend at Cambridge.70 Equally conspicuous advances were being made in the south-west by Joshua Toulmin, whose prolific pro-Unitarian sermons, Review of the Life, Character and Writings of the Rev. John Biddle (1789) – one of the first men openly to espouse Unitarian views – and the anonymous Exhortation to All Christian People to Refrain from Trinitarian Worship (1789), were published by Johnson and could also be had from the bookshop run by Jane Toulmin next to her husband’s school in Taunton. Another important factor had appeared mid-way through 1788 in the shape of a new wide-ranging monthly periodical, the Analytical Review, which Johnson had launched in conjunction with a young Scots Unitarian Thomas Christie and which soon came to be accused of being a mouthpiece for ‘rational’ dissent. The idea for an ‘outline of a Review of Books upon the Analytical plan’ had originated with Christie. A medical student with wide-ranging literary and scientific interests, he had arrived in London late in 1787 after completing a six-month tour of England during which he had met and discussed his proposals with fellow-Unitarians at Liverpool, Erasmus Darwin at Derby and Priestley in Birmingham. His uncle, William Christie, was in contact with Lindsey and had established a Unitarian Society at Montrose where he circulated Priestley’s works (specially ordered from St Paul’s Churchyard) to the outrage of local orthodox dissenters.71 He was assisted for a time by the Reverend Thomas Fysshe Palmer, who had written to Johnson from Montrose as early as 1784, requesting copies of Priestley’s works and the bookseller’s catalogue. Palmer had since become pastor of a new Unitarian meeting in Dundee where he would later rather infamously be convicted of sedition, his career, like that of his former tutor John Jebb, offering another notable example of the links between ‘rational’ religion


and ‘radical’ politics. It was probably through friendship with Priestley or Lindsey or with Dr Samuel Foart Simmons, editor of the London Medical Journal which Johnson published, that Christie took his idea to St Paul’s Churchyard.72 The Analytical was conceived as a successor to another journal sympathetic to Protestant dissenters and their views – Paul Maty’s New Review – which had also attempted to ‘furnish good intelligence’, especially of foreign literature, but which had stopped publication in 1786. Priestley’s ill-fated Theological Repository, revived in 1784 under the influence of the Society for Promoting the Knowledge of the Scriptures but failing by 1788, with its rigorous, ‘analytical’ plan for interpreting the scriptures, must also have presented itself as a model.73 The Analytical, however, was to be a much more careful business undertaking, better-equipped to meet with that ‘encouragement equal to the extraordinary labour that would be required in executing it’, so Christie’s pure ‘analytic’ aims in practice had to be curbed.74 Johnson was the sole proprietor, handling all aspects of production and distribution, and his finance underpinned the whole venture but (unlike George Robinson who owned the Critical Review) he also appears to have assumed much of the editorial burden. This may have been originally agreed, or conceivably it turned out to be an ad hoc arrangement born of the fact that Christie was still vacillating about his choice of career (medicine, literature or business) and, between October 1789 and August 1793, was away a good deal on business in Paris. The Analytical was to be specifically adapted to the ease of men engaged in active life and professional business . . . who, though they may have an ardent love of knowledge, and might be extremely useful in diffusing it . . . are, however, too much involved in the necessary duties of their stations, to find leisure to peruse volumes in quarto and folio.75 It was the same audience – the predominantly dissenting merchant middle classes – that Priestley had targeted and set out to educate some twenty years earlier at Warrington. Its plan also was far from revolutionary, but instead an attempt to revive an older type of ‘abstract’ journal, offering impartial and rational analysis rather than critical commentary or opinion, thus enabling readers to judge of books for themselves. This was a deliberate effort to escape the abusive norms of contemporary reviewers (who, in Christie’s words, had ‘engaged in wars with authors’ and ‘distributed from their dark thrones, decisions to regulate the ideas and sentiments of the literary world’) and to counter their excessive power by presenting to the public what it had so far lacked – a modest, useful and respectable journal that ‘shall tend to diffuse knowledge, and to advance the interests of science, of virtue, and morality.’76 It was also specifically designed to discountenance

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any accusations of ‘party’ which were circulating. This may have been driven as much by commercial as political motives and the wish not to alienate potential buyers – although, in the event, the Analytical’s circulation remained relatively low, at around 1,500 copies a month, compared to the similarly-priced Monthly (5,000) and Critical (3,500) – but it was still a conscious response to the fact that by the late 1780s the growing influence of dissent over the press was beginning to cause concern. Correspondingly, much has been made of the fact that Johnson chose not to appoint a Unitarian or even a Protestant dissenter but a Catholic, Alexander Geddes, as his chief theological reviewer – a fact made more significant by Geddes being one of the main trinitarians to have pitted himself against Priestley in controversy. It is debatable, however, whether this was simply a gesture of impartiality or whether, in fact, Geddes’s reputation as a brilliant, if somewhat unconventional, bible scholar, his being friendly with Johnson and conveniently based in London did not make him an obvious choice for the task. Geddes and Priestley (just like Priestley and Price) were amicable in their doctrinal differences and in fundamental agreement about their main aim which was to discover religious ‘truth’ and in their ‘rational’ methodology.77 Geddes, in fact, ‘could ridicule the infallibility of the pope, and laugh at images and relics . . . as much as the most inveterate protestant’ and incurred the wrath of Catholic bishops by attending Presbyterian worship. He is recorded among the ‘Anti-Tests’ at this point and characterized by his dissenting contemporaries as free-thinking, ultra-liberal and a ‘primitive christian’.78 Moreover, as he and Christie were joined by one of the bookseller’s oldest and closest friends, the artist and one-time Protestant priest Henry Fuseli, and his new young (Anglican) protégée Mary Wollstonecraft, Johnson appears to have been less concerned to avoid charges of sectarianism than to create a small resident, reliable team of reviewers, churchmen as well as dissenters (just like the Monthly), within easy reach of St Paul’s Churchyard. Beyond this inner London core, Johnson could appeal to a wider provincial network of occasional contributors. William Cowper submitted ten reviews to the Analytical’s early numbers and praised it to Johnson for coming close ‘both in plan and execution to the idea I have always entertained of what a review ought to be’ – that is, ‘set on foot by persons liberal and well-informed and consequently well-qualified to conduct it’ and devoid of ‘that extreme bitterness of censure’ which characterized its competitors.79 Priestley, like Lindsey, had little actively to do with the project, although both were regular subscribers. However, the fact that William Enfield (now at Norwich) and John Aikin (at Yarmouth), both key critics for the Monthly, Anna Laetitia Barbauld (in Hampstead), William Turner (in Wakefield), and Joshua Toulmin (at Taunton) regularly abetted Johnson on the Analytical does indicate that his contributorship was inevitably skewed towards dissent and, outwardly at least, this was seen as conducive towards


a cabal or ‘party’ spirit.80 In practice, the Analytical did tend to concentrate on theology, ‘sacred criticism’ and ecclesiastical history, as well as science, and its ‘rational’ anti-establishment position was soon readily apparent. Yet, just like its major rivals in this period, it was never used expressly ‘to advertise the wares of the bookseller’ who owned it (although a considerable number of Johnson’s titles would be noticed) and from the outset was commendable for its overall restraint and lack of bias.81 On 3 December 1788 the Jeffries Committee reassembled at the King’s Head Tavern on the Poultry, just east of St Paul’s Churchyard, and resolved to renew the dissenters’ application to win relief from the Test and Corporation Acts. Over the next three months letters were drafted to the printers of oppositionist newspapers re-stating their ‘Case’, lists of MPs who had previously voted for the measure were circulated and, according to Samuel Heywood, every necessary preparation was made to bring the claims of the dissenters again under discussion in the present parliamentary session.82 Johnson, for his part, took to selling copies of a ‘spirited’ 19-page Address to the Dissenters, on the State of their Political and Civil Liberty (1788), ‘encouraging them to persist in their application, and offering such arguments as serve to strengthen their zeal in the cause’, by the Mansfield dissenter Samuel Catlow.83 With Debrett, he was also quick to bring out a second corrected edition of The Right of Protestant Dissenters to a Compleat Toleration Asserted (1789), prompted by the Jeffries Committee. Like the revised ‘Case of the Protestant Dissenters’, this had several passages offensive to Catholics deleted to bring it more in line with the ‘full toleration’ argument advocated by Priestley, and was condensed to half its original size, enabling it to sell for a modest 1s 6d Priestley hoped to find copies of Heywood’s work, along with Joshua Toulmin’s conciliatory Letter to the Bishops, on the Application of the Protestant Dissenters, to Parliament (1789), in Johnson’s shop when he visited London at the beginning of April. Both titles were currently up for review in the ‘POLITICS’ section of that month’s Analytical. On 8 May 1789 Henry Beaufoy presented the dissenters’ repeal motion a second time to the Commons. His Unitarian colleague William Smith defended the motion against Lord North, arguing that every good subject should be entitled to equal civil rights and repeating Priestley and Heywood’s claims for dissenters to be justly recognised as eligible for office. In again supporting the motion, Fox adopted the line that Priestley had taken in The Importance and Extent of Free Enquiry, asserting that no government had a right to enquire into private opinions and that men should be judged by their actions, not their thoughts. Pitt broadly agreed with Fox. However, he could not bring himself to allow the emoluments and offices of the government which had set up an established church to be given to those people who were unfriendly to it, if only for fear of the damage they might do. He preferred to preserve the current harmony and moderation between religious groups instead of ‘rekindling sparks of ancient animosity

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which mutual forbearance had almost extinguished’.84 The second repeal vote was again lost, but only by 124 to 104 votes. The debate was widely reported in the London press, and the regular Parliamentary Journals published by Debrett and Stockdale, but this time Johnson himself decided to have the proceedings in the Commons printed as a shilling pamphlet, to which readers were alerted in the Analytical. Edward Jeffries reported that ‘the Equity and good policy of our claims have increased the number of our friends and relaxed the efforts of our opponents’ and that the slim majority (down from 78 to 20) presented ‘a flatering [sic] prospect of future success’.85 Suspicions of the Unitarian and Socinian elements heading and informing the repeal campaign, though widespread and deeply-felt, had clearly not at this point proved sufficient to derail it and Joseph Johnson’s activities, particularly concerted since 1787, could be seen to have played an important part in the proliferation and dissemination of a theory of religious toleration, based on justice, equity and natural rights, that had brought Protestant dissenters as close to full legal recognition as they would get for a generation. Two months later, however, in July 1789, the Bastille was stormed in Paris heralding the start of popular revolution in France. It was fear aroused by that event, added to public wariness of the ideas of Priestley and Price, which would scupper the dissenters’ immediate hopes.

4 Responses to Revolution

But liberty begins to dawn again in France, after a long night of two hundred years. . . . homage is paid to reason, truth, and justice; and the way is thus prepared for the reign of freedom. Analytical Review (1788) France, both as a subject and a source for publications, had begun to figure more prominently in Joseph Johnson’s output during the latter half of the 1780s. Indeed, as early as 1785 in Book V of The Task, William Cowper had not only pinpointed the site where the battle for civil and religious liberty would be enacted from 1789 onwards but also prophetically given the mood of reaction to the events of 14 July: Then shame to manhood, and opprobrious more To France . . . Her house of bondage worse than that of old Which God aveng’d on Pharaoh – the Bastile. Ye horrid tow’rs, th’ abode of broken hearts, Ye dungeons and ye cages of despair, That monarchs have supplied from age to age With music such as suits their sov’reign ears, The sighs and groans of miserable men! There’s not an English heart that would not leap To hear that ye were fall’n at last, to know That ev’n our enemies, so oft employed In forging chains for us, themselves were free. (V. 379–92) Cowper’s sentimental description of the terrors of the Bastille coincided with a popular surge of humanitarian rather than overtly political feeling in England, spearheaded by the growing movement for abolition of the slave 91

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trade and the work of the influential dissenting penal reformer John Howard. Together with its original publisher, Thomas Cadell, Johnson had sold a new edition of Howard’s ground-breaking study into The State of the Prisons in England and Wales (1784) at the behest of their mutual friend John Aikin, who had helped edit the work in Warrington back in the 1770s. With Cadell again, he had published some Historical Remarks and Anecdotes on the Castle of the Bastille (2nd edn, 1784), a ‘very scarse and prohibited’ pamphlet which Howard had smuggled back from France and which (in his view) would only ‘increase the attachment and reverence of Englishmen to the genuine principles of their excellent constitution’.1 His shop also served as one of the main London outlets for Howard’s elaborate and expensive sequel to the State of the Prisons, An Account of the Principal Lazarettos in Europe (1789), as well as the second part of a lengthy and ambitious scientific poem which gave favourable mention to both Howard’s benevolent philanthropy and the abolitionist cause – Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden (1789).2 Significantly, it was among the religious community which Johnson served as a bookseller that the political changes taking place in France evoked their first sympathetic response, recent legal, fiscal and social reforms having made that country a useful ally in terms of the dissenters’ own struggle for greater civil and religious freedom. On 5 November 1788 informal groups who were enthusiastic for liberty and reform met in most of the leading towns and cities of England to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the ‘Glorious’ British Revolution. Many of these were dominated by dissenters, notably the London Society for Commemorating the Revolution in Great Britain, whose members included Price, Lindsey, Disney, Kippis and John Horne Tooke and which, at its annual dinner at the London Tavern on Bishopsgate Street, reaffirmed its central belief in the sovereignty of the people and that ‘the rights of private judgment, liberty of conscience, trial by jury, the freedom of the Press and freedom of election’ ought ever to be held ‘sacred and inviolable’.3 It is not clear whether Johnson was a member of the Revolution Society or attended any such dinner, although he would later be entrusted to publish its correspondence with the French National Assembly. He was, however, quick to issue printed sermons delivered on the occasion by William Enfield to his influential dissenting congregation at Norwich, William Wood at Leeds, and Elhanan Winchester (an American ‘Universalist’ preacher) in London, and gave over a section of the November Analytical to the ‘CENTENNIAL COMMEMORATION OF THE REVOLUTION’.4 Enfield and Wood were ministers whose works Johnson had long been accustomed to publishing and their sermons much of a piece with his overall religious and political output which, since Priestley’s Essay on Government, had been laden with Real Whig sentiment in praise of ‘heroic William’ and ‘patriotic’ exertions against the oppressive Stuarts. It

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was fitting, however, that, on the centenary of one revolution, Enfield should look rather admiringly upon efforts presently gaining pace in France towards ‘an entire emancipation from despotism, for the event of which all Europe is waiting with impatient expectation’. Such changes were, in fact, broadly welcomed among the ruling, educated and commercial classes in England. Yet, as Mark Philp has suggested, that such widespread sympathy existed at all has to be seen as owing to the arguments, beliefs and language of ‘rational’ dissenters who, by the late 1780s, were well-represented in ‘non-establishment literary and social circles’ and who, through their public and printed oratory, had helped prepare the ground for the ‘warm reception’ to the events of 1789.5 Priestley had paid a notable visit to Paris (with Shelburne) in 1774, when he performed some of his celebrated experiments on air to an audience including Lavoisier, and the scientific exchanges that flowed from these encounters had forged the first really tangible links between the continent and St Paul’s Churchyard. Over the next ten years several of Johnson’s scientific titles were translated into French, including most of those by Priestley. So, too, was the Essay on Government but this had to be printed in Holland and got into France ‘clandestinely’ to avoid ‘the censeurs of the press’.6 Ongoing contacts between Priestley, Price and Benjamin Vaughan and Benjamin Franklin during the years of the American war had kept the lines of communication open between Shelburnite groups in England and political and scientific circles in France. Indirectly owing to Franklin’s influence, Johnson had published Considérations sur l’Ordre de Cincinnatus (1784), an excoriating piece on hereditary nobility by Mirabeau, which took exception to the chivalric order of Cincinnati which George Washington and his officers had tried to establish in America in direct contravention of the principles of the revolution. Unable to print it in France, Mirabeau had crossed over to England with the manuscript, carrying letters of introduction from Franklin to Benjamin Vaughan suggesting he be put in touch with ‘an honest, reasonable bookseller’.7 Johnson was also entrusted with the English version the following year, translated by a young barrister who had befriended Mirabeau and Vaughan (probably at Shelburne’s house), Samuel Romilly. Romilly would later return to the bookseller with another translation of a set of Letters, Containing An Account of the Late Revolution in France (1792) by another foreign intimate of Shelburne’s circle and close friend of Mirabeau, Étienne Dumont, who was mindful of its dangerously abstract, non-utilitarian principles. Franklin was also a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences at Paris, where he mixed with Lavoisier, the Duc de la Rochefoucauld and Condorcet, and it was on his recommendation that Priestley was elected to join him as one of only eight foreign associates in 1784. ‘Literary Intelligence’ from the French Academy was enthusiastically conveyed towards the end of each

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Analytical and Johnson himself sold translations of important chemical works by Lavoisier, De Fourcroy and other of its distinguished members which contributed to the great ‘Phlogiston war’ involving Priestley. It was these same ‘Academicians at Paris, with Condorcet, the friend and correspondent of Priestley, at their head’, whom Burke would soon accuse of being ‘turbulent and seditious’ and ‘sworn enemies to Kings, Nobility and Priesthood’.8 Johnson first published Condorcet’s work (a Life of the French ‘Comptroller-General of Finances’, Turgot) in 1787 and followed it with a translated edition of Of the Importance of Religious Opinions (1788) by Turgot’s popular but controversially Protestant successor, Jacques Necker. Taken together with his publication of Volney’s Ruins: or A Survey of the Revolutions of Empires (1792), this suggests an affinity with the ideas of the liberal French aristocracy. Mirabeau, Condorcet and Volney were all members of the newly formed ‘Constitutional’ party which also included the Duc de la Rochefoucauld, Lafayette, Talleyrand and the Abbé Sieyès. During his first stay in the French capital in the winter of 1789–90, Thomas Christie associated intimately with Necker, Sieyès, Mirabeau and Rochefoucauld, further suggesting that this group was politically and intellectually congenial to members of Johnson’s circle and that Christie himself served as an important personal link between Paris and St Paul’s Churchyard.9 It was equally through the medium of the Analytical, and Henry Fuseli’s interest in and impressive knowledge of continental literature and languages, that Johnson seems to have awoken to the potential market for foreign (particularly French and German) works – a fact which Mary Wollstonecraft’s early career, ostensibly hired as a hack reader and translator for the bookseller, would seem to illustrate. Fuseli had met Rousseau in Paris in his early twenties and held tremendous admiration for him ever since. In 1767, following Rousseau’s much-publicized quarrel with Voltaire, Fuseli composed a spirited defence of his writing and conduct which Johnson published. Rousseau’s psychological and educational theories, though, famously, not his views on women, also heavily influenced Wollstonecraft’s work, as many other of Johnson’s didactic authors. Given that the first twelve months of the Analytical coincided with a resurgence of Rousseau’s libertarian theories in France and the events which were seen to have led up to 14 July, it is not surprising that the liberal religious views of its staff, their political and philosophical affinities with the author of the Social Contract and developing links with the ‘patriotic’ party in France, should lead to accusations of its being intellectually puritan and levelling, politically disaffected and insidiously open to ‘French principles’. During its first two years, however, the Analytical remained relatively free from politics. Its early praise for Rousseau (mainly from Wollstonecraft) was, on the whole, enthusiastic but not unqualified and its reviewers were always keen to draw distinctions between the atheistical bent of French free-thinkers such as Condorcet (who would


‘destroy every form of religion’) and the lingering piety of even the most ‘rational’ English dissenters.10 * The events of the late spring and early summer of 1789 in Paris did not immediately make themselves felt in the published works of Johnson’s authors, who (initially at least) tended to confine their feelings to their private correspondence. The majority, however, like John Aikin, professed themselves warm admirers of the outbreak of the revolution and these sentiments inevitably began to infiltrate the pages of the Analytical.11 The ‘disturbances’ at first caused Priestley much unease on account of his son, William, being over in Paris, but he soon spoke of ‘a glorious prospect’ being offered to mankind which other countries might hopefully follow in due course. Lindsey, too, writing in the autumn to William Frend, declared the revolution to be ‘a wonderful work of providence’ and wished it would ‘prosper and go on and be the speedy means of putting an end to tyranny everywhere.’12 Both, though, were more immediately engrossed in a plan, formalized in London in April of that year, for a ‘continually improving’ translation of the scriptures. For this, they enlisted the help of a number of friends (including Frend), the great spread of Unitarian, not French, principles being still paramount in their and Johnson’s activities. By October Protestant dissenters were starting to organize themselves for yet another appeal to Parliament, still optimistic of success and buoyed by news that Louis XVI had finally sanctioned the French ‘Declaration of Rights’. This enshrined as the basis of the new constitution that all men have equal and natural rights (Article I), that among those rights are liberty (both physical and intellectual) and the right to resist oppression (Article II), the rightful toleration of religious opinions (Article X) and the sanctity of free speech and a free press (Article XI). Louis had also had to concede the surrender of feudal rights and privileges by the aristocracy, including the abolition of tithes and admission of all citizens to public office. On 4 November 1789, two days after the National Assembly had simultaneously set about tackling the national debt and reforming the clergy by ‘nationalizing’ all church property, Richard Price preached his ‘Discourse on the Love of Our Country’ at the Old Jewry, again to celebrate the anniversary of 1688 and the dissenters’ deliverance from ‘the dangers of popery and arbitrary power’. Civil governments, ‘like most of those now in the world,’ Price declared, were ‘usurpations on the rights of men, and little better than contrivances for enabling the few to oppress the many’, and he reiterated the principles of the Protestant Revolution – the ‘right to liberty of conscience in religious matters’, the ‘right to resist power when abused’ and the ‘right to chuse our own governors’.13 Lindsey, who was in the congregation with Disney and John Horne Tooke, sent an account of it to Priestley. The very next day, and to commemorate the same event, Priestley himself preached

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a sermon on the Test and Corporation Acts at both Presbyterian meeting houses in Birmingham. He reminded the dissenters of their principles, that they were equally entitled to ‘all the natural and just rights of men’, and urged them to continue their entirely civil and peaceful agitation.14 Price’s Discourse was quickly published by Thomas Cadell and advertised at 1s 6d Priestley received and read a copy on 10 December and wrote gratefully to Lindsey of being ‘moved, even to tears, towards the conclusion.’ Johnson did not directly assist in the publication, as he had with Price’s previous published sermon, but doubtless ordered copies for customers and printed a sympathetic review by Wollstonecraft, which purposefully quoted some of Price’s most emotive passages on the Test laws and the ‘inequality of our representation’ and his final ‘animated allusion’ to the French revolution, in the December Analytical. He did appear as principal London seller of Priestley’s sermon which was printed in ‘a small form’ priced cheaply at sixpence, specifically to circulate in the country, at the request of the Committee of Protestant Dissenters in Birmingham. This, too, was reviewed in the Analytical which recited Priestley’s prayers for ‘a neighbouring nation, and all who are now struggling for liberty, civil or religious’.15 It quickly ran into a second edition and provoked inflammatory responses from Anglican ministers already primed by Price’s sermon. On 15 December a large group of the most liberal dissenters in London met at the King’s Head Tavern to push for a public gathering of all dissenters in the city to undertake a new application to Parliament. A week later an extraordinary meeting of the General Body of Dissenting Ministers in London passed a series of resolutions affirming the earnest attachment of Protestant dissenters to the constitution and their full and equal entitlement to civil and religious liberty. The Jeffries Committee was duly reconvened and, during the first months of 1790, met regularly at the King’s Head, zealously supported by active (but still minority) groups of dissenters around the country who set up local committees to lobby their MPs, whilst a spate of meetings (principally of the established clergy) took place directly in order to counter their activities.16 The dissenters’ third campaign in as many years, in all it produced over a hundred separate publications. The majority of the pro-repeal tracts, and certainly many of the most influential, again appeared with Joseph Johnson’s imprint.17 Among these were a short History of the Corporation and Test Acts (1790) by the dissenting barrister and Revolution Society member, Capel Lofft, who had a seat on the Jeffries Committee, and John Aikin’s anonymous The Spirit of the Constitution and that of the Church of England, Compared (1790), which accused the High Church party of Jacobitism, of posing the greatest denominational threat to the state, and of being hostile to the rights of their fellow-citizens.18 Most probably at the Committee’s request, a new edition of Heywood’s Right of Protestant Dissenters to a Compleat Toleration Asserted (3rd edn, 1790) was called for and (as in 1787) Johnson also acted


as one of the sellers of A Refutation of Bishop Sherlock’s Arguments against a Repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, written to support an earlier campaign during the 1730s by Benjamin Hoadly. Milton’s classic plea for the right to private judgement, A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes, was reprinted in the form of a shilling pamphlet (inscribed to Richard Price) under his offices.19 On this occasion, however, he was also involved in circulating a single folio sheet priced 2d, entitled ‘Test Against Test, or A View of the Measures Proposed in the Resolutions of the Dissenters’, put out specifically to defend against the charge that, whilst reprobating very loudly against the Test in Parliament, dissenters were hypocritically imposing their own conditions on prospective MPs. He continued to advertise copies of the 1789 repeal debate and ensured that a good deal of space and energy was devoted to reviewing these and other titles on the Test and Corporation Acts in the Analytical. It was Priestley’s influence, however, and, just as importantly perhaps, his situation that were most deeply felt in Johnson’s pro-repeal output, as he contributed vigorously to the debate from Birmingham. The bookseller received copies of his Defences of Unitarianism for the Years 1788 & 1789 (1790) printed there in a single volume and sent down to him at the start of the year to be sold (priced 3s 6d) in London. They were also widely circulated by Lindsey who gave them out as presents to, among others, Edward Jeffries. The Defences contained letters to Priestley’s old adversary, Dr (now Bishop) Horsley, who had controversially charged the clergy in his diocese not to vote for dissenting representatives or ordain dissenting ministers and declared Priestley and Lindsey’s writings to be sinful. They duly gave the lead to other dissenting apologists (including Lindsey and an Independent minister from Hackney, Samuel Palmer) to respond to increasingly vociferous High Church attacks and print and distribute them through St Paul’s Churchyard. Palmer’s work, notably his Protestant-dissenter’s Catechism, when it was put into the hands of Edmund Burke at this time, ‘so sanctiond [sic], as to leave no Doubt upon [his] Mind, that a considerable party is formed, and is proceeding systematically, to the destruction of this Constitution in some of its essential parts.’20 In fact, when Burke gave his first speech against the French revolution on 9 February, significantly at the height of the repeal campaign and having read Price’s Discourse, it was a union of dissenters rather than an invasion of sansculottes that appeared much the more dangerous threat, as his reference to ‘some wicked persons [who] had shown a strong disposition to recommend an imitation of the French spirit of reform’ made clear.21 Four days later, around 300 dissenters assembled at the London Tavern, among them Lindsey, Disney, Heywood and Price, and ‘a lay dissenter’ (possibly Richard Sharp) who composed A Letter to the Public Meeting of the Friends, to the Repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, at the London Tavern, Feb. 13, 1790 (1790) which Johnson sold after it had issued from the Birmingham presses. By now the print-

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makers were alert to the hazard. On 16 February a satirical print by James Sayers appeared entitled ‘The Repeal of the Test Act. A Vision’, depicting Priestley (breathing fire and brimstone), Lindsey (tearing up a copy of the Thirty-Nine Articles) and Price crammed together in a pulpit, and linked with Fox and, even at this early stage, Thomas Paine, who cropped up as a member of the unruly congregation. As well as the Defences, Johnson sold Priestley’s Familiar Letters, Addressed to the Inhabitants of Birmingham (1790) ‘in refutation of several charges, advanced against the Dissenters’ (including sedition) by the Reverend Spencer Madan, which came out in five separate parts, and six Letters to the Reverend Edward Burn (1790), another popular and respected clergyman in the city. Priced cheaply at around a shilling, these aroused widespread attention (more so than almost any other of Priestley’s works) and the 500 copies of each that were printed were virtually all sold off by the end of March. Mutilated extracts, however, were also printed and circulated in pamphlet form by Birmingham clergy, deliberately, it was felt, to injure the dissenters’ case, and these were duly picked up on by Burke in Parliament.22 Johnson countered by selling an anonymous sixpenny Appeal to the Common Sense, and Common Honesty, of Every Inhabitant of Birmingham (1790), probably by a local dissenter John Hobson (whose house the following year would be razed to the ground), and a cheap series of Extracts From Books, and Other Small Pieces; In Favour of Religious Liberty, and the Rights of Dissenters (1790), sanctioned by the Committee of Protestant Dissenters in Birmingham. A set of Public Documents Declaratory of the Principles of the Protestant Dissenters (1790), sent to the same printer (John Thompson) in Birmingham and sold by Johnson in London for the same price (6d), almost certainly originated from the same quarter. In fact, Thompson’s press provided Johnson with many of the pro-dissenting works he sold at this time, including The Oppressive, Unjust, and Prophane Nature, and Tendency of the Corporation and Test Acts, Exposed (1790), a ‘vehement discourse’ preached before the influential Cannon Street Baptist congregation in Birmingham by its new young minister Samuel Pearce, and probably the most impressive of the pro-repeal treatises (certainly Charles James Fox and the Analytical thought so), George Walker’s The Dissenters’ Plea (1790).23 Published at the request of the Protestant Dissenters of the Midland District, this carried a two-page end advertisement listing the raft of specifically prorepeal works (15 in all) ‘Printed and sold by J. Thompson, of Birmingham; also by J. Johnson, London’, most of which were priced at sixpence or a shilling. Not only do these suggest strong working links (via Priestley) between St Paul’s Churchyard and printers, booksellers and dissenting groups in the Midlands, but together they represent a remarkably concerted effort to vindicate the dissenters’ position. Walker, like Priestley, had grown in political stature since leaving Warrington and attained considerable local prominence as Chairman of the


Associated Dissenters of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. At Nottingham he was close to Gilbert Wakefield, who had moved back to his native city after the closure of Warrington Academy and who praised him for his ‘undeviating rectitude’ in the cause of ‘truth, liberty, and virtue’. Angered by Johnson’s dilatoriness, Wakefield had only recently moved his own business from St Paul’s Churchyard to the Holborn bookseller John Deighton. However, he consented to a request from dissenters in Birmingham to reprint his Address to the Inhabitants of Nottingham (1789) on the subject of the Test laws and Cursory Reflections Occasioned by the Present Meetings in Opposition to the Claims of the Dissenters (1790) and they again used Johnson as their main London seller.24 Walker was also very much in touch with Priestley, whom he visited on several occasions during the early months of 1790 to discuss pro-repeal activities in the Midlands and who may well have helped steer his work through the Birmingham press. The Dissenters’ Plea appeared after the debate on the dissenter’s third motion for repeal in the Commons on 2 March 1790. This time the bill was introduced by Fox, who faced increased opposition to the removal of the Test on the grounds that the current state of events in France made changes to the British constitution highly dangerous and that, had there not been a revolution, the dissenters would have been much less eager to bring their case. Walker’s Plea amounted to a cogent distillation of the arguments of Milton, Locke, Priestley, Heywood and Fox, arguing that the alliance between Church and State had no basis in justice or fact but rather in political convenience and utility, and that ‘a religious Test, which opens or shuts the door to civil advantages, is the usurpation of a power which is not committed to the magistrate, and a violation of the rights of a citizen.’ It poured scorn on Pitt, who had shown himself disposed to uphold the status quo, deeming toleration ‘a grace and favour’, not a right, and expressing horror at the threat the bill posed to the ‘indispensable necessity’ of an established church. Walker also mockingly singled out Burke for attack, following his long parliamentary speech on the dangerous ‘abstract principles’ of the dissenters: Man has no natural rights! Free governments created out of nothing! – O thou wonderful counsellor, thou venerable lama of this deluded western world, we hail thy appearance, and bow to thy praeternatural doctrine with more than a Tartarian reverence!25 Burke was, in fact, a former friend of the dissenters and had actually been approached to support their application. By March 1790, however, he had split with the Foxite Whigs over their reaction to the French Revolution, and his response to the repeal bill – a mixture of personal bitterness and frustration at the dissenters’ past actions, their connection with Shelburne (whom Burke detested for his pro-French sympathies and dissenting patron-

100 Romanticism, Publishing and Dissent

age) and current dealings with Fox, together with a genuinely deep-seated concern that, by their pronouncements, they were fuelling efforts to imitate events in France – heralded a similar hostile break with the dissenters. Burke did concede in his speech that the use of a religious test was a desecration but thought that all office holders should in some way have to declare their allegiance to the church establishment. Further, he was at pains to stress the dangers to social order posed by a new Francophile dissenting faction, quoting heavily from Price’s Discourse and reviving Priestley’s earlier ‘train of gunpowder’ image. His arguments, not surprisingly, held the day and the dissenters’ third motion for repeal was defeated by 294 votes to 105, a much greater margin than their previous application. Churchmen generally hoped and expected that the dissenters would disappear quietly but like the Jeffries Committee, which remained undaunted if slightly chastened in its resolve, Johnson persisted with his prodissenting activities.26 Between March and July, the section devoted to the Test and Corporation Acts in the Analytical carried reviews of around 70 separate titles, 28 of which could specifically be had from St Paul’s Churchyard. Among these were a valuable Collection of Testimonies In Favour of Religious Liberty, in the Case of the Dissenters, Catholics, and Jews (1790), priced 1s. 6d., compiled by Benjamin Vaughan, and an updated version of John Disney’s Catalogue of the Several Publications Which Have Appeared, Relating to the Enlargement of the Toleration of Protestant-Dissenting-Ministers; and the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts (1790).27 Also channelled through the bookseller were two anonymous shilling pamphlets – An Address to the Dissidents of England on their Late Defeat (1790) and An Address to the Opposers of the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts (1790) – by John Aikin and Mrs Barbauld respectively. Both writers were highly respectable, moderate middle-class dissenters. Yet it was a measure of even their frustration at this point that their works were much more forcefully and animatedly written than usual and showed them at their most impulsive, ‘plunging’ uncharacteristically into ‘party contests’ and ‘meddling’ (as Aikin put it) in defence of ‘the interest of truth and mankind’.28 Aikin commiserated with his fellow-dissenters for having once again been deluded in their ideas of the equity, good sense and magnanimity of their countrymen. The nation, he claimed, was now divided into two parties – one progressive and improving, upholding the notion of popular sovereignty, reverential towards the constitution yet aware of its many imperfections, the other utterly averse to any alteration as an encroachment on its privileges – conveniently split along the fault line between dissent and established religion. The Church party’s continuing predominance meant that, ‘so far from having caught new spirit from the noble sentiments now pervading Europe’, England appeared to be heading backwards in its policy, and he urged dissenters ‘steadily and unanimously [to] persist in publicly


asserting and proving [their] rights’ and even withhold their payment of tithes.29 Barbauld, too, looked humbly if somewhat provocatively towards France, urging in her Address, ‘Go on, generous nation, set the world an example of virtues as you have of talents. Be our model, as we have been yours.’ But she was much less combative and ultimately more effective in seeking to undermine her opponents, gently deriding the idea that the dissenters were waiting ‘like an impetuous sea, to rush in and overwhelm the land’ and reacting with mock-surprise to the idea that ‘the removal of so slight a pin’ as the Test Act would endanger the entire fabric of the constitution. Her Address won praise for its accomplished style and ‘fine irony’ (the Analytical lauding it as ‘one of the best specimens of declamatory composition we have ever seen’) and went through four editions in 1790, but could do little to reverse the increasing unpopularity of its sentiments.30 Aikin’s pamphlets lost him most of his friends and medical patients in Yarmouth and eventually forced him to leave his home and practice for London. By the time of the first anniversary of the French Revolution, Joseph Johnson’s shop had become the focus for a dissenting campaign which was now turning to France explicitly to register its own grievances, strengthened in its identification not by revolutionary zeal but by its own failure to secure religious reform at home; and which found it useful to show how Britain’s liberties were now being overtaken. However, its disavowal of the idea of an established church and its increasing use of the language of natural rights encouraged its opponents to assert, as Burke and Bishop Horsley both did by 1790, that ‘the principles of a Nonconformist in religion and a republican in politics [were] inseparably united’.31 * On 1 November James Dodsley published Burke’s long-awaited Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).32 A fulsome exposition of his parliamentary position, it proved to be a devastating commentary on the repeal movement and the destructive influence of ‘rational’ dissenting philosophers and intellectuals, convinced that the ultimate object of ‘Jacobin’ hostility was religion. In it, Burke referred to the ‘vanity, restlessness’ and ‘petulance’ of ‘several petty cabals, who attempt to hide their total want of consequence in bustle and noise, and puffing, and mutual quotation of each other’ and, though as yet involving only a handful of people, ‘by their intrigues, their sermons, [and] their publications’, were capable of drawing large numbers into their faction and thus imitating their rebellious friends across the Channel. Richard Price and the Revolution Society were clearly uppermost in Burke’s mind but so, too, was the Society for Constitutional Information, revived by John Horne Tooke at the start of the year with the ‘laudable’ aim, in Burke’s view, of circulating works which might otherwise ‘lie on the


hands of the booksellers’, and which numbered several of Johnson’s authors (Capel Lofft, Thomas Christie and Alexander Geddes, for example) among its members.33 Priestley also loomed large in the Reflections, Burke comparing the ‘spirit of liberty in action’ to a ‘wild gas’ or ‘fixed air . . . plainly broke loose’, and pointing accusingly to the closing passages of his History of the Corruptions of Christianity: A man amongst them of great authority, and certainly of great talents, speaking of a supposed alliance between church and state, says, ‘Perhaps we must wait for the fall of the civil powers before this most unnatural alliance be broke. Calamitous no doubt will that time be. But what convulsion in the political world ought to be a subject of lamentation if it be attended with so desirable an effect?’ You see with what a steady eye these gentlemen are prepared to view the greatest calamities which can befall their country!34 He again recycled Priestley’s unfortunate ‘gunpowder’ image to damn him and his dissenting colleagues, not simply as religious schismatics, but as enthusiastic state terrorists solely intent on destruction: They despise experience as the wisdom of unlettered men; and as for the rest, they have wrought under-ground a mine that will blow up at one grand explosion all examples of antiquity, all precedents, charters, and acts of parliament. In this way, the Reflections secured the notion of the dissenters as a definite party, intent on promoting levelling ‘French’ principles and with ‘contention and power much more than Piety for its Object.’35 Priced at 5s, it sold over 10,000 copies within a few weeks (the Analytical noting that ‘PERHAPS no publication of this country has been purchased with greater avidity, or read with more eagerness’) and became one of the chief topics of the day, serving to fuel already widespread anti-dissenting, if not yet antirevolutionary, sentiment. Lindsey denounced the work as professing ‘no one good principle of civil or religious liberty’ and not the slightest idea of what makes ‘a true Christian’ and hoped it would strike Priestley enough to reply.36 Naturally enough, the majority of the fifty or so counter-responses to Burke which appeared over the course of the next year were penned by dissenters, and roughly a quarter of them were sold or published by their chief bookseller in London, Joseph Johnson, whose informal literary circle may well have qualified as another of Burke’s ‘petty cabals’. The first reaction to emerge from St Paul’s Churchyard was a full and ‘almost completely impartial’ summary in the Analytical which, whilst not denying the obvious brilliance of Burke’s abilities, criticized him for his


inconsistency and arrogant hyperbole and gave a series of reasoned objections to his arguments: ‘prescription, local custom’, and ‘inheritance’ were ‘monstrous and extraordinary’ doctrines and in no way superior to the abstract principles of truth, reason and justice, ‘idolatry of ancestry and rank’ was irrational and unnatural, and ‘government was instituted for the good of the governed’.37 This was followed in quick succession by Mary Wollstonecraft’s anonymous Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), Capel Lofft’s Remarks on the Letter of the Rt. Hon. Edmund Burke, Concerning the Revolution in France (1790) and Priestley’s Letters to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (1791), 800 copies of which arrived at Johnson’s bookshop from Birmingham at the beginning of January, together with instructions that presents be made of it to Burke and Fox. Wollstonecraft’s Vindication was hurriedly sent to press even before it was finished and appeared less than six weeks after the Reflections in December. Yet it seems the product less of revolutionary enthusiasm than of her own wounded personal esteem for Richard Price and her proximity to and intellectual sympathy for the dissenters’ case via Johnson’s circle. Wollstonecraft, indeed, barely concerned herself with the French Revolution, intent only on setting out the general principles by which, she believed, society would be better organized. She did, however, praise it in passing as a ‘glorious chance that is now given to human nature of attaining more virtue and happiness than has hitherto blessed our globe’, quoted approvingly from Rousseau and (like Priestley) defended the National Assembly against Burke’s charges of obscurity and mediocrity, in the process doubting whether Westminster contained ‘every thing respectable in talents’ or ‘political distinction’. Yet she registered dour caution about enthusing over the revolution, remarking that until the ‘remote consequences of things’ become apparent, ‘present calamities must appear in the ugly form of evil, and excite our commiseration’, and was just as concerned (indeed more so) with the victims of the slave trade and the punitive game laws, widows, single mothers and the poor as the victims of arbitrary monarchy in Paris. Though defending Price (a man ‘whose talents and modest virtues place him high in the scale of moral excellence’), Wollstonecraft also readily conceded that ‘the pulpit is not the place for political discussions’ and that Price’s ‘zeal may have carried him further than sound reason can justify’. She acknowledged her respect for Burke but accused him of being a turncoat, stung into writing the Reflections out of envy and bitterness at his own political misfortunes and hypocritically boasting of his virtue and independence whilst in the pay of the Crown. Intent on attacking the ‘rusty’ foundations of his opinions, she contended passionately for the ‘Sacred rights’ of men against the unjust rights of property which he so steadfastly championed and which, in her view, had depressed virtue, bred servility, overpowered talents and, above all, undermined marriage and the family.38


Priestley’s focus was also more upon Britain than France and his Letters were chiefly another dissenting apology, concerned with what the Reflections had advanced on civil establishments of religion and with examining the true causes of their author’s opposition to the dissenters’ late claims in the House of Commons. Like Wollstonecraft, he regretted the unaccountable fact that Burke was no longer a friend to the cause of liberty but had joined with ‘a bigotted clergy’, and he reiterated his wish that Christianity should revert to its early pristine state and ‘recover its real dignity and efficiency’. Keen to season the dissenters’ claims with reason and moderation, however, he urged the ‘calmest representations’ to bring about a peaceful separation of civil and religious power, ‘attended with no calamity’.39 Lofft, in turn, devoted most of his energies to echoing and defending his ‘rever’d friend Dr. Price’ and also countered Burke’s criticisms of Priestley by praising him as a man characterized by ‘philosophic courage and unreserved spirit of Research and Communication’.40 However, boldly announcing his impartiality on his title page (‘no political Attachments but to TRUTH, VIRTUE, and LIBERTY’), he was willing to concede a good deal more ground to Burke than Priestley. The Reflections, he admitted, were the product of ‘powerful and splendid talents’ and contained some ‘acute and solid’ remarks which could yet have ‘a beneficial effect on the present day’. As a barrister, a ‘gentleman of fine parts’ and independent means (as the Analytical dubbed him), and a property owner besides, he readily agreed with Burke about the sanctity of the law and admitted that for this to be ‘broken down upon ideas of convenience’ would be ‘to outrun the slow, but smooth and even course of nature’. In stark contrast to Priestley, he professed himself ‘no friend to any forcible means which should secularize the monastic orders of a State’ and was far from pleased with the new revolutionary government’s abolition of titles. Significantly, unlike Priestley, he also chose to remain silent on the subject of Marie Antoinette (for ‘if I cannot lessen her sufferings, I shall not encrease or create Danger’). Moreover, he actually confessed to a regret for the loss of chivalry and, by depicting himself as opposing ‘the impenetrable shield of Truth and Freedom’ to the ‘resistless edge’ of Burke’s ‘dazzling arms’, indulged a penchant for ‘Gothic’ pageantry almost equal to that of his opponent.41 Lofft’s Remarks, however, did betray more overtly radical suggestions commensurate with a founding member of the SCI. There were, after all, ‘inveterate abuses’ which had justified revolution and the extent and justness of many of its basic principles would hopefully prove ‘objects of imitation in all Countries which aspire to Freedom’. He was not ultimately convinced that ‘an established Church, an established Monarchy, Aristocracy, and Democracy comprizes all that we ought to wish’ and (like Priestley) asserted that a ‘Constitution, which in this day could be overset or endangered by discussion, would not merit solicitude.’ To him, the revolution in France was ‘a just subject of Joy and Congratulation, [for] all who look forward to the pro-


gressive emersion of the human race, from the gloom of oppression and the horrors of servitude’.42 The same was true of Priestley, who concluded his Letters in a manner equally redolent of Price, by congratulating ‘the liberal, the rational, and the virtuous part of the world’ on the revolutions that had taken place in America and France. By their example, they had ushered in ‘a totally new, a most wonderful, and important, aera in the history of mankind’ and were more effective than a thousand treatises on the subject of civil and religious liberty.43 From Priestley’s correspondence, it appears that his Letters may originally have contained a passage alluding to Pitt, which was printed as corrected (by Lindsey or Samuel Heywood) but finally omitted. Again complying with Lindsey, he cancelled what would have been the last letter, as well as a ‘leaf where our ministry are said to be unfavourable to the French Revolution’. Price seems also to have cast his eye over the proofs and pointed out another sheet which was duly dropped. These political concessions to friends still left the Letters a scathing attack on the Church – a subject on which he had ‘a long time ago drawn the sword, and thrown away the scabbard’ – and unflinching in their anti-war condemnation of kings: ‘Whole nations deluged with blood, and every source of future prosperity has been drained, to gratify the caprices of some of the most despicable, or the most execrable, of the human species.’44 Characteristically, he confessed himself unworried by the consequences and the Letters (for which Johnson paid him fifty pounds and sold, like Wollstonecraft’s, at 2s 6d a copy) quickly passed through three editions, suggesting a sale of as many as two to three thousand in London and the Midlands. Within the general context of the Reflections debate, this represented a fair measure of success but it also offered yet another serious affront to the High Church party in Birmingham. Wollstonecraft’s Vindication, too, won general applause and Johnson swiftly brought out a second corrected edition, identifying its author, before the end of the year. It was one of seven ‘very able’ responses to Burke (including Lofft’s) reviewed in the December Analytical, which happily noted not ‘a single syllable on his side of the question’.45 The next month’s issue dedicated a section to the revolution in France which, as well as Priestley’s Letters, noticed an anonymous set of Strictures on the Letter of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke (1791) and a translation of a letter to Burke from a member of the French National Assembly, Comte Destutt de Tracy, both of which were available from St Paul’s Churchyard. Johnson’s immersion in the Reflections controversy was commented upon by William Cowper who bemoaned the fact that ‘Burke’s pamphlet stood in [the] way’ of his translation of Homer at the printer’s, ‘for every press, and consequently mine, groan’d with answers to it’. Priestley, at the same time, pestered Lindsey to get Johnson to send him all the answers to Burke that had appeared since his own.46 On 22 February the bookseller released the


first part of another ‘Answer to Mr. Burke’s Attack on the French Revolution’, an ‘address to the people of England on the subject of government’ – Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791). If newspaper reports are to be believed, four hours after it went on sale and around a hundred copies had been sold, all evidence of the work was removed from his shelves and responsibility for the unbound error-strewn sheets handed over to another publisher, Jeremiah Jordan on Fleet Street, with whom Paine had hastily managed to negotiate. The very next day Lindsey wrote: Mr Paine’s book against Mr Burke has some fine thing[s] upon the subject [of universal toleration in religion] as ever I read and which much affect every mind: but the book is so intirely [sic] republican, tho’ full of most excellent matter, and contains such reflections on the Brunswick princes, that Mr Johnson, for whom it is printed, is advised not to sell it.47 Lindsey’s version of events may be slightly euphemistic, as it has been variously suggested that pressure was brought to bear on Johnson to abandon the edition or that he did so through fear, having only just discovered the real substance of Paine’s text. Given his immense productivity in this period, it would certainly have been unlikely if not impossible for Johnson to have examined in detail everything he sold or published, and he would rather have had to trust to the advice and assurances of close authors or readers (especially once the Analytical was up and running). The considerable number of errors in his first edition of Rights of Man (and that which appeared under Jordan’s imprint on 13 March, which was essentially Johnson’s original sheets bound up with a new preface), compared to the edition which Jordan himself had set in type and published a few days later, would indeed seem to suggest that the work had not been closely scrutinized.48 Haste to get works published, however, (as in Wollstonecraft’s case) commonly left a first edition in need of some correction. Moreover, it would be extremely disingenuous to think that, as a political pamphleteer, Paine was anything of a surprise commodity to Johnson. The bookseller’s title page, for example, proudly identified Paine as ‘AUTHOR OF THE WORK INTITLED COMMON SENSE’, his phenomenally successful pamphlet written during the American War, in which he had made plain his intense opposition to hereditary monarchy and aristocracy and almost single-handedly helped galvanize colonial opinion in favour of independence. This, however, had been ‘sold without restraint or prosecution in every shop in England’ (where it was far from widely admired) and several new editions were about to go on sale in London. It was also wellknown that Paine enjoyed connections with the new revolutionary regime in France. He had been in London and preoccupied with the idea of responding to the Reflections for almost a year, during which time he had dined and socialized with members of Johnson’s circle and made no secret of the fact


that he was much ‘out of humour with Mr. Burke with respect to the French Revolution and the Test Act’.49 By November Lindsey certainly knew that Paine was preparing his response, by which stage more than a quarter of the book had been written, and Johnson himself would presumably have been aware of the difficulties Paine had had in securing a publisher for his book when approached by him during the winter. Indeed, Paine’s own admission here may imply that Johnson himself was far from easy about taking on the work, and he was possibly only persuaded to it by Richard Price and John Horne Tooke. In agreeing to publish Rights of Man, Johnson may have seen it fitting into his growing stable of responses to Burke as it appeared to articulate similar Whig Protestant values and certainly offered numerous points of contact with the post-Reflections works he had so far published. Paine’s pamphlet was a tribute to the virtues of political reason and ‘rational’ enquiry and espoused the same principles of natural right and popular sovereignty as much dissenting discourse. His criticisms of the absurd principle of heredity, though more extensive, were no fierier or more impassioned than Wollstonecraft’s and his indictment of the evils of rank and titles (in favour of the more ‘substantial ground of character’ and ‘talents’) accorded with her and Priestley’s vehemently meritocratic emphasis. Paine also gave vent to specifically dissenting grievances: the lingering spectre of the Test laws, for example, which meant that a man ‘whose parents were not in circumstances to give him an occupation, is debarred, in many cases, from the natural right of acquiring one, be his genius or industry what it may’; the iniquitous alliance between Church and State (‘a sort of mule animal, capable only of destroying, and not of breeding up’); and the glaring need for Parliament to mind its own concerns and establish a universal right of conscience and citizenship, as in France and America.50 Moreover, Paine’s style and language were memorably plain, simple and unaffected – qualities which had long been associated to some degree with Priestley’s work and much extolled in the Analytical. But there were also obvious differences between Paine’s response to Burke and those of Johnson’s other pamphletists. Rights of Man was not motivated by the desire to defend Richard Price (which Paine did – he called him ‘one of the best-hearted men that lives’ – but only very briefly) or principally to justify the dissenters’ values or position. Paine, in fact, signalled his distance from many of the dissenting authors whom Johnson published by agreeing (ironically, like Burke) that there was no similarity between the French and the seventeenth-century British ‘Revolution’. To Paine, 1688 was not a ‘revolution’ at all, merely ‘a change of persons’ not government which had been way ‘exalted beyond its value’ and whose effects were ‘already on the wane’. In less than a hundred years’ time, mankind would ‘scarcely believe that a country calling itself free, would send to Holland for a man, and clothe him with power, on purpose to put themselves in fear of him’.51 Paine was also


(uniquely) uncompromising in his expressions of support for the abstract doctrine of political rights held by the French revolutionaries – even choosing to incorporate the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens by the National Assembly of France’ in his pamphlet – and, unlike most dissenting apologists (who always appeared sensitive of their own demands), he used France not simply as an enlightened example for England to follow, but as a whipping boy to beat her with: What are the present Governments of Europe, but a scene of iniquity and oppression? What is that of England? Does not its own inhabitants say, It is a market where every man has his price, and where corruption is common traffic, at the expence of a deluded people? No wonder, then, that the French Revolution is traduced. . . . It stares corruption in the face, and the venal tribe are all alarmed.52 At bottom, of course, Rights of Man was a profoundly republican statement, which viewed monarchical sovereignty as an enemy of mankind and the main source of wars and human misery, and even a ‘mixed Government’ (to which Whig nonconformists were commonly pledged) as ‘an imperfect every-thing, cementing and soldering the discordant parts together by corruption’.53 Throughout their repeal campaign, dissenting activists had fought long and hard to refute the accusation of being ‘sedition-sowers’, ‘Cromwellians’ and ‘levellers’ and, in dropping Rights of Man, Johnson’s intention may well have been to avoid inviting further such comparisons, particularly as he had just agreed to act for the newly-established ‘Unitarian Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge and the Practice of Virtue by the Distribution of Books’. Involving many of the prime movers of the earlier (and still separate) Society for Promoting Knowledge of the Scriptures (Lindsey, Priestley and Disney, for example), the Unitarian Society again had much in common with the Society for Constitutional Information in its efforts to ‘print and circulate, at a cheap rate, books which were judged to be best calculated to propagate right views of the Christian doctrine’ and in its over-arching aims ‘to promote peace, liberty, and good order in society’, and ‘to advance the interests of truth and virtue’.54 It had first met on 9 February and one of its first decisions was to begin lobbying Parliament for a repeal of the laws against ‘Blasphemers of the Trinity’, again through the offices of Fox. The fact that Lindsey himself was one of the first to report that Johnson was advised not to sell Rights of Man, and endorsed Paine’s views on religious toleration whilst shrinking from his political sentiments, may suggest the kind of closely competing loyalties the bookseller was having to balance. The founding of the Unitarian Society, however, by a movement keen to declare its own extreme and separate doctrinal beliefs and, initially at least, to act as a pressure group bidding for legal and constitutional change was


in its way as bold and potentially divisive a move as Paine’s. Indeed, the preamble to its rules (drawn up by Thomas Belsham) was so unequivocal and strident that it even raised objections among other ‘rational’ dissenters, including the Cambridge group around William Frend and the Baptist John Prior Estlin at Bristol. Moreover, at its first annual dinner at the King’s Head Tavern in April, around a third of the Society’s 150 or so members toasted Burke and thanked him for the discussion he had provoked, which suggests no urgent desire to dissociate itself from the Reflections debate. Reports of this were published in the following morning’s newspapers and subsequently in the French press (according to Belsham). The same day Burke himself criticized the meeting in the Commons, and was not slow to connect the Unitarian Society with the Revolution and Constitutional Societies as ‘objects of the greatest terror’. By this stage the links between ‘radical’ religion and politics were running all too deep and it is no coincidence that Paine’s pamphlet was slated, in some quarters, for its ‘spirit of puritanic malignity’ and its language compared to the ‘indecent slang of the conventicle’.55 Johnson, then, most probably withdrew from Rights of Man because he was apprised of the legal and political damage that might stem from its publication and induced not to run the risk by friends on the day. The whole question of libel was back under the spotlight in 1791, Fox having announced his intention to introduce a discussion on the subject in the Commons on 21 February. The spur to this renewed debate had been an earlier trial for seditious libel involving the Whiggish Dean of St Asaph, William Shipley, in 1784, the printed proceedings of which Johnson had sold, together with the Whig lawyer Thomas Erskine’s brilliant defence speech, issued separately as The Rights of Juries Vindicated (1785). On this occasion he published at least two pamphlets: Reflections on the Distinction Usually Adopted in Criminal Prosecutions for Libel (1791) by the lawyer Anthony Highmore, who was active in lobbying for Fox’s bill, and some anonymous Considerations on the Matter of Libel (1791) suggested by Fox’s motion. Like the rest of the trade, however, he would have to wait until the next session of Parliament for any substantive measure of reform, so that what constituted a libel still remained entirely at the ministry’s discretion and the ‘bare fact’ of publication enough to convict a bookseller. The risks involved in freely discussing the actions of government were thus (as Fox observed) still more than ‘prudent men would choose to hazard.’56 The interest and interference of government hirelings in Paine’s work seems not to have been an issue at this stage. However, rumours or threats may have been circulating about ‘a consultation of the law officers to determine whether the author could be prosecuted’ which took place shortly after publication and, to judge from subsequent discussion of Paine’s pamphlet, conjecture was rising over the possible legal backlash which the author and publisher might face. Certain reviewers of Rights of Man, for example, particularly the


Critical (which cited Johnson not Jordan as publisher), pointed to ‘the evils arising from such inflammatory publications’ and recommended swift legal action against ‘writers of this class who are more fit to plan treasons, stratagems, and spoils than to suggest useful remarks with respect to the government of a free people’.57 Could it have been a lawyer, then, as well as a prominent dissenting activist, a confidant of Lindsey and a member of the Unitarian Society – Samuel Heywood or Michael Dodson, for example – who was responsible for alerting Johnson to the dangers? Johnson’s decision to abandon the sale of Rights of Man suggests that the climate or his policy for publishing political works operated in a different way from that which governed (and evidently did not impede) his publication of even the most controversial and speculative religious works. But it also, perhaps, emphasizes Paine’s rather unique reputation and the singular nature of his pamphlet which, as Fox later admitted, was ‘a performance totally different from all ideas of reform in our government’ as it ‘went the length of changing the form of it.’58 Even allowing for the application of some kind of government pressure, what it further does is to distinguish Johnson from other more reckless, innately oppositional and fomenting booksellers who, despite all the warnings, were still willing to publish Paine’s works and risk jail, bankruptcy and government proscription of their activities throughout the 1790s. It is significant, for example, that the AttorneyGeneral could find no reason to prosecute Rights of Man since (‘although extremely reprehensible’) it had been ‘ushered into the world under circumstances that led me to conceive that it would be confined to the judicious reader’ who would ‘refute it as he went along’.59 Paine initially had wanted a cheap edition but claimed he was advised that it would be more expedient to let the work come out first in ‘the modern stile’. Johnson’s edition was expensively printed and priced at half-a-crown (2s 6d), which enabled it to be bound up in a single volume with Burke’s Reflections but inevitably ‘precluded the generality of people from purchasing’. It may be too much to infer that, by this policy, Johnson was already trying to preempt some of the dangers associated with the circulation of Paine’s works, although it was Pitt’s stated view that ‘a three-guinea book could not do much harm’.60 Still, what it does suggest is that, as a bookseller, he was eminently responsible when it came to protecting his own interests in line with the law; that, in politics as in theology, he predominantly catered to the middle ranks; and that his professional ties were more obviously seen to be with an older, British strain of Whig nonconformity rather than the new more populist brand of democratic radicalism. This episode did not signal the end of Johnson’s association with Paine, for whom he continued to act as a business agent in London and also as a trusted friend and close personal ally. Nor did it precipitate any wider withdrawal from the Reflections debate. Indeed, many of the responses to Burke that he proceeded to publish revealed their indebtedness to Paine, strikingly


so in some cases, though in putting the case for reform few of their authors went so far as to endorse his boldly republican sentiments. In March, as Paine prepared to slip briefly back to France, the Analytical featured a sevenpage review of Jordan’s edition of Rights of Man which praised the work for its ‘native vigour’ and ‘plain, but forcible’ language, and as ‘one of the most curious, original and interesting publications, which the singular vicissitudes of modern politics have produced’, but ‘without subscribing implicitly to every principle’. It also recommended to its readers as ‘worthy the perusal’ some critical Observations on the Right Hon. Edmund Burke’s Pamphlet (1791) by an independent Irish MP Benjamin Bousfield, which Johnson had reprinted.61 The same month the bookseller sold A Letter to the Rt. Hon. Edmund Burke (1791) by an anonymous ‘Dissenting Country Attorney’ in defence of his religion and profession. (Burke had been appalled that the National Assembly was filled with obscure provincial lawyers rather than distinguished magistrates.)62 Following the death of Richard Price on 19 April, tributes from Andrew Kippis (delivered at Price’s funeral) and Priestley (at Hackney on 1 May) made their printed way onto Johnson’s list and straight into the pages of the June Analytical. So, too, did a hastily compiled series of Letters on the Revolution of France (1791) by his chief associate on the review, Thomas Christie. Christie had become close friends with Paine by the early months of 1791 (in fact, he had negotiated with the dissenting printer Thomas Chapman to take on Rights of Man) and signalled their mutual awareness of one another in his Letters.63 His concern, however, was with political fact not theory and with countering much of the misrepresentation and inaccuracy contained in the reporting of the revolution by the English press. In his first three letters Christie dealt with the necessity and relative peaceability of the revolution and did little to mask his pro-French sympathies, hailing the revolution as the ‘greatest and most glorious event that ever took place in the history of the world’ and ‘the only revolution that has completely respected the rights of mankind.’ But he also believed it to be generally misunderstood and so devoted the remaining three letters to the detailed practical matters relating to the settlement of the new French constitution, the political division of the country, the nature and role of the various assemblies, the redefined powers and privileges of the king, and the new methods of election and representation. To these he appended 200 pages of original papers and authentic documents, speeches from the National Assembly (including the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man’) and extracts from some of the best French journals. Not surprisingly, given the work’s density, scope and not insignificant cost (7s), the Analytical recommended it as ‘a valuable repository of facts’, not ‘a controversial publication’.64 Despite Christie’s best efforts to remain factual and objective, there was still plenty of internal evidence linking him politically and intellectually to St Paul’s Churchyard. He notably prefaced his Letters with Cowper’s lines


on the Bastille from The Task and quoted and directly echoed many of the sentiments and expressions used by Wollstonecraft in her Vindication of the Rights of Men. Like Priestley and Lofft, Christie argued that the consequences of the revolution were not attributable to the Assembly, but to ‘the unprincipled administrators of the old system’ who had led France to the edge of ruin, and he deduced the same principles from it as from the 1688 revolution: that the end of all government was the happiness of the people and that, in both cases, they had been justifiably provoked. Paine, too, however, had placed responsibility for the revolution squarely with the old regime and, in the vehemence and specificity of his criticisms, Christie was much closer to Rights of Man than to Priestley’s Letters. Indeed, there were many points at which his and Paine’s works could be seen visibly to intersect: their attack on Burke’s support for rights founded purely on custom and prescription, for example; their objection to the proposition that government should behave like a ‘Society of Antiquaries’; their strikingly similar apologies for the activities of the Paris mob; and their acknowledgement that Louis XVI had so far lost nothing by the revolution which was fundamentally ‘a revolt against principles, not against persons’.65 Yet, despite the obvious overlaps, there were again important differences in the substance of their arguments and, ultimately, it was less anti-monarchical feeling and more traditional middle-class resentment of aristocratic abuse of privilege which emerged most clearly in Christie’s Letters. Indeed he professed his love for his country and reverence for the constitution (whose very existence Paine was heretical enough to question) and held out the hope of its being improved by calm and peaceful means ‘without overturning the whole fabric’. In this, he cited the wise testimony, not of Voltaire and Rousseau, but of Locke, Benjamin Hoadly and Samuel Clarke, identifying himself very much, like Priestley and Price, with a strongly Whig Protestant strain of reform, intent upon drawing the constitution back to its original principles.66 After revisiting Paris during the summer and getting caught up with Paine in the reaction to Louis XVI’s flight to Varennes, Christie produced an English translation of the new French constitution presented to the king on 3 September. This encapsulated as nearly as possible the principles of the 1789 ‘Declaration of Rights’ but effectively forgave Louis’s betrayal by continuing to adhere to a limited constitutional form of monarchy. The Analytical thought it greatly ‘to the good’ since it ‘happily secured’ the two great ends of government – ‘the protection of individuals, and the tranquility [sic] of the public’ – and retained ‘wise provisions for preventing hasty innovation’. Christie’s translation was swiftly published by Johnson as a 70-page pamphlet (priced 1s 6d), which was advertised as the first part of Volume II of his Letters and soon adopted by the National Assembly as part of its ‘Polyglot’ version.67 Like his earlier volume, it attested to the fact that the majority of the bookseller’s contributions to the Reflections debate were


penned by ‘those who look[ed] upon the revolution in France as one of the grandest events which have happened in any age’ but who were necessarily driven rather than instinctively drawn towards being democrats, and eager to improve, not ‘radically’ disturb, their native constitution.68 The same sentiments ran with even more justice and resonance through the flood of pamphlets Johnson issued in the wake of the Birmingham riots in July 1791, when a dinner held to celebrate the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille caused long-standing animosity towards dissenters finally to erupt. Though Priestley was not in attendance, his home and meeting house were drunkenly set upon and destroyed by a lawless mob, as were those of others in his coterie previously associated with the Theological Repository. Those of his books, correspondence and papers which were not looted (including the near-complete manuscript of his Unitarian version of the bible) went up in flames and he was forced to flee the city for London. As soon as he arrived in the capital, he composed A Letter to the Inhabitants of Birmingham (1791) which was immediately inserted in the public papers but which Johnson also chose to print as a 16-page pamphlet (costing ‘2d. or 14s. a Hundred’) ‘to diffuse as widely as possible the refutation of injurious falshoods [sic]’ circulated against the ‘Revolution’ dinner.69 By this stage, the bookseller was already distributing copies of Priestley’s anonymous Political Dialogue on the General Principles of Government (1791), an even more violent and republican-tinged attack on hereditary aristocracy than his Letter to Burke, which cost only a few pennies. In August he began selling An Authentic Account of the Riots (1791) and The Report of the Trials of the Rioters at the Assizes Held at Warwick (1791), both sizeable shilling pamphlets hurriedly dispatched to him from printers in the Midlands. In further defiance of the attackers, he issued Priestley’s two-part Appeal to the Public, on the Subject of the Riots (1791–92), which Lunar Society friends tried cautiously to delay, as well as the sermon Priestley intended to deliver on his return to Birmingham and the one he actually preached on being appointed Richard Price’s successor at the Gravel Pit Meeting in Hackney. Alongside these, he took charge of a string of printed sermons and discourses condemning the ‘Late Shameful Outrages’ from Priestley’s close Unitarian friends and colleagues, including Radcliffe Scholefield (in charge of the Old Meeting in Birmingham, which also fell victim), John Edwards (who preached on ‘The Blessedness of Those Who are Persecuted for Righteousness Sake’ at the first meeting of his congregation after the riots), and the Hackney tutor David Jones, who (under the pen-name the ‘Welsh Freeholder’) rigorously defended Priestley and the Unitarian cause before being appointed his successor at the New Meeting. Priestley’s friend, the respected liberal Anglican Samuel Parr, whose Warwickshire parsonage had also been threatened, wrote an anonymous Letter from Irenopolis to the Inhabitants of Eleutheropolis; or, A Serious Address to the Dissenters of Birmingham (1792) defending Priestley’s achievements but hoping to dissuade them from


holding another 14 July dinner. Like the majority of these titles, it was printed in Birmingham by John Thompson and sent up for London sale to Johnson. The bookseller further dealt with a pseudonymous Letter from Timothy Sobersides, Extinguisher-Maker, at Wolverhampton, to Jonathan Blast, Bellows-Maker, at Birmingham (1792), by Priestley’s fellow-chemist and Lunar Society member, James Keir (a moderate Church of England man, who had presided at the original dinner), who dealt plainly with ‘such goodfor-nothing fellows as the rioters’.70 Prominent alongside these on his list stood: A Short History of the Persecution of Christians (1792) by a former Unitarian Baptist minister and future Analytical reviewer, Anthony Robinson; a new ‘enlarged’ edition of An Inquiry into the Nature of Subscription (1792) by William Frend’s disciple George Dyer, which touched more stridently on the ‘proscriptions and fires at Birmingham’ and the little reason they gave to dissenters to be ‘prejudiced in favour of a certain excellent constitution’; and Samuel Heywood’s anonymous High Church Politics (1792), which surveyed the riots in detail and disputed the Tory-inspired notion that ‘the political principles of the Dissenters are hostile to, and those of the Church congenial with, the constitution of Britain’.71 All these works had their sights mainly set on rousing public attention to the situation of nonconformists in England, whilst at the same time trying to separate their objectives from those of foreign revolutionaries. Most received sympathetic reviews (under ‘Law’, ‘Politico-Theology’ or a section specially devoted to the ‘Riots at Birmingham’) in the Analytical. Equally, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), though stimulated by the meetings and intellectual exchanges she enjoyed, with Paine among others, on her frequent visits to Johnson’s bookshop, owed less to the imminent influence of ‘radical’ politics than to the pedagogical concerns of ‘rational’ dissent. As Wollstonecraft herself observed, at the start of what she declared to be a treatise, not on governments, but on ‘female rights and manners’, ‘the neglected education of my fellowcreatures is the grand source of the misery I deplore.’ She did not intend ‘violently to agitate the contested question respecting the quality or inferiority of the sex’, nor did she wish ‘to invert the order of things’, but simply to ‘consider women in the grand light of human creatures, who, in common with men, are placed on this earth to unfold their faculties’. Her main grievance was that women were shut out from all investigation. Like the dissenters (with whom she drew noticeable parallels), they were barred from a liberal, ‘rational’ education and thus enslaved by their own narrowness of mind, and this represented a serious impediment to the progress of knowledge and virtue. Wollstonecraft’s concerns, then, were not levelling (though she did wish for the ‘common law of gravity’ to prevail between the sexes) but predominantly rational and improving, and demanded as much of women as they did of men. There was also an inherently antirevolutionary dimension to her arguments since it was in society’s own


interests to educate its citizens with the intention of avoiding any future risk of ‘retaliation’.72 Wollstonecraft did, however, specifically connect herself with events in France by dedicating her work to the French ambassador Talleyrand, who was in London at this point and warmly received by her (at her rooms in Store Street) and by dissenters who held a dinner for him in Hackney. Talleyrand had sympathized with women’s exclusion from a share in the new revolutionary government and Wollstonecraft hoped to influence him, and other members of the National Assembly, when they came to address the issue of female education. It was inconsistent and unjust, she argued, to subjugate one-half of the human race by denying them equal civil and political rights and in this, as in her previous Vindication, she continued to make her allegiances in the Burke-Paine controversy clear. She condemned the fact that Europe should only be so partially civilized as to prize rank and titles above ability, and the occasional viciousness of her attacks on the ‘sacred majesty of Kings’ and the ‘divine right of husbands’ seems born of her discussions with Paine. He was then at work on the second part of Rights of Man, in which he referred to hereditary government as ‘a system of mental levelling’ since it ‘indiscriminately admits every species of character to the same authority’, whatever their mental or moral calibre. One can trace the lineaments of these arguments (and possibly also the very substance and tenor of their conversation) in Wollstonecraft’s Vindication: . . . hereditary distinctions . . . clash with the mental superiority that naturally raises a man above his fellows. . . . regal power, in a few generations, introduces idiotism into the noble stem, and holds out baits to render thousands idle and vicious.73 To rouse the nation from ignorance and urge an ‘expansion of intellect’ as the best means of redistributing power was a mission which Wollstonecraft embraced, in common with Paine, during the winter of 1791–92 when they first began their acquaintance at St Paul’s Churchyard, and demonstrates not only the intellectual centrality of Joseph Johnson’s circle but the influence upon both of them of the progressive free-thinking arguments of religious dissent. Johnson variously coaxed and cajoled Wollstonecraft into completing her Rights of Woman during December 1791 and then steam-rollered it through the press. It made up a large, almost 500-page volume costing 6s – a further signal that its primary obligations were to a relatively comfortable middle-class audience. Conversely, the bookseller only became involved with the publication of the second part of Rights of Man (1792) by accident at the last minute following the withdrawal of Thomas Chapman as printer in January. Paine again turned to Jeremiah Jordan, who agreed to take over and act as the main publisher, but Johnson helped from the sidelines, advancing money to Paine which probably went


to subsidize some of the printing costs. On 16 February 5,000 copies came off the presses and over the next fortnight the work went through four more printings. Mindful of the criticisms the work contained of the ‘absurd’ state of political representation in England, the defects of the current administration, especially the monarchy (‘a family imported from abroad, of very inferior capacity to thousands in the nation’), and its radical proposals for a ‘general convention’ to take the whole state of government into consideration, together with extensive tax reforms and an Anglo-French alliance, Johnson’s name did not appear on the title page. Unbeknown to Jordan, however, he did undertake to sell the work (the lucrative option) and advised Paine temporarily to get out of London.74 The second part of Rights of Man was reviewed promptly in the Analytical in March, as was Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Woman, though under ‘Female Education and Manners’, not ‘Politics’ – a distinction heavily laboured over by the reviewer. The latter was recommended ‘warmly to the perusal of all classes’, even those who might not agree with its sentiments, as ‘a singular, and, on the whole, excellent production’, whereas the review of Paine was significantly more neutral, aware that as many as those who ‘delighted’ in the work wanted the author ‘hanged’, and set out only to offer the usual summary for the reader to decide. Despite this, the reviewer was not entirely able to withhold his admiration for Paine’s views on the costliness of government and his redistributive tax proposals, the pressing need for electoral reform and the formation of a national association (by which ‘every real evil might find a remedy’), revealing perhaps both the implicit methodological and the prevailing political tensions involved in the Analytical’s conduct.75 As if to prove his pamphlet was not ‘the only bud in England’, Paine’s influence also carried over into the writings of another American who had recently come within the orbit of Johnson’s circle, Joel Barlow.76 His first political pamphlet was issued anonymously from St Paul’s Churchyard on 4 February 1792, only days before the second part of Rights of Man (and with the same three-shilling price tag) and made no secret of its affiliation, even in its title. Advice to the Privileged Orders in the Several States of Europe, Resulting from the Necessity and Propriety of A General Revolution in the Principle of Government not only smacked of Paineite presumption but also his previous assertion that When we survey the wretched condition of man under the monarchical and hereditary systems of Government . . . it becomes evident that those systems are bad, and that a general revolution in the principle and construction of Governments is necessary.77 Barlow’s historical analysis of society’s ills was exactly the same as Paine’s. The tyrannies of the world were all aristocratic and they justified the


uneven operation of laws solely to protect their own interests. So, too, was his intellectual critique of government: ‘Unequal governments are necessarily founded in ignorance, and they must be supported by ignorance’. Like Paine, Barlow also believed the French revolution to be ‘the work of argument and rational conviction, and not of the sword’, and to have fatally challenged outmoded feudal hierarchies and the need for wars, creating a society in which ‘dukes and marquisses are now EXALTED to farmers, manufacturers and merchants’. Monarchy itself was only preserved for ‘fugitive’ reasons so that ‘a majority of the people will learn to be disgusted with so unnatural and ponderous a deformity in their new edifice, and will soon hew it off.’78 Barlow reserved some of the most damning remarks in his Advice for the Church, whose historical alliance with the State had not only proved ‘a fatal deviation from the principles of the first founder of the faith’ but had ‘deluged Europe in blood for a long succession of ages’. He went even further, arguing that it was not the Church that was corrupted by men but men who were corrupted by the Church and cited the intolerance of the recent ‘Church and King’ mobs in Birmingham as evidence of the incompatibility of the natural rights of man with established religion. Barlow was, in fact, advocating ‘no Church’ and proving beyond doubt that he was not one of Johnson’s devoutly nonconformist circle of authors but, like Paine, one of a new secular transatlantic breed of republicans forged out of a previous revolution: Engrave it on the heart of a man, that all men are equal in rights, and that the government is their own, and then persuade him to sell his crucifix and buy a musquet, – and you have made a good citizen.79 Advice to the Privileged Orders won high praise in the Analytical (possibly from Thomas Christie) which claimed that, during the whole of the Reflections debate, there had ‘not appeared a more original writer, a better informed politician, or a more acute logician’, though (as with Paine) it was far from subscribing to all his opinions. It was also reckoned eminently ‘sensible’ by Mary Wollstonecraft who, from this point, struck up an acquaintance with the Barlows. In March its author was recommended for honorary membership of the SCI, at which point Johnson himself appears to have joined or at least renewed his membership.80 He continued to act as Barlow’s bookseller, the same month issuing his 20-page satirical poem The Conspiracy of Kings (1792). This was addressed more generally ‘To the Inhabitants of Europe’ and proved apposite in its counter-revolutionary suspicions (‘of Kings combin’d’ to ‘crush the untry’d power of new-born France’, ll. 49, 52) and just as politically explicit and unencumbered as his previous prose Advice. In it, Barlow attacked ‘the Great’ as ‘crested reptiles’, ‘prolific monsters’ and ‘vampires’ who for too long had drained men of their natural


affections and wreaked nothing but havoc (ll. 9, 14, 209). Burke was merely their ‘degenerate slave’, vainly attempting to counter with his ‘infuriate quill’ and ‘bigot rage’ the divinely ordained progress of reason (ll. 105, 129, 133). Now the death of ‘Orders, Slaves and Kings’ was nigh (hailed by Barlow in typically apocalyptic terms) and, in its place, the prospect of an everlasting reign of truth and an empire based on fraternity and equal rights (ll. 243–66).81 There were parallels here between Barlow’s poem and another with clear, though less forceful, pro-French sympathies which Johnson published in the early summer of 1792 – the first (and more ambitious) part of Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden, ‘The Economy of Vegetation’. Though predominantly a homage to scientific progress (not least the achievements of Priestley and the Lunar Society), Darwin managed to slide into the second of its four cantos some celebratory lines on France. Having praised ‘Immortal FRANKLIN’ for igniting the American colonists against the colonial ‘Tyrant-Power’, he depicted the giant, Gulliveresque form of Liberty (previously slumbering in chains) on ‘GALLIA’s plains’ as now electrically charged, ‘Touch’d by the [same] patriot-flame’ as earlier rebellions, and having ‘rent amazed/The flimsy bonds’ that ensnare him (II. 355–66, 377–88). Barlow had also portrayed the revolutionaries as ‘Men, rous’d from sloth, by indignation stung,/Their strong hands loos’d’, and demanded to know why ‘France, whose giant might/Rent the dark veil, and dragg’d [kings] forth to light’, should now bow down to royalist threats (ll. 35–6, 61–2).82 Further, his occasional mythological lapses and widespread use of cosmic imagery suggested more than a coincidental affinity with Darwin’s poem and its celebrated picture of the founding of the universe, the proofs of which had been sitting at St Paul’s Churchyard. Sneaking in its occasional political observations under the ‘banner of Science’, Darwin’s ‘Economy of Vegetation’ was unlikely to cause anything approaching a political storm, whereas Barlow’s poem was no more than an extended and unabashed tirade against the viciousness of courtly government, tolling its death-knell in the face of dawning revolution.83 Barlow’s political views, in tandem with Paine’s, were without doubt the most extreme that Joseph Johnson ever published (taking him immoderately close to what he later, jokingly, described as a ‘hanging’ offence) and were ‘puffingly’ referred to by Charles James Fox, the object of so much of George III’s hatred, in the Commons. They did not, though, enjoy an especially large sale and, perhaps because of this or the fact that (ostensibly, at least) they addressed a privileged not a popular audience, did not appear to warrant the threat of prosecution.84 The fact that Johnson had no compunction about declaring himself the publisher of Barlow’s work, whilst publicly minimizing his association with Paine, could well be attributed to the former’s comparative lack of notoriety. But it does suggest his willingness to promote more extreme though fundamentally pacifist ideals (like those of


Priestley and Price), braced by the rising popular movement for reform and the imminent prospect of an easing of the libel laws proposed by Fox. Moreover, it also rather tends to give the lie to his apparent failure a year earlier to publish William Blake’s The French Revolution for fear of government reprisals.85 Blake’s poem was an historically based but wholly visionary re-enactment of the debates which took place in France between king, lords and commons in the run-up to the fall of the Bastille. Its principal and overtly republican theme, like Paine and Barlow’s, was that ‘Kings are sick throughout all the earth’ (l. 61) and their days of slaughter and conquest now fatally numbered, but the overriding impetus of the poem was as profoundly anti-war as it was pro-revolutionary. Louis and his lords are presented as a sanguinary, pestilential tribe, with their ‘vast armies’ ‘spread over the hills,/Breathing red fires from man to man’ (ll. 80–1). The ‘ancientest Peer’, the (fictional) Duke of Burgundy, reeking of war ‘like a ripe vineyard’, warns against the Assembly’s destructive levelling tendencies and threatens to rouse up ‘the Ancient forests of chivalry’ throughout Europe to protect the interests of a feudal élite (ll. 83–4, 93). Opposition, however, appears in the form of the Abbé Sieyès, ‘the voice of the people’ (l. 206), who calls for the privileged orders to face up to all the misery and oppression their reign has inflicted. It is Sieyès’s rebuttal by the nobles which precipitates the main and hugely symbolic event of the poem – the Assembly’s vote (for what Blake optimistically calls ‘the removal of War’) ordering Lafayette to take the army ten miles outside Paris (ll. 267–9) – and which culminates in its final image of the ‘Senate in peace sat beneath morning’s beam’ (l. 306). For Barlow, too, the central triumph of the revolution was that the French had ‘Renounce[d] the wish of war’ and ‘Invite[d] all men to happiness and peace’ (ll. 259–62) and, like Blake’s Abbé Sieyès, he was to ‘Hail the mild morning, where the dawn began,/The full fruition of the hopes of man’ (ll. 277–8). The depiction of the Bastille in The French Revolution, like Barlow’s poetry, also owed much to the imagery of Erasmus Darwin, whose lines and footnote on its horrors in The Botanic Garden may also have been seen by Blake in proof, as he was commissioned by Johnson to make a series of engravings for the poem. Further, Blake’s attempts to placate conservative fears about the consequences of popular change, by having the benignly aristocratic Duc d’Orléans warn his peers ‘Fear not dreams, fear not visions’ (l. 180), directly shadowed those of Priestley, Wollstonecraft and Christie.86 The French Revolution was, then, readily assimilable in terms of its sentiments and subject matter with other poetic and prose political works which the bookseller published. To contemporary audiences, however, it may have appeared an uneasy and unintelligible mix of real-life incident and heavily prophetic poetry, which Johnson possibly realized after looking at the pages in proof. Only the previous year he had tried to sell a 12-book poem in


rather ‘turgid’ couplets on the English Revolution by another artisan-poet, James Ogden, which had been badly received by the Analytical: ‘. . . an epic poem on a recent event is the most unfavourable to poetic genius. . . . we want that minuteness of fact, that correctness of description, which prose alone is capable of affording.’87 Always friendly to Blake, however, Johnson may have made suggestions helping to make the poem more saleable but which were fiercely resented and led to its being completely abandoned with a commercial bookseller. The clean proof pages certainly suggest a general lack of deliberation, and that no attempts were made at editorial revision. The fact that Fuseli, an intimate and well-respected friend of Blake and worthy reviser to Cowper, appears to have had no knowledge of him as a poet but only as an engraver (which is how Johnson would chiefly have regarded him) suggests that the project was quickly and somewhat discreetly dropped.88 If the timing for this was mid-way through 1791, then the popular clamour unleashed by Louis XVI’s escape to Varennes would have proved extremely unsettling to the publication of Book One, with its glowing portrayal of Lafayette and peaceful, deeply optimistic conclusion with ‘Paris without a soldier, silent’ (ll. 304–5) completely shattered by the massacre on 17 July on the Champ de Mars. Its rampant anti-clericalism may also have introduced doubts given that dissenters had begun to be targeted the same month by ‘Church and King’ mobs. Despite their obvious philosophical differences, Blake was seemingly struck by Priestley’s persecution in Birmingham and it is notable that his Bastille in The French Revolution houses a host of dissenting types who have all suffered terribly for refusing to comply with the authorities: among them, a political preacher who, ‘by conscience urg’d’, ‘rais’d a pulpit,/ And taught wonders to darken’d souls’; a former ‘friend’ to the court who has been tortured, mutilated and blinded for composing ‘a letter of advice to a King’; and, most pertinently of all perhaps, a man imprisoned for ‘a writing prophetic’ (ll. 42–3, 47, 51, 29). It is conceivable, then, that Blake’s paranoid dwellings on their terrible restraint and incarceration may offer some insight into his own particular nervous fears and anxieties and not those of his potential bookseller. Certainly, Johnson’s own future activities would seem to confirm this as Blake, Paine and Barlow’s sentiments all continued to be echoed and debated in the works of other pro-French sympathizers he published.89 This was the case, for example, with Thomas Cooper, a deputy of the Manchester Constitutional Society, who (together with James Watt Jr) was presented to the Jacobin Club by Robespierre on 13 April 1792 and delivered an enthusiastic message of support for the defenders of the rights of man against a confederacy of the despotic powers of Europe. At the end of the month, Cooper and Watt were furiously denounced by Burke as agents sent from England to enter into an unscrupulous ‘alliance with a set in France of the worst traitors and regicides that had ever been heard of’ during


a debate on parliamentary reform in the Commons.90 Cooper read the debate on his return from France and somewhat reluctantly felt obliged to take up his pen to justify his conduct. His Reply to Mr. Burke’s Invective (1792) was duly published by Johnson (linked to the largely dissenting Constitutional Society in Manchester via Priestley and Thomas Percival) and another of its members and printer of its newspaper, the Manchester Herald, Matthew Falkner. Launching himself tangentially into the Reflections debate, Cooper labelled its author one of the many ‘pensioned Advocates of Aristocracy’ and ‘the declared Enemy of all attempts to “propagate the general principles of Liberty” ’. He refuted Burke’s uninformed abuse of the Jacobins, decrying the idea of the French as Britain’s natural enemy (with more than a passing nod to Barlow and Paine): ‘By nature we are brethren as well as neighbours; by the intrigues of courts and of ministers, we have been mutually beasts of prey’; ‘War, domestic and foreign, is . . . exclusively attributable to the privileged orders. – War they create; by War they were created.’91 Keen to distinguish himself from other ‘half-measured Reformers – Men of Rank and Respectability’, who ‘desire no farther reform than to extend the aristocratic monopoly of power to that circle in which themselves are included’, the changes Cooper recommended did not amount to a mere disenfranchising of pocket boroughs or admitting only taxable householders to the vote, but to annual or biennial elections, salaried MPs and ‘a full, fair, and adequate representation of the People’. Yet he remained firmly convinced that, under the present circumstances, no further measures than these could be justified.92 Like Christie and Lofft, Cooper still favoured ‘early and peaceable Reformation’ rather than violent ‘amendation’ and, in this, was not so far removed from the newly-formed Society of the Friends of the People whom he criticized (not so much for the nature of its political platform as its motives) nor from another of his possible targets on the affluent, gentlemanly wing of reform, Christopher Wyvill.93 Wyvill, by this stage, had already produced his own response to Burke, A Defence of Dr. Price, and the Reformers of England (1792), and likewise published it through St Paul’s Churchyard. Though chiefly concerned to examine the current state of religious liberty, it provided an opportunity for him to disentangle his own political position (and that of Price) from the more ‘radical’ and destructive principles of the author of Rights of Man. Where Price had been disinterested and rational and promoted only a ‘moderate correction of abuses’, Paine was ‘a Patriot of a different class’ – a political enthusiast, a specious and daring reasoner and, worse still, a foreigner, whose ‘avowed purpose is, not to reform or amend the System of our Government, but to overturn and destroy it.’94 Like Price, Wyvill advocated ‘safe and progressive improvement’ against ‘the doubtful event of great but hazardous Revolution’, believing the French example to be wholly ‘impracticable and undesirable for England’. In fact, his wish to preserve the ancient


foundations of the constitution, whilst simply removing what appeared superficial ‘blemishes’, brought him close to emulating Burke and he urged the aristocracy to secure rather than risk their power and privileges by making ‘wise and seasonable concessions’.95 Besides Johnson, Wyvill’s work was entrusted to a local bookseller in York, John Todd (whom Priestley had used to distribute copies of his works back in the 1760s). But, symptomatic of the delicate political balancing act he was trying to perform, it also involved the heavily Pittite bookseller John Stockdale, whom Paine accused of colluding to delay his Rights of Man. Johnson’s share in the Defence was understandable as it pleaded the collective loyalty of the dissenters, despite one or two of their number having ‘hazarded, with an honest zeal, to publish their opinions on the inutility and impropriety of any religious establishment’, their ‘detestation of the corruptions of Parliament, and an admiration of certain Republican forms of Government’.96 Though reflecting chiefly back upon the failed Test campaign, Wyvill’s Defence rather aptly ran ahead of a Commons debate on 11 May when a petition from the Unitarian Society to repeal the Blasphemy Act and anti-trinitarian parts of the Toleration Act was considered. Johnson had prepared the ground for this in customary fashion, churning out a continuous stream of theological pamphlets decrying the fundamental corruptions of Christian doctrine and asserting the primitive truth of the Unitarian cause by Lindsey, Disney and Toulmin. He also issued a cheap 20-page set of Reasons for Presenting to Parliament a Petition for the Repeal of Certain Penal Statutes Affecting Unitarian Christians (1792), most probably at the Unitarian Society’s behest. Despite all these efforts, when the anti-trinitarian bill was debated in the Commons the ‘declarations of Priestley and Price’ came in for some of Burke’s most vitriolic criticism. The Unitarians, he claimed, were sworn enemies of the church who had now ‘incorporated’ to destroy it: ‘[They] had avowed their approbation of the abominable proceedings at Paris . . . likewise of the doctrine of Paine, and not only approved of them, but as it were recommended them for the imitation of England.’ Though well-used by now to such hyperbole, the House voted decisively to defeat the motion by 142 to 63.97 Two weeks after the Unitarian debate, on 25 May, a royal proclamation ordering magistrates to search out the authors and printers of wicked and seditious writings and relay evidence to the king’s ministers was approved in the Commons. The government also chose this moment to begin prosecuting those responsible for the second part of Rights of Man by summonsing, first, Jeremiah Jordan, then Paine. Jordan determined not to put up any struggle. Rejecting Paine’s advice, he quickly conceded his guilt and gave up various papers to the Treasury solicitors, including a copy of Paine’s work in which he had conveniently inscribed ‘Bought of Mr. Johnson, February the 18th, 1792’, just to prove his colleague had sold it.98 By chance, Fox’s longdebated Libel Bill passed into law early in June, allowing juries not only to


decide upon the mere act of publication but whether the intention imputed to a work by the authorities was justified. Johnson arranged to have the debates on Fox’s bill, together with the new statute, printed in a single volume costing 2s 6d. The ‘Politics’ pages of the Analytical during the early summer were crammed with notices of pamphlets both defending and attacking Paine’s work, directly mirroring the confrontation out in the country, and, in August, it announced the publication of a cheap duodecimo edition of both parts of Rights of Man (priced 6d each or ‘30s per hundred’) by the Paternoster Row bookseller Henry Delahoy Symonds. In view of later comments and his previous caution, it would be difficult to involve Johnson in the overt sale of Symonds’ edition.99 However, he did play a part in the SCI’s plan to distribute 12,000 copies of an extended letter from Paine to the Home Secretary Henry Dundas, the main proponent of the anti-sedition proclamation. His name appears at the end of a lengthy list of potential agents drawn up by his Unitarian friend William Sturch, a longstanding member of the Essex Street congregation, and presented to the SCI on 29 June: ‘700 Mr. Johnson, St. Paul’s Church-yard, for different parts of the country.’100 He also appeared as principal seller of A Letter from His Grace the Duke of Richmond to Lieutenant Colonel Sharman (1792), a seminal work first published a decade earlier when Richmond (Fox’s uncle) was a prominent member of the SCI and which (in the Analytical’s words) ‘adopted two of the most essential principles of a radical reform’ – equal representation and annual parliaments. Widely esteemed, it had furnished much of the inspiration behind the London Corresponding Society (LCS), founded at the start of the year by Thomas Hardy, and was cited equally as an authority by the Whiggishly high-brow Society of the Friends of the People. Richmond, however, had long since sided with Pitt, to the disgust of many (including Burke), and approved the government’s anti-sedition measures. His Letter, in fact, had been referred to during the proclamation debate and Richmond himself violently attacked for his betrayal. Re-circulated incredibly cheaply (and almost certainly at a loss) through Johnson and booksellers throughout the country, it served as a deliberate reminder that the cause of reform had once been taken up by eminent men who now sat in power and were firmly bent on trying to discredit it.101 * In September 1792 Thomas Christie set off again for Paris. So, too, did his friend Paine, who chose to flee the country rather than face prosecution. They arrived in the wake of tumultuous events: the storming of the Tuileries and suspension of the monarchy on 10 August and bloody massacres on the streets of the capital in the first week of September. The French Convention assembled in the Tuileries (ostensibly to decide the king’s fate) on 20 September. In the coming days, Johnson set about publishing A Letter to the National Convention of France (1792) by Joel Barlow, which offered up a


few observations on the business of its framing a new constitution. Barlow had spent the first part of the summer across the channel and, despite all the turmoil, appeared doubly confirmed in his republican convictions, both relieved and excited that at last, having suspended the monarchy, the French people were ‘resorting to their own proper dignity’ and ‘establishing an equal government’.102 He also advised the abolition of another essentially ‘monarchical’ idea and the dissenters’ bête noir, a national church, and spent the latter part of his Letter working through an impressive raft of reform issues – a widening of the representation based on population not property, annual elections, mandatory rotation of power and offices, a review of public pensions and salaries, reform of the criminal law, the dissolution of a standing army and the establishment of a public system of education – which adhered closely to Paine’s recommendations in Rights of Man. It was Paine, in fact, who delivered Barlow’s 70-page Letter to the Convention, where he had taken up his seat as deputy for Calais. As a result, it was soon translated into French and its author rewarded with honorary French citizenship, joining Priestley, Christie, Thomas Cooper, John Horne Tooke and Paine himself. It received an unusually lengthy and detailed review in the October Analytical, although (even at only 1s 6d a copy) sales only amounted to five or six hundred copies, well below those of his original Advice. By the autumn of 1792, then, strong practical as well as ideological links had been forged between the circle of writers, intellectuals and reformers who surrounded Joseph Johnson at St Paul’s Churchyard and the new republican administration in France. Johnson himself had actually arranged a trip across the Channel early in September, together with Fuseli and Wollstonecraft, but turned back at Dover probably owing to events in Paris. Further, his name, together with those of Paine, Barlow, Priestley, Horne Tooke and Christie, featured on a ‘Collection List’ for the SCI (dated 13 September) to buy boots for the French army and he appears to have attended an SCI meeting at least once (on 2 November) during this period.103 Barlow, Horne Tooke and Alexander Geddes were also present and it was resolved that a committee be appointed to consider an address to the National Convention. On 28 November Barlow presented the SCI address in Paris, proclaiming to its members: ‘After the example given by France, future revolutions will be easy. It would not be extraordinary if, in a little while, congratulations were to arrive to a National Convention of England.’ His fellow SCI envoy John Frost then duly announced the Society’s patriotic gift of a thousand pairs of shoes, to which Johnson had subscribed.104 Before leaving, Barlow had deposited one of the chapters from his unfinished sequel to Advice to the Privileged Orders with Johnson, ‘desiring him to publish it by itself.’105 The political climate in England, however, had tilted decisively away from benevolence and fraternal exchange. The edict issued by the French Convention on 19 November, pledging assistance to all other


nations wishing to oust their despotic rulers and recover their liberty, caused much outrage and panic and confirmed the British government in its distrust of French (particularly Jacobin) intentions. By the end of the month, a second proclamation against sedition (to deter ‘evil-disposed persons’ from ‘acting in concert with persons in foreign parts’) was in the offing and the ultra-loyalist Association for Preserving Liberty and Property Against Republicans and Levellers had been founded at the Crown and Anchor Tavern in the Strand and immediately set about targeting the SCI. With the British government reacting to the heightened possibility of revolution at home and the imminent trial of Paine over Rights of Man, there were clearly dangers attached to being associated with one of the Convention’s leading correspondents and printing a work which (exactly like Paine’s) dealt critically with the subject of government revenue and expenditure. Reacting very much as he had done earlier with Paine, Johnson decided it was safer not to publish and even discontinued the sale of Part I. He did, however, hold on to the manuscript for safekeeping and subsequently had a copy made for Barlow’s wife to take over to Paris, where the second part of Advice to the Privileged Orders was printed in September 1793.106 On 11 December 1792 the trial of Louis XVI began in Paris and exactly a week later Paine was put on trial in absentia at the Court of King’s Bench in London charged with being ‘a wicked, malicious, seditious, and ill-disposed person’ who had sought to vilify the 1688 revolution, George III and the present British Parliament. Paine was defended by Thomas Erskine, principally on the grounds that the charge violated a key principle of the British constitution – the liberty of the press – and in terms curiously relevant to his bookseller friend Johnson. Every man, he argued, ‘may analyse the principles of its constitution, point out its errors and defects, examine and publish its corruptions, warn his fellow-citizens against their ruinous consequences’ without inciting revolution, and he turned Priestley’s sentiments to his use almost verbatim: When men can freely communicate their thoughts and sufferings, real or imaginary, their passions spend themselves in air, like gunpowder scattered upon the surface; but pent up by terrors, they work unseen like subterraneous fire, burst forth in earthquake, and destroy everything in their course. Let reason be opposed to reason, and argument to argument, and every good government will be safe.107 Johnson, like Jeremiah Jordan, was not called as a witness, although two letters from Paine mentioning them both were introduced. Discomfortingly, Erskine also quoted from Newcome Cappe’s 1781 fast-day sermons, claiming it was ‘ten times stronger than Mr. Paine’ and yet the author had not been thought worthy of prosecution.108 The advocacy of ‘rational’ principles at this stage was not at all likely to swing the argument and the jury’s deci-


sion to convict Paine prompted a witch-hunt among the reform societies and their coadjutors within the printing and book trades. Just days before setting out for Dover at the start of a two-year sojourn in France, Mary Wollstonecraft confessed to thinking of putting off her journey, this time ‘on account of the present [‘rather alarming’] posture of affairs at home’, and fearing mainly for what might befall her bookseller: ‘I go – yet should any accident happen to my dear and worthy friend Johnson during my absence I should never forgive myself for leaving him – These are vapourish fears – still they fasten on me.’ Wollstonecraft arrived in Paris in time to see Louis at the bar. On 26 December she wrote to Johnson that the king had passed by her window that morning (‘sitting, with more dignity than I expected from his character’) on the way to his trial, clearly impressed with ‘the majesty of the people’ but relieved that the day was ‘not stained with blood’ and afraid of what might follow.109 Even the staunch republican Paine was working hard to find ways to avert the king’s execution. His Reasons for Wishing to Preserve the Life of Louis Capet (1793) served to reflect the fact that the sympathies of many of Johnson’s circle were predominantly with the idealistic Brissotins and Girondins in the French government who, earlier in the year, had been happy to condone a military crusade against other European monarchies to defend the revolution but now found themselves gravely worried (unlike the more ruthless and decisive Jacobins) about the consequences of killing a king.

5 The War of Opinion

Dissenters . . . have as a body constantly fallen short of their own principles; . . . through fear or some other motive they have been so strongly the advocates of an Overstrained Moderation that they have rather been the enemies than the friends of those who have ventured the most and effected the most for the rights of the people. Thomas Walker, A Review of . . . Political Events . . . in Manchester (1794) After arriving back in London in December 1792, having spent the past twelve months or so in France (and, like Wollstonecraft, a witness to recent events in Paris), it seems entirely natural that William Wordsworth should have been drawn straight to St Paul’s Churchyard and applied to Joseph Johnson to publish his first poetry.1 Johnson was probably best known to Wordsworth as the publisher of Cowper, from the title page of The Task, a work the younger poet much admired, and also possibly from some of the ‘master Pamphlets of the day’ which he claimed ‘eagerly’ to have read, most likely during his residence in London during the first months of 1791.2 But it is also likely that the bookseller’s name was recommended to him just prior to his departure from Paris. A youthful supporter of the revolution, Wordsworth had attended the stormy sessions of the new French Convention, associating with members of the Gironde faction, and may also have hovered around the large expatriate group of residents at White’s Hotel, which included Paine, Barlow and Thomas Christie and virtually formed an off-shoot of Johnson’s circle in the city.3 Wordsworth brought to the bookseller what was ostensibly a traditional eighteenth-century landscape poem, based upon a walking tour he had earlier taken through France and Switzerland. It was formal, indeed rather affected, in metre and style, and in it the poet established his customary theme of the holiness and ‘healing pow’r’ (l. 14) of nature. Descriptive Sketches, however, also serves as the political record of a traveller ‘lur’d by 127


hope’ to revolutionary France and both buoyed and deeply troubled by his experiences (l. 45).4 Wordsworth worked on the poem in Orléans in September 1792 and in it he celebrates the establishment of the new French Republic: ‘Methought from every cot the watchful bird/Crowed with earpiercing power’ till then unheard’ (ll. 764–5). He protests at the former slavery of Savoy which, until November 1792 and its ‘emancipation’ by the French, was controlled by the King of Sardinia, and praises in Rousseauesque terms the ‘native dignity’ and independence of the Swiss (‘The slave of none, of beasts alone the lord’) in whom the ‘traces of primaeval Man appear’ (ll. 528–35). Yet, though the revolution has clearly woken him from his Burkean slumber, ‘Ev’n now’ Wordsworth sighs at the dissolution of the monastery of the Grande Chartreuse which he visited in 1790 but which two years later has been taken over by 400 unruly soldiers – its monks expelled or imprisoned, and their fates decided by a revolutionary tribunal (ll. 53–79). The recent bloody disturbances in Paris pose an even more obvious test of his political faith, ‘startling’ him with their ‘uproar’ and arousing in him his first real ‘pang of moral grief’ (ll. 754, 769). Ultimately, however, Wordsworth does manage to arrive at some kind of compensating logic in his poem, reasoning that ‘Hope, strength, and courage, social suffering brings,/Freshening the waste of sand with shades and springs’ (ll. 197–8) and that, despite the revolution’s ‘lamentable crimes’, freedom still irresistibly ‘spreads her pow’r’ (l. 756). Here he appeared to be drawing upon the Priestleian belief that even the worst evils – what Wordsworth calls ‘The churlish gales, that unremitting blow/Cold from necessity’s continual snow’ (ll. 604–5) – eventually give rise to greater good.5 Though the sky remains far from cloudless towards the end of the Sketches and ‘war’s discordant habits’ noticeably gleam ‘thro’ the trees’ (l. 746), the immediate and disturbing impact of the September Massacres begins to recede and the poet is able to summon forth a revolutionary hymn, bemoaning the inevitability of war (which like Priestley, Paine and Barlow, he attributes to the ‘perverted ire’ of kings) but trusting that the ‘Fire and Sword’ of the French republican armies will ultimately purge the earth of inequality and oppression (ll. 774–805). That, just a week after the execution of Louis XVI on 21 January 1793 and three days before France declared war on England, Johnson should publish a poem that, for all its uncertainties and ambiguities about revolutionary violence, remained bold in its anti-monarchical sentiments (‘grant that every sceptred child of clay’ be ‘Swept in their anger from th’affrighted shore’ and ‘[w]ith all his creatures sink – to rise no more’, ll. 806–9) and pointed reference to Rights of Man – ‘While strives a secret Power to hush the croud,/Pain’s wild rebellious burst proclaims her rights aloud’ (ll. 652–3) – suggests that its subversive qualities were not immediately obvious or seen as merely incidental and not to pose too much of a risk. The innocuous title of the work, more travelogue than political diatribe, its classical

The War of Opinion 129

style and its being ‘huddled up’ by Wordsworth together with a conventional college piece, An Evening Walk, that was appealingly melancholy (‘Sweet rill, farewell!’, l. 85) and Cowperesque, may have helped Johnson to take the bait and its standard three-shilling price-tag again clearly destined it for the polite middle-class poetry market.6 Though mainly the product of Wordsworth’s student vacations, An Evening Walk is also not without political interest and, albeit in more subtle ways than Descriptive Sketches, evokes parallels with Paine and Barlow. In it, for example, the wandering poet encounters a rooster, stalking around his domain like a ‘monarch’, a ‘crest of purple’ atop ‘his warrior head’ and a feathery tail-plume ‘Whose state . . . /Droops, and o’er canopies his regal brow’: ‘On tiptoe rear’d he blows his clarion throat,/Threaten’d by faintly answering farms remote’ (ll. 129–38). Barlow had referred to ‘Lords, Dukes and Princes’ lifting their ‘neck[s] of plumes’ as ‘Clarions and flutes and drums [their] way prepare’ (ll. 230–42) in his Conspiracy of Kings and Paine, of course, had memorably accused Burke of pitying the ‘plumage’ of aristocracy whilst forgetting ‘the dying bird’ in Rights of Man. Wollstonecraft, also, had compared women (like kings) to members of the ‘feathered race’ who ‘have nothing to do but to plume themselves, and stalk with mock majesty from perch to perch.’7 Before the year was out, the bookseller Daniel Isaac Eaton (who traded on Newgate Street at the sign of the ‘Cock and Swine’) would be prosecuted for seditious libel for printing a story allegedly comparing George III to a ‘game cock’, with a ‘flowing robe of plumage tucked up at his rump’ and a ‘crown, or coxcomb’ about his head, whose ‘shrill marshall clarions disturbed the repose, and destroyed the happiness’ of the farmyard, in his tuppenny weekly periodical Politics for the People (1793).8 Wordsworth also compared the workers busy in a Cumbrian slate quarry to bees within an ‘enormous hive’ (l. 143), a metaphor which Paine and Barlow had both used to devastating effect. Moreover, he aired his pacifist grievances by including an extended section dealing with a female beggar and her two children who are caught up in a storm in which the children perish. The woman’s soldier husband is not there to ‘share’ her ‘woes’, but ‘Asleep on Bunker’s charnel hill afar’, the victim of an earlier misguided revolutionary war (ll. 253–4). When it came to the reviews, however, none of them commented on the political sentiments expressed in Wordsworth’s poems (not even the noted ‘Jacobin’ Thomas Holcroft who reviewed them in the Monthly) but concerned themselves mainly, and in some cases quite harshly, with the work’s literary merits. The Analytical, first to review them in March, thought the Sketches ‘could only have been produced by a lively imagination’ but damned them faintly for their obscurity, occasional extravagance and rather ‘laboured and artificial craft of expression’. The reviewer did, however, concede that the poem was ‘rendered instructive by the frequent introduction of moral reflections’ and ended, rather tantalizingly, by quoting a ‘pleas-


ing’ extract on the subject of freedom (ll. 719–39), but otherwise remained characteristically non-committal.9 Johnson, for his part, appears to have done very little more to promote Wordsworth’s first poetry, which met with scant amount of commercial success and proved (perhaps not surprisingly) to be the last he also published. Wordsworth, however, for the time being continued to refer to Johnson as ‘my publisher’ and, as late as 1798, still spoke of wishing to preserve their connection, but the remainder of the decade turned out rather to be one of missed opportunities (as earlier with Blake), including the near-publication of Lyrical Ballads.10 In the months following the appearance of Descriptive Sketches, Wordsworth set to composing a prose reply to a pamphlet published (on 30 January) by the liberal Bishop of Llandaff, Richard Watson, which protested at the shocking execution of Louis XVI and the ‘sanguinary’ and ‘savage’ birth of the new French republic. Openly appearing as ‘the advocate of republicanism’, Wordsworth regretted the ‘blind fondness’ for kings, not just among the liberal clergy but the people in general and boldly enumerated his objections to monarchical government, on the grounds that it was inherently unstable and despotic.11 Here, he showed that he had read and closely modelled his arguments on Chapter 3 of the second part of Rights of Man, ‘Of the Old and New Systems of Government.’ In the light of his experiences in France, Wordsworth, like Paine, revealed himself deeply sceptical of the virtues even of the ‘mixed’ British system of government which Watson praised, observing that the King, Lords and Commons had the constitutional right to bring in ‘whatever laws they please, in defiance of the petitions or remonstrances of the nation’. Even under ‘the best of all monarchical governments’, he argued, ‘the popular mind may be debauched’, using as his example the sacking of Priestley’s house in 1791 and echoing the view of many of Priestley’s sympathizers by hinting that the rioters (rather than being ‘Left to the quiet exercise of their own judgment’) had been incited.12 Wordsworth reiterated the ‘general call for a parliamentary reform’, including more frequent elections, the abolition of property qualifications for MPs (in favour of ‘[v]irtues, talents, and acquirements’) and, most controversially of all, universal male suffrage. In this, he implied more than a passing familiarity with Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman, particularly her ninth chapter on the ‘Pernicious Effects which Arise from the Unnatural Distinctions Established in Society’ in which she derided the entire system of representation as simply ‘a convenient handle for despotism’ and (rather meekly) put the case for women having representatives, ‘instead of being arbitrarily governed’.13 His concern for the poor (‘little is thought of snatching the bread from their mouths to eke out the “necessary splendor” of nobility’) directly echoed not only Paine, but Wollstonecraft’s outburst of feeling for that ‘numerous class of hard-working mechanics, who pay for the support of royalty when they can scarcely stop their children’s mouths


with bread.’ Moreover, his contempt for the ‘baleful influence’ of hereditary aristocracy and ‘all laws such as the unnatural monster of primogeniture’ left little doubt as to the extent of his mutual sympathy with others among Johnson’s pamphletists.14 A Letter to the Bishop of Landaff, however, was never published and survives only in manuscript form as a stitched folio-sized notebook, the main hand not even attributable to Wordsworth. Although a fair copy, the text has been shown to be marred by incomplete or abandoned insertions and alterations, and in a state far from ready to be handed over to a printer, and the concluding page(s) are either missing or were never transcribed or, indeed, even written. In this respect, all the signs are that the work was broken off by the author himself. It is fair to assume, however, that Joseph Johnson would have been the bookseller most likely to have been approached about its publication. Whether this was the case and he proved apprehensive remains open to question but, given the Letter’s contents and the prevailing political climate – the fact that (in Priestley’s words) there existed a manifest ‘dread of every thing tending to Republicanism’ in England, indeed the very word had become ‘one of the most opprobrious in the English language’ – it is hard to believe his reaction would have been otherwise. Wordsworth’s overtly Paineite views and alarming tendency to paraphrase Rights of Man, notably the maxim that ‘All hereditary government is in its nature tyranny’ (which was the first evidence to be cited at Paine’s trial), would clearly have fuelled fears of prosecution at a time when booksellers were still being indicted for publishing Paine’s work.15 The recent execution of the French king would have made not only its republican sentiments but its efforts to excuse the French people for having resorted to violence (‘is this a sufficient reason to reprobate a convulsion from which is to spring a fairer order of things?’), developing the logic of Descriptive Sketches, seem to many not only perverse but inflammatory. Moreover, its condemnation of war as an ‘infatuation’ of monarchs might easily have been construed as treacherous and disloyal once hostilities had been declared.16 Certainly, the next time libel prosecutions hit a comparable high in England, five years later, Johnson would pay dearly for selling a reply to the same Bishop. Deteriorating events in France, however, rather than the prospect of legal recriminations at home may have had more to do with the failure of Wordsworth’s Letter to materialize in print. In March and April, general civil and military unrest, exacerbated by successive defeats and desertions, fatally damaged his assertion that the French had ‘unanimously chosen a republic.’ Furthermore, the setting up of the infamous Committee of Public Safety and the renewed attack on (and eventual arrest and execution of) the Girondins in the Convention which these crises prompted, only further widened the ‘contradiction between the principles of liberty and the march of revolutions’ which, in his Letter, he had sought to heal.17 The famous


‘Change and subversion’ which Wordsworth felt ‘from this hour’ left him, he later wrote, with ‘a sense,/Of treachery and desertion’ and ‘a brain confounded’ (neither best suited to clear or committed prose), and in a common position with others of Johnson’s authors who, whilst attempting to remain true to their libertarian principles, began to feel themselves disappointed and compromised, not only by English aggression towards France, but by France’s own descent into ‘Terror’ and ‘Domestic carnage’.18 This ‘conflict of sensations’, coupled with the absence of his most significant pro-revolutionary authors on the continent, naturally reflected itself in Johnson’s output.19 Henceforward, the number of overtly pro-French pamphlets to emerge with his imprint dwindled (certainly as compared with 1791–92, the highpoint of the Burke-Paine controversy), although he did publish further editions of Thomas Cooper’s Reply to Burke and the first part of Barlow’s Advice to the Privileged Orders during 1793 (and both parts appeared with his name, but only in French, in 1794). The Attorney-General, however, had issued this warning to Cooper: Continue if you please to publish your reply to Burke in an octavo form, so as to confine it probably to that class of readers who may consider it coolly: so soon as it is published cheaply for dissemination among the populace, it will be my duty to prosecute.20 So, rather than deliberately targeting the lower orders with the second edition, its author was left only vaguely to hope that somehow it ‘should happen to fall in to their hands’.21 The suspension of postal links with the onset of war, compounded by the introduction of the Traitorous Correspondence Act in May, meant that Johnson’s contacts with France were severely curtailed and ‘Literary Intelligence’ from Paris began to suffer a similar fate in the Analytical. Nevertheless, he continued to handle Paine’s business affairs and, initially at least, Joel Barlow’s (which were a decided mess) and also arranged for Wollstonecraft to be able to draw on him whilst on the continent. At least twice during the summer of 1793 he managed to get money through to her in Paris but these efforts were exceptionally discreet and executed so as to avoid any trace of involvement on his part.22 Moreover, after writing punctually to Wollstonecraft soon after her arrival in the city in December, all further communication from him appears to have stopped. As Lindsey now noted, dissenters’ letters were liable to be inspected at the Post Office.23 Letters from Wollstonecraft to St Paul’s Churchyard during this period may well have miscarried but Johnson did at least receive from her the first of a planned series of ‘Letters on the Present Character of the French Nation’, dated ‘15 February 1793’ and written in Paris. This Letter, however, like Wordsworth’s, was not published by Johnson at the time and only appeared


in print five years later when it was included by William Godwin in his edition of Wollstonecraft’s Posthumous Works (4 vols, 1798). Again, the reasons for this are not clear. For one thing, it is difficult to see the Letter as in any way a dangerously pro-revolutionary document since its overriding tone is less one of enthusiasm than melancholy and, as with other of Wollstonecraft’s work, it carries as much personal as political resonance. In it, she wishes she could inform Johnson that (like Wordsworth) she ‘saw the fair form of Liberty slowly rising, and Virtue expanding her wings’ as this might offer some form of justification for the ‘barbarities’ that have been committed and allow her to ‘bless the firm hand that lopt off the rotten limb’. But, instead, all she witnesses in Paris is the daily triumphing of vice over human virtue and what preys upon her is the spectacle of all the ‘blood’, ‘misery’ and ‘disorder’ that have lately ‘stained the cause of freedom’. Though her bookseller friend back in London ‘may think it too soon to form an opinion of the future government’, Wollstonecraft hopes he will forgive her for conjecturing, when everything whispers me, that names, not principles, are changed, and when I see that the turn of the tide has left the dregs of the old system to corrupt the new. For the same pride of office, the same desire of power are still visible; with this aggravation, that, fearing to return to obscurity after having but just acquired a relish for distinction, each hero, or philosopher, for all are dubbed with these new titles, endeavours to make hay while the sun shines; and every petty municipal officer, become the idol, or rather the tyrant of the day, stalks like a cock on a dunghil.24 Deeply critical of the fact that an aristocracy of birth has been replaced by the even less morally edifying spectacle of one of riches, Wollstonecraft’s Letter indicts the French Revolution in exactly the way that Paine had earlier condemned the British ‘Revolution’ of 1688, and in its contempt for the new race of small-minded bureaucrats and selfish profiteers again offered sizeable parallels with Burke. There were, however, still grounds for optimism – Wollstonecraft cannot yet, she says, ‘give up the hope, that a fairer day is dawning on Europe’ and that ‘the good effects of the revolution will be at last felt’ – but these are posited ‘beyond the evils of the moment’ with future providence and seem more the product of ardent faith than solid reasoning. Despite the severity of Wollstonecraft’s strictures on the revolution, it would still have been less than tactful for Johnson to have published (and shown himself in receipt of) a work by an author who had openly refused the opportunity to return to England after the outbreak of war, and who was not only at this point consorting openly with Paine (as well as the Barlows) in Paris but, like him, closely involved in French constitutional


affairs.25 Also, being personally implicated in the correspondence – the Letter is addressed to him as ‘My dear friend’ and Wollstonecraft regularly invokes him throughout (‘I would I could first inform you . . .’, ‘Before I came to France, I cherished, you know, an opinion . . .’) – may only have made him keener to suppress it. He may, however, have simply held off in the expectation of future letters to make up a fuller volume. Godwin, for his part, cites the letter as purely ‘introductory’, Wollstonecraft herself even refers to it as ‘desultory’ and, certainly, on its own, it does appear too slight a work for publication. It is possible that Wollstonecraft sent other letters to Johnson in this series but that only the first got through, although Godwin’s comment that the project was ‘soon after discontinued’ would tend to dispute this. Moreover, Wollstonecraft’s own correspondence reveals that, by June 1793, she had already set about writing her Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (1794), which ‘incorporated most of the observations she had collected for her Letters’.26 This only covered the early stages of the revolution but was deeply affected by the imprisonments and guillotinings (particularly of Brissot and her friend Manon Roland among the Girondins) which took place during its composition. A naturally perplexed and ambiguous account, it, too, clung desperately in its rhetoric to the ‘sublime’ ideals embodied in the 1789 ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man’, whilst condemning but also bravely trying to account for the violent outrages that had been perpetrated in practice and the savage ‘race of monsters’ now seizing power.27 In March 1794 Wollstonecraft sent off a large part of the manuscript to Johnson from Le Havre (a Jacobin stronghold), notwithstanding the warnings she received from friends to destroy it and that her ‘life would not have been worth much, had it been found’. Assured perhaps rather than intimidated by Jacobin hostility but also glad to have a book supplying the current demand for French events, Johnson did not hesitate to publish Mary’s Historical and Moral View in London before the end of the year or have it lengthily reviewed in the Analytical, where it was recommended as ‘a work of uncommon merit’.28 He even ventured to put out a second edition early in 1795. Just as manifestly pro-revolutionary works began to disappear from Johnson’s list, so his energies were almost wholly redirected towards vehement anti-war protests and pamphlets urging political reform at home, many of them again by leading Unitarians. Among these was a small anonymous sixpenny pamphlet, Thoughts on the Causes of the Present Failures (1793), by William Roscoe (with whom Johnson, Fuseli and Wollstonecraft all kept in touch) which argued against the war chiefly on commercial grounds and ‘abound[ed] with a variety of excellent remarks’, according to the Analytical. It went through four editions in 1793 and, though ‘sneer[ed] at’ by the ministry, won the attention of several elder statesmen and MPs, including Shelburne.29 The bookseller also advertised The Necessity of a Speedy and Effectual Reform in Parliament (1793), a work by a member of the


Manchester Constitutional Society, George Philips, and which had made its way to him from Matthew Falkner’s press (only recently the object of a ‘Church and King’ attack). Priced at 1s 6d, Philips’s pamphlet advocated universal suffrage and annual parliaments and attributed ‘the long and mournful catalogue of our ruinous and bloody wars’, the scale of the national debt and the crippling weight of public taxes to the want of a proper and adequate representation of the people.30 With their decidedly anti-loyalist rather than immediately pro-French emphasis, their animus against despotism and harsh inequality and condemnation of war as a deliberate and ruinous instrument of state policy, works such as these were indicative of much of Johnson’s subsequent political output which, when coupled with that of his friend and fellowbookseller George Robinson, would account for ‘nearly half of the leading titles in the liberal anti-war corpus of the 1790s.’31 Dissent was clearly an important factor in this but, given that much of the hostility to war was provincial in origin, so, too, were Johnson and Robinson’s professional links with printers and booksellers around the country. Between 1792 and 1798, for instance, the two served as publishers and principal London distributors of works printed and sold by notable anti-loyalist booksellers, such as Francis Jollie of Carlisle, James Thomson and Matthew Falkner of Manchester, John Pye Smith and Joseph Gales in Sheffield (the latter, Unitarian publisher of the Sheffield Register) and John March in Norwich. Not all of these collaborations were, by their nature, political. Nevertheless, together they suggest a context for Johnson’s links with the provincial press that was more than purely logistic or commercial. Sheffield, Manchester and Norwich (a city dominated by wealthy dissenting families) were all important pockets of constitutional activity and anti-war resistance. All had thriving (and, in Sheffield’s case, highly militant) SCIs in regular correspondence with those in London (to which Falkner, Gales and March belonged), each of which were heavily involved in 1793 in petitioning for parliamentary reform and two years later for peace. By 1795 Johnson’s literary activities had linked him to some of the main supporters of The Cabinet (3 vols, 1795), an essay paper set up by a group of Norwich liberals who, whilst claiming to be ‘admirers of . . . the genuine principles of [the] constitution’, were also ‘convinced that ignorance or forgetfulness of, and contempt for, the natural rights of man, are the sole causes of the corruption of governments and of public grievances’, and which during its year-long run took a profoundly and consistently anti-war line.32 Among the contributors were the surgeon Edward Rigby, whose medical works Johnson had published since the mid-1770s, the doctor-poet Frank Sayers and the distinguished German scholar and critic William Taylor, who were all members of a remarkable dissenting coterie which Johnson had already penetrated. Sayers’s Dramatic Sketches of the Ancient Northern Mythology (1790), Poems (1792) and Disquisitions Metaphysical and Literary (1793) had originally been


printed for him at John Crouse and William Stevenson’s ‘Norfolk Press’ and he also acted as principal London distributor of Taylor’s translations of contemporary German works by Goethe and Bürger (the latter printed by March). Taylor was a member of William Enfield’s congregation at the city’s elegant Octagon Chapel and contributed several hymns to a Unitarian selection of his, which March again printed for Johnson in 1795. Crucially, he and Sayers were both close friends and former pupils of Mrs Barbauld. Enfield’s assistant (and eventual successor) at the Octagon Chapel, Pendlebury Houghton – a Liverpool dissenter who had studied and taught at Warrington – was another, slightly more republican-minded member of this circle. Johnson had already published a volume of his Sermons (1790). It was through association with another well-regarded anti-loyalist bookseller in York, John Todd, that Johnson continued to sell and publish the works of Christopher Wyvill. Increasingly estranged from Pitt after 1792, and appalled at the collapse of relations with France, Wyvill quickly emerged as one of the leading anti-war, anti-government protesters. He was nonetheless still driven in his campaigning by a genuine fear of revolution and, in particular, the activities of popular societies such as those at Sheffield, convinced that the distress of war would only increase their popularity and result in widespread civil disturbance. During 1793 Johnson published two shilling pamphlets by Wyvill, A Letter to the Right Honourable William Pitt (1793) and A State of the Representation of the People of England (1793), in which he voiced his first public opposition to the war and sought to renew the push for moderate electoral reform (along lines advocated ten years earlier by Pitt). Like his earlier Defence of Dr. Price, copies were struck off locally by the printers of the pro-reformist York Chronicle (Wyvill’s main propaganda vehicle) and then transported down to Johnson in London. At intervals over the next ten years Johnson would act as principal London seller of Wyvill’s voluminous Political Papers (4 vols, 1794–1802), which related mainly to the proceedings of the Yorkshire County Association and contained letters to Priestley, Price, Franklin, Shelburne, Sir George Savile, Cartwright, Jebb, Capel Lofft and Fox. They also revealed details of Wyvill’s personal correspondence with Pitt, showing the extent of the Prime Minister’s previous involvement in reform and, by implication, his apostasy to the cause, as well as his dealings with other influential Whig and County moderates seeking to counter the ‘pernicious counsels’ of ‘Mr. Paine’. Wyvill’s expert lobbying, petitioning and promotion of the cause of peace and (limited) reform through the local press ensured that, by the end of the 1790s, the West Riding (though still predominantly Pittite) had become an important centre of anti-war feeling. This, then, increases the significance of Johnson’s name appearing alongside the booksellers of Leeds, York, Halifax, Wakefield, Bradford, Sheffield and Huddersfield in a considerable number of imprints during this period – particularly An Essay on Parliament,


and the Causes of Unequal Representation (1793) which argued for the wisdom and necessity of reform but preferred to see no change at all rather than any ‘brought to pass by . . . sanguinary or violent measures’ – and equally his sale of works printed in Hull, another city with a growing dissenting population whose ‘Merchants, Shipowners, and Inhabitants’ were also vehement peace protesters and in close contact with Wyvill and the Whig Opposition after 1795.33 It is also no accident that, together with Robinson and Todd, Johnson sold works by the Newcastle lawyer Thomas Bigge, a wealthy associate of Wyvill’s who successfully promoted anti-war petitions and circulated handbills throughout the north-east. Unitarianism again, however, largely underpinned these connections. William Turner, the son (and namesake) of Priestley’s old friend at Wakefield, had been minister to the Society of Dissenting Protestants at Hanover Square in Newcastle since 1782 and, in addition to a thriving Sunday school and vestry library (which he kept well-stocked with Priestley and other Unitarian writers), had helped establish the Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society in 1793. Religion and contemporary politics were barred from its discussions which were dominated by chemistry, natural philosophy, polite literature and commerce, yet it still contained an undeniably strong Unitarian presence. Twenty of Turner’s congregation were members, among them the leading local bookseller William Charnley and Solomon Hodgson, proprietor of the oppositionist Newcastle Chronicle, both of whom were involved in the printing and sale of Bigge’s (and Wyvill’s) works.34 Bigge himself joined the Society in 1795. Johnson’s name can be found alongside Charnley’s in imprints dating back to the 1760s, including James Murray’s Sermons to Asses (1768). He had published The Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England, Reformed upon Unitarian Principles (1790) with Charnley and Hodgson, who also printed Turner’s works (mostly sermons) which were then distributed through St Paul’s Churchyard in London. A sermon on the death of Turner’s father (in 1794), by another of the friends Wyvill used to distribute Bigge’s pamphlets in Yorkshire, William Wood, was also notably struck off for Johnson at Hodgson’s press. Towards the end of the decade, Johnson would act as London seller of The Oeconomist, or Englishman’s Magazine (1798–9) put out monthly by Bigge and other Newcastle liberals on the basis of donations they raised in conjunction with Wyvill. Though basically a small miscellany, containing diverse pieces on history, science, agriculture and a good deal of poetry (notably Cowper’s), its aim was ‘to cultivate a Love of Liberty, peaceful Reform’ and ‘liberalize the Minds of our Countrymen’. William Turner was one of the contributors and certainly it circulated actively among the members at Essex Street.35 Just as during the American War, Johnson’s output was again marked by a prominent number of fast-day discourses, including Food for National Penitence (1793) and Sins of Government, Sins of the Nation (1793), both pub-


lished anonymously but written by John Aikin and Mrs Barbauld, and sermons by Priestley (delivered at the Gravel Pit Meeting in Hackney), an Independent minister Robert Winter (urging his congregation in London ‘to avoid everything which might tend to foment a party spirit’), and an Anglican vicar Robert Potter (who espoused the wisdom of the British constitution whilst asserting the cause of civil liberty and the ‘rights of citizens’) to the mayor and corporation of Norwich.36 These were all designed to coincide with the fast day held on 19 April 1793 and the majority picked up (along with a large number of loyalist sermons) by reviewers of ‘PoliticoTheology’ in the Analytical. In her lay sermon, written just after the declaration of war with France (and under the independent pseudonym of ‘A Volunteer’), Barbauld pleaded for reason, restraint and quietism during the present crisis, emphasizing the notion of public duties rather than rights and calling upon her readers to take responsibility for their rulers’ actions on the grounds that blame, as well as power, ultimately rests with the people. For her, it was a sin of ‘the deepest dye’ to let ‘oppressive laws and bad governments’ which ‘crush’ the poor and innocent continue to exist, or to countenance an iniquitous and unnecessary war whose true costs were not fully understood. Yet, ‘[w]ithout a quiet subordination to lawful authority,’ she insisted, none of the objects of a good government could ever be achieved. More often than not, it was the reformers who tended to forget ‘this excellent rule’ and the deference due to their governors: Stimulated by newly discovered truths . . . they are not willing to wait for the gradual spread of knowledge, the subsiding of passion, and the undermining of prejudices. They too contemn a swinish multitude, and aim at an aristocracy of talents. . . . It is their business to sow the seed, and let it lie patiently in the bosom of the ground, perhaps for ages – to prepare, not to bring about revolutions. The public is not always in the wrong for not giving into their views . . . for their plans are often crude and premature, their ideas too refined for real life, and influenced by their own particular cast of thinking; they want people to be happy their way; whereas every one must be happy his own way. Freedom is a good thing; but if a nation is not disposed to accept of it, it is not to be presented to them on the point of a bayonet.37 The traditional dissenting emphasis upon liberty and individual conscience were still very much in evidence in Barbauld’s discourse. However, in her piety and moderation, her accent upon ‘practical utility’ rather than abstract theorizing in politics, and in the consoling (and controlling) power of religion, she signalled a common drift amongst reform-minded authors who now felt their politics inevitably constrained by their patriotism and whose more tempered views (which were evidently popular – Sins of the


Government, Sins of the Nation passed through four editions during 1793) were well-represented among Johnson’s output. Following the fast day appointed for 28 February 1794 Johnson issued sermons preached by, among others, John Newton at St Mary Woolnoth and Samuel Lowell (a Congregational minister at Sudbury) which similarly held the sins of Britain to account for the present conflict, urged their hearers to penitence and reflection and pleaded for a general reformation as ‘the only well grounded hope of success in war’. Lowell’s sermon, like Newton’s, touched particularly on the slave trade (more shocking than any of ‘the cruelties practised in France’) and was printed ‘merely to justify himself from a censure . . . brought upon him as a mover of sedition’.38 Priestley delivered a sermon on the same occasion at Hackney, entitled ‘The Present State of Europe Compared with Antient Prophecies’, which was immediately handed over to the printers. This, too, urged ‘sinful’ Britons to ‘cultivate a sense of piety’ and ‘look more to God, and less to man’, but also sought to justify the French revolution, the current prevalence of infidelity (for Priestley, a lamentable reaction to the evils of orthodox rather than ‘rational’ Christianity but which was now happily ‘destroying those antichristian establishments which gave birth to it’) and the ‘bloody and eventful’ war in Europe in terms of biblical revelation. It made up a 60-page pamphlet which Johnson sold for a shilling and was reviewed in a section specially given over to ‘Fast Sermons’ in the March Analytical.39 A fact too often overlooked, however (mainly in view of the notoriety of Priestley’s discourse which sold 3,000 copies during 1794), is that Johnson also published a deeply loyalist fast-day sermon by William Cowper’s friend, the Sussex curate and newly-appointed Professor of Poetry at Oxford, James Hurdis. This was bound up together with another sermon on ‘Equality’, designed ‘to enforce subordination and submission in the Christian church’, in which Hurdis reverted to the line commonly dispensed from establishment pulpits that ‘gradations of excellence’ among men in society were God-given. Hence, those ‘more liberally endowed’ should not be ‘elated’ or ‘look down with contempt and pride’ upon their inferiors, nor should those ‘to whom Providence has assigned situations less respectable . . . insult and malign those who are above them’. Mindful of the current military context, he likened Britannia to a man-of-war which could have no force or vigour without a hierarchy of command or ‘unity among its crew’. He also drew the analogy of the family into play to produce reflections that were hard to reconcile with Mary Wollstonecraft on the same subject: In every dwelling-house upon earth, in which a family lives, there must be inequality. . . . The father is the king and prince of his household, with an undoubted right to control his children, and with still greater authority over his servants. Were either children or servants to rebel, and insist


upon an equal division of his property, they would be guilty of flagrant injustice towards him, and bring ruin upon themselves.40 The parallels with the ‘iniquity and impiety’ produced by the abolition of the monarchy in France were all too compelling. A ‘great nation by her own folly’, Hurdis argued, had been ‘precipitated into the hands of tyrants’, so that she now stood ‘encompassed by armies without, distracted by divisions within, her ploughshares beat into swords, her pruning hooks into spears’. It was a nightmare reversal of that peaceful, ‘rational’ republic envisaged by Priestley and Price and could only instil one lesson – that the further we depart from individual monarchy, the more we ‘open the way for disorder and calamity’. Hurdis also closed his sermon by speculating whether ‘an outlawed reformer of our island’, namely Paine, ‘whose doctrines are so eagerly swallowed by the discontented’, might not also meet his fate at the guillotine and, in what amounted to an extraordinary indictment of much of Johnson’s recent oeuvre, cynically and (quickly forgetting his previous appeal for ‘mutual regard’ between the classes) contemptuously asked, How will posterity smile, at the simplicity of the times in which the sentiments of an exciseman were deemed by some the communications of an angel? . . . a man, destitute of the graces of grammatical education; destitute of charity and good breeding; sarcastic, fond, and vulgar in his speech . . . a man, who by long disaffection, has rooted in his heart unconquerable prejudices against the establishment of this country, whether in church or state, and is ready to say or attempt any thing which may irritate or subvert both.41 Hurdis’s work, though in no way representative of Johnson’s output, still constitutes something of a paradox. In publishing it, Johnson may simply have recognized the market for money-spinning polemic, though that would be to deny his previous loyalty to Hurdis as a bookseller and the fact that he had never been averse to selling works which expressed hesitancies and misgivings (if not such deep-rooted antipathy) about many of Paine’s ideas.42 Implicit in Erasmus Darwin’s scientific treatise Zoonomia; or, The Laws of Organic Life (2 vols, 1794–96) was the idea that ‘an inequality of the ranks of society must succeed’, though (for Darwin) present inequalities were simply too great for ‘there should be no slavery at one end of the chain of society, and no despotism at the other’. Priestley (who received a copy of Darwin’s work) never forsook the idea of a social hierarchy either, just like many of his dissenting colleagues: The poor should be content with their low situation in life, and by frugality and industry endeavour to make their circumstances as easy as they


can. And the rich should be humble, and thankful to God for all they enjoy, and endeavour to do as much good to others as possible.43 Nor did Hurdis’s mentor Cowper, who also objected to Paine ‘being executed in effigy only, and not in reality’, though still privately sympathetic to some degree of reform.44 Alternatively perhaps, his sermon could be seen as another example of Johnson vaunting his much-prized independence, keen to maintain a reputation for equity, respectability and probity and necessarily correct the image of himself as a partisan bookseller. His name certainly appears in the imprint of other sermons extolling The Necessity and Expediency of an Inequality of Condition Among Mankind (1793), besides those more predictably titled The Doctrine of Equality of Rank and Condition Examined and Supported (1795). Furthermore, between 1793 and 1798 he sold several poetic and topographical works by another fiercely conservative Anglican cleric who would later join the feverish ranks of the anti-Jacobin press and pen a violent attack on Mary Wollstonecraft in The Unsex’d Females (1798) – Richard Polwhele. All this alerts us to the fact that Johnson’s affiliations with authors were occasionally much more diverse and complex than has often been suggested and that, if they owe anything at all to ‘radicalism’ (even in the case of Paine, whose extreme republican views seem just as unrepresentative and short-lived a feature of the bookseller’s output as Hurdis’s loyalism), it is to the ‘radical’ philosophical tenets of free (even if unpalatable) enquiry rather than any firm or unquestioning adherence to the virtues of popular politics. * By the spring of 1794, weary of ‘excessive bigotry’ and the ‘numberless insulting and threatening letters’ he had received from all parts of the country, Priestley had decided to follow his sons and emigrate to America. He spelled out his reasons for leaving in a preface he handed over to Johnson to be printed with his fast-day sermon, in which he also mounted a rather artful self-defence against the charge of sedition. The whole course of his studies, he declared, had demonstrated ‘how little politics of any kind have been my object’: ‘Let any person only cast his eye over the long list of my publications, and he will see that they relate almost wholly to theology, philosophy, or general literature.’45 He did admit to writing when much younger a ‘small anonymous political pamphlet, on the State of Liberty in this Country’ and an ‘address to the Dissenters on the subject of the approaching rupture with America’. But, after these, he had ‘entirely ceased to write any thing on the subject of politics, except as far as the business of the Test Act, and of Civil Establishments of Religion, had a connexion with politics.’ He maintained that he had never preached a political sermon in his life, except in as much as those commonly preached by dissenters on 5 November in favour of civil and religious liberty could be held to be


political. Moreover, although he claimed not to disapprove of ‘societies for political information, such as are now every where discountenanced’, he made much of his own lack of public involvement (‘I never was a member of any of them; nor, indeed, did I ever attend any public meeting, if I could decently avoid it’) and the fact that he had swiftly refused the French Convention’s offer to act as a representative. His only crime, he declared, was his open hostility to the doctrines of the Anglican church and all civil establishments of religion, which alone had brought upon him the ‘implacable resentment of the great body of the clergy’, Edmund Burke and all the treasury newspapers. It was not merely self-preservation, however, but that ‘every person, and every thing, that had the slightest connexion’ with him was also felt to be at risk, not least his longstanding friend and London bookseller.46 Over the past year Johnson had steadfastly continued to publish, as well as assiduously reprint, Priestley’s works, notably his Letters to the Philosophers and Politicians of France (1793) in which Priestley used his reputation (ironically, as a firm believer among the largely atheist intellectual community he had met) in France ‘to enforce the evidence of natural and revealed religion’. He had also just brought out the first of a series of Discourses on the Evidences of Revealed Religion (1794) which Priestley had first delivered to large numbers at Hackney. Only about 400 out of 1,000 copies of the Discourses were sold, however, which was insufficient to cover the costs. The bookseller had kept faith with other members of the ‘rational’ dissenting community in London, printing sermons by John Disney (who had taken sole charge of Essex Street following Lindsey’s retirement in 1793) and Priestley’s immediate successor at Hackney, Thomas Belsham. He also attracted works of controversial theology from another of the handful of seceders from the established church, Edward Evanson of Tewkesbury, and a volume of Poems, Lyric and Pastoral (2 vols, 1794) by the Welsh Unitarian ‘bard’ Edward Williams. Proving himself firmly linked to the regional spread of Unitarianism, he had acted as main London distributor of sermons and discourses delivered to the ‘Society of Unitarian Christians, Established in the West of England’ (in 1792) by Joshua Toulmin, Timothy Kenrick and John Kentish of Plymouth. This body played an important role in drawing ‘scattered liberal Presbyterian and General Baptist churches’ together, thus suggesting (to many orthodox observers) an alarming new degree of mobilization and ‘connexion’.47 Toulmin, like Priestley, had had his house in Taunton set upon and Paine burned in effigy outside his door, and in 1793 his own son, Harry, had emigrated to America. The same year another Baptist preacher at Plymouth, William Winterbotham, had been tried at Exeter and found guilty of attempting to ‘traduce and vilify the happy constitution’ and ‘excite the subjects of the king to sedition’ in his previous 5 November sermon. The Analytical, when it came to review the printed trial (published by Ridgway and Symonds) in March 1794, held


that Winterbotham’s sermon touching on the French and ‘Glorious’ British revolutions and the oppression of dissenters in Birmingham during the riots ‘did not contain any thing deserving of punishment, but on the contrary was meritorious.’48 This could do nothing to relieve its preacher, however, who still languished at the start of a four-year prison term in Newgate. Johnson had similarly shown himself a willing agent to the new evangelical spirit within dissent, having sold An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians, to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens (1792) by William Carey, the foundation text for the newly-formed Baptist Missionary Society. The influential Yorkshire Baptists John Fawcett, Thomas Langdon of Leeds and William Pendered in Hull, whose works were sold not only by Johnson in London but William Edwards of Halifax, John Binns in Leeds (whom Priestley had earlier used) and John Pye Smith in Sheffield, were all in touch with this body. St Paul’s Churchyard, moreover, operated as the main clearing house for challenging new historicist versions of the scriptures, notably Alexander Geddes’s translation of The Holy Bible (2 vols, 1792–97), which ‘absolutely denied the doctrine of the divine inspiration of the sacred writings’, and Johann David Michaelis’s Introduction to the New Testament (2 vols, 1793–1801), translated by the Cambridge scholar Herbert Marsh, a cousin of William Frend. Both provoked huge storms of protest. An interdict was even issued by the Catholic church prohibiting Geddes’s work and he was promptly suspended from ‘all ecclesiastical functions’.49 It was probably owing to these affiliations (and his dalliance with Paine) that Johnson began to be ‘deserted’ by non-dissenting authors such as Sarah Trimmer, who by 1793 had negotiated through Priestley’s old adversary Bishop Horsley for the orthodox Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge to adopt her books, and increasingly appears to have entrusted her work to Longman and the Rivingtons.50 Even John Newton is reported to have said that all dissenters were republicans and that it was the duty of government to watch over them, though he still continued to use Johnson as a bookseller. Johnson’s name (like Priestley’s) had probably already been added to the official list of ‘suspect persons’ by this stage and certainly there is the heavy suggestion from one of Priestley’s letters that, like several of his contemporaries within the trade (Joseph Gales, John March and Matthew Falkner, for example, who all took flight in 1794), and his own shopman Redman (who was across the Atlantic and corresponding with him by 1795), he seriously considered going to America. Though slightly younger than Priestley, he was considerably frailer and, given the uncertain prospect of starting up again in business, he ultimately elected to stay put. He generously bought up the remainder of Priestley’s stock (which included large numbers of the History of the Corruptions of Christianity and Theological Repository) and promptly issued ‘A Catalogue of Books Written By Dr. Priestley,


and Printed for J. Johnson’. Ten years on, however, he claimed not to have sold 50 of each.51 Priestley spent his final day in London with his friends (Lindsey, Disney and Toulmin) in Essex Street, before setting out for Gravesend. From there he wrote his last letter in England to Lindsey with instructions to Johnson to distribute copies of the farewell sermon he had delivered a week earlier at Hackney on ‘The Use of Christianity, Especially in Difficult Times’, and had had printed purely to avoid any threat of misrepresentation.52 For this, Priestley had taken as his text St Paul’s address to the Ephesians. The example was peculiarly pertinent since Priestley, like Paul, professed always to have conducted himself publicly and to have kept back nothing in his teachings which he held to be useful and, for his remaining friends in England at least, there was an uncanny resonance in the Apostle’s predictions: For I know this, that after my departing shall grievous wolves enter in among you, not sparing the flock. Also of your own selves shall men arise, speaking perverse things, to draw away disciples after them. (Acts, xx. 29–30) On 2 April 1794, just days before Priestley emigrated, several members of the Manchester Constitutional Society were put on trial at Lancaster for conspiring to overthrow the constitution and government. Legal proceedings had actually begun the previous summer and, in September 1793, one of the members, a leading cotton merchant, Thomas Walker, had been in London organizing the publication of a pamphlet dealing with the charges against him, which sought to explain the Society’s principles and plead its inherent peaceableness and loyalty. This appeared the following year as A Review of Some of the Political Events Which have Occurred in Manchester, During the Last Five Years (1794), together with a transcript of the trial, under Joseph Johnson’s imprint. Walker was eventually acquitted and the entire Manchester group cleared of sedition. Curiously, no legal action was taken against Thomas Cooper, despite the fact that he had actually written a ‘seditious’ paper (partly quoted in Walker’s Review) which one of his Society colleagues was tried for distributing. By 1794 Cooper’s enthusiasm for the revolution was on the wane and he had already chosen to accompany the Priestleys to America. After a journey over there the previous autumn, he had put together Some Information Respecting America (1794) in which he bluntly disparaged the French and ‘the ferocious injustice of many of their practices’ – ‘They are a wonderful people; but in my opinion rather to be admired at a distance, than fit for a peaceable man to reside among’ – and, like Walker, published it in pamphlet form through St Paul’s Churchyard.53 It was joined on Johnson’s shelves by Benjamin Franklin’s Information to


Those Who Would Remove to America (1794), a work first published in London ten years earlier which offered a strong disincentive to the person who would ‘go thither who has no other quality to recommend him but his birth’, and A View of the United States of America (1795) by Tench Coxe of Philadelphia. Coxe’s was a very valuable work, in the Analytical’s view, but did not sell in anywhere near the numbers Johnson expected.54 Just over a month after Walker’s trial, leading figures in the SCI and LCS (Thomas Hardy, John Horne Tooke, John Thelwall and Thomas Holcroft) were arrested and their papers seized. They were put on trial for alleged treason at the Old Bailey in the autumn. Their principal crimes were plotting to establish a national convention in England and conspiring to levy war and, to assist their designs, disseminating the works of Paine and Barlow. Johnson was summoned as a Crown witness at both Hardy and Horne Tooke’s trials and, during both, was cross-examined about his role in their publication. Despite J. S. Jordan’s best efforts to implicate him, he remained noticeably reticent but there were moments when he appeared eager to dissociate himself from any direct interest or involvement. On being asked during Hardy’s trial, ‘did it happen to you to publish the Rights of Man?’ Johnson replied categorically, ‘No.’ He did admit to selling copies but only when the work was ‘supposed not to be a libel’ and, even then, was reluctant to confess how many for fear of exposing himself ‘to any hazard’. Certainly, all it amounted to was ‘some dozens’. When it came to the SCI’s plan to mass-distribute copies of Paine’s letter to Dundas in 1792, details of which were revealed in the Society’s minutes, Johnson believed that ‘some’ copies had been sent to him, but only in the form of an anonymous-sounding ‘parcel’, possibly from the printer’s. This had simply been conveyed to the coach to be forwarded into the country. He had no knowledge of who had ordered the copies to be sent or ‘from whom they came’. Certainly, he had had nothing to do with their publication.55 Attention also focused upon Barlow’s Advice to the Privileged Orders and Letter to the National Convention of France, copies of which had been sent to the SCI and LCS (care of Thomas Hardy) in 1792, allegedly ‘to convince them that the kingly office ought not to be retained’ in England as well as France. Whilst Johnson stood a slight figure in the witness box, sizeable extracts from both were read out, proscribing royalty and the necessity of a national church and predicting that the fate of Europe depended, not upon enlightened political philosophers and intellectuals, but on ‘a much more important class of men, the class that cannot [read or] write’. In both cases, Johnson had to admit to being the publisher but somewhat hazily remarked that he could not recollect the contents of all the many pamphlets he published. Presented with a copy of the third edition of Barlow’s Advice, he was pointedly asked whether it was published ‘before the death of the late king of the French, or not’. Rather evasively (and somewhat implausibly, in view of the details he had just given of its print run), he answered, ‘I cannot tell;


I think it was published in 1792, or 1791’, and attempted to assuage matters further by claiming that ‘not many more than a thousand’ were sold.56 At Horne Tooke’s trial a fortnight later, Johnson was again sworn in to prove his hand in the publication of Barlow’s Letter. The same extracts were read out to the court as at Hardy’s trial and the jury left to decide whether the book’s recommendations that the monarchy be removed from the French constitution had ‘a material connexion’ with the objects of the SCI.57 On this, as on the previous occasion, the Crown’s case was dismissed out of hand. Horne Tooke, like Hardy and Thelwall, was acquitted and the rest of the treason suspects promptly discharged. Joseph Johnson had perhaps less to fear from his appearance at the treason trials than he possibly suspected. The chief crime, as far as the authorities were concerned, was not the original publication of Paine or Barlow’s works but their being ‘published anxiously, and dispersed industriously’ by the various reform societies, acting in combination ‘to poison the minds of every man into whose hands they should fall’.58 On the basis of his evidence, Johnson proved himself more closely implicated with the work of Barlow than with Paine and (crucially) as having no involvement in the publication of cheap editions of either. His personal connections with the SCI, though documented in the Society’s minutes, were modest at best and hardly sufficient to cause alarm and it did not appear that he had ever attended regularly or was even particularly zealous about his membership. Indeed, papers seized by the authorities showed that, by 1793, he had even fallen into arrears with his subscription.59 Moreover, involvement in the activities of the SCI may not have been treated in quite so sinister a fashion as was first imagined. During Horne Tooke’s trial, attempts were made to distinguish between the different reform societies, some of which, even in the Lord Chief Justice’s view, adhered to old-fashioned republican principles, while others were for reforms upon the principles of the Rights of Man, which are hardly to be reconciled with the idea of that parliamentary reform which is to be pursued with real attachment to the constitution of the country, in King, Lords, and Commons.60 In his summing-up, the judge referred to the gentlemanly Constitutional Society as ‘a mere club’ and Horne Tooke himself as a man of ‘cultivated’ habits and understanding, whereas the Corresponding Society (led by Hardy, a humble shoemaker) was said to be ‘of a very different nature’, even though the two were known to have co-operated and Hardy had been commissioned to make the shoes for the French military to which Horne Tooke and Johnson had subscribed. The LCS was ‘a political monster’, ‘so composed, as to be spreading itself every hour from division to division’ (like the Jacobin clubs in France which even the National Convention had felt


obliged to suppress) and thus presented ‘a very alarming aspect to all those who have a regard to the peace, the happiness, and tranquillity of the country’. Horne Tooke himself made a point of denying ever communicating or corresponding with any other society or its members and also famously illustrated his own position relative to that of Paine by the example of a stage-coach (‘When I find myself at Hounslow I get out, others may go farther’) – an image which might equally well have applied to Johnson who had also proved rather expert at knowing when and where to alight.61 Ironically, but perhaps not surprisingly, given the lack of ‘radical’ tenacity among its leaders, it was the SCI rather than the LCS which subsequently wound up operatations. The treason trials received a good deal of sympathetic coverage in the Analytical which opened its account for 1795 by reviewing Holcroft’s Narrative of Facts, Relating to a Prosecution for High Treason (1795) and condemning ‘the hardships which have arisen to such individuals as may have excited the jealousy’ of a ‘suspicious, perhaps cruel’ administration.62 It also noticed two anonymous and highly topical works from St Paul’s Churchyard: Cursory Strictures upon the Injustice of the Present War, and upon the Necessity of a Parliamentary Reform (1794) and Better Late Than Never! An Impartial Review of Mr. Pitt’s Administration, on the Ground of Responsibility, During the Present War (1794) by ‘An Enemy to the War on Its Original Principles, But A Sincere Well-Wisher to the King and Constitution’. Over the coming months, space would be devoted in its pages to Holcroft’s Letter to William Windham (1795), Pitt’s Secretary of War, Thelwall’s Poems Written in Close Confinement in the Tower and Newgate, under a Charge of High Treason (1795) – a ‘noble example’ of ‘the manly fortitude, with which a patriotic mind can support unmerited sufferings’ – and The Genuine Speeches of Thomas Erskine, in Defence of Thomas Hardy and John Horne Tooke (1795) – ‘an eternal monument of wonderful abilities, exerted . . . in the best of causes’. Furthermore, Johnson himself teamed up with the rising law bookseller Joseph Butterworth on Fleet Street to publish the first of two legal treatises by the London barrister Stewart Kyd, another of the SCI’s ‘acquitted felons’.63 He also issued what in other circumstances might have seemed a relatively harmless collection of popular songs and poems by the republican lawyer and antiquary Joseph Ritson, relating to (and defending) the ‘patriotic’ outlaw Robin Hood (2 vols, 1795). Despite the obvious anxiety of his court appearance, Johnson clearly felt confident enough to continue his activities very much as before. He again sold printed sermons occasioned by the fast day on 25 February 1795 by the Feathers Tavern veteran Benjamin Dawson, Priestley’s Unitarian successor at Birmingham David Jones and Newcome Cappe at York, which urged their hearers to heed divine rather than temporal instruction and re-stated the reasons for peace.64 Dawson’s sermon was printed by another highly influential provincial bookseller, Benjamin Flower of Cambridge, who sold other


works (chiefly sermons) at this time in tandem with Johnson. Flower was editor of the Cambridge Intelligencer, the most outspoken ‘rational’ dissenting organ outside London. Begun in July 1793, it had early included extracts, poems and articles by Priestley, Mrs Barbauld, Wollstonecraft and George Dyer and, mainly owing to Flower’s own pioneering editorials, remained staunchly anti-loyalist until its demise in 1803. Johnson’s fast-day publications equally disclosed his close West Country connections, not only with the Unitarian strongholds of Taunton and Exeter but also with booksellers of a strongly anti-loyalist bent in Bath and Bristol. With Richard Cruttwell, printer of the liberal Whig newspaper the Bath Chronicle, he sold An Essay on Religious Fasting and Humiliation (1795) by the former dissenting minister John Simpson, who had settled in Bath in 1791. Priestley had first employed Cruttwell’s press during his residence at Calne in the late 1770s, from which time the latter’s name had appeared regularly together with Johnson’s in imprints, notably on some slim volumes of verse by the Reverend William Lisle Bowles and sermons by the distinguished Unitarian Baptists John Prior Estlin and David Jardine.65 Cruttwell had also printed a sympathetic 60-page Argument on the French Revolution, and the Means of Peace (1794) by the liberal statesman (and son of the philosopher) David Hartley, which Johnson, Dilly and Debrett all sold in London. The same publishing arrangements applied in the case of Daniel Neal’s classic History of the Puritans (5 vols, 1793–97), first published half a century earlier and now elaborately revised in a new edition by Joshua Toulmin. Together with the Baptist bookseller Joseph Cottle of Bristol, Johnson had been among the principal sellers of early medical works by the locally-based doctor Thomas Beddoes. A Unitarian and one-time reader in chemistry at Oxford, but forced out on account of his democratic views, Beddoes produced a string of anti-war pamphlets during the mid-1790s, including Where Would Be the Harm of a Speedy Peace? (1795) and an Essay on the Public Merits of Mr. Pitt (1796), which the bookseller first sold and then had printed in London. Cottle subsequently became involved with Johnson in the sale of Estlin and Jardine’s works and their names also appear together on A Word in Season: or, A Call to the Inhabitants of Great Britain, to Stand Prepared for the Consequences of the Present War (1795) by another Bristol Baptist James Bicheno. Already known to readers of the Analytical as ‘a zealous advocate for civil and religious liberty’, Bicheno used the fast day to condemn ‘the prosecution of a war against the rights and liberties of mankind’ and the endless list of ‘national sins, which threaten to bring down upon us the judgements of heaven’.66 At this point Johnson published another highly influential and devoutly anti-militaristic work by a dissenting minister, Joseph Fawcett’s poem The Art of War (1795). This condemned modern warfare in clinically precise and graphic terms (‘the cool carnage of the cultur’d world!/In the cold cabinet all calm conceiv’d!’) and spurned all the allegedly ‘civilizing’ scientific arguments used to justify it.67 Though


undoubtedly ushered in on a wave of pronounced anti-loyalist feeling after two years of war, taken together these works still testify to his continued commitment to publishing salutary but often less than popular voices. They also demonstrate his strategic and geographical importance to what was an ‘innately peaceful’ yet ‘highly vocal’ (for its numbers) and dangerously unpatriotic press campaign. For the first time in over two years, there was a conspicuous upsurge in Johnson’s output of works translated from the French, most of which were highly personal accounts of the revolution written by noted Girondins who had fallen victim to its excesses. Among these were Condorcet’s Outlines of an Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind (1795), written whilst the author was in hiding in Paris (and which owed much to the influence of Priestley and Price, treating history as a continuous battle between ignorance, superstition and ‘rational’ enlightenment), a life of the Abbé Sieyès, memoirs by the former Brissotin general Dumouriez (written in exile in Germany after his defection) and Jean-Baptiste Louvet, the most illustrious survivor of the Girondist proscription who had famously denounced Robespierre in the Convention, and An Appeal to Impartial Posterity (1795) by the Girondin martyr Manon Roland.68 Most were imported by a French bookseller, Joseph De Boffe, who sold foreign works and newspapers (including the Moniteur) from a shop in Soho, several of which were noticed in the Analytical. One or two may have been procured by Thomas Christie, responsible for the detailed review of Condorcet’s work, or Wollstonecraft, who had come into contact with both Dumouriez and Konrad Oelsner (the German editor of Sieyès’ Life) in Paris, both of whom were now back in London. Louvet himself, however, who had returned to Paris after Robespierre’s fall and set up as a bookseller, was a likely contact: he was the original publisher of Roland’s Appeal and his name appears alongside Johnson’s on the imprint of his memoirs. All these works were directly reprinted in London and sold by Johnson, De Boffe and an ‘English and German bookseller’ recently returned from Hamburg, James Remnant.69 Johnson, then, arranged for them to be translated into English to be printed and sold solely under his own name, and accorded each a separate notice in the Analytical. His lack of inhibition here may, in fact, owe something to Horne Tooke’s trial at which the judge declared that, though it was undesirable for French works to find their way into England, the fact that they had ‘no immediate relation to our government’ meant that there was ‘no way of fixing crime’ upon them. Nonetheless, he and De Boffe had to fend off rumours querying their authenticity, deliberately put about to ‘suspend their sale’, and the ‘avidity with which these Productions were read’ soon became the subject of fierce anti-Jacobin criticism.70 Johnson was much less cautious in reissuing the work of another influential Girondin who had escaped the ‘Terror’, Volney’s Ruins: or A Survey of the Revolutions of Empires (2nd edn, 1795; 3rd edn, 1796), a dangerously free-


thinking work in the tradition of Voltaire and Paine which openly denied the principles of revealed religion. This translation, though, proved too tame for Volney’s taste and relatively costly (it originally sold for 6s), and the work’s real impact was not felt until after the Napoleonic Wars when it began to be released in much cheaper pocket-book editions.71 It still drew criticism in print from Priestley, who feared its weak but captivating ideas would seduce ‘the young and ignorant into infidelity’, and who delivered a similar rebuke to Paine in an ‘Answer’ to his Age of Reason (1794) which Johnson reprinted in London in 1795. So, too, did the Analytical, which accused Paine not only of being arrogant and scurrilous but insufficiently learned when it came to report the nature of his objections to biblical authority in the autumn.72 During the summer of 1795 Johnson was sent some of the copy of the second part of Age of Reason by Priestley’s Unitarian friend from his Hackney days John Hurford Stone, who was living and working as a publisher in Paris and ‘printing a very large impression to send to America’. Stone offered to sell him the copy for English sale, though the bookseller declined, knowing that ‘the author being an outlaw can give no title and that any one may reprint it here’. This bespeaks economic and political rather than religious prudence which, in view of the indiscriminate printing of Paine’s work and the inevitable prosecution that followed, was certainly justified. Yet, when he took to summarizing the work in a letter to Priestley, there was a definite sense of put-down in Johnson’s remarks (‘in his endeavours to destroy the authenticity of the Bible [‘Mr. P.’] makes use of no weapon but the Bible itself’) and elsewhere he too registered concern at the ‘rapid strides’ that infidelity was making, especially among young ‘rational’ dissenters. Moreover, his shop became the source of a fast-flowing stream of rebuttals by Priestley, Disney, Toulmin and John Prior Estlin, among others, aimed at exonerating dissent from the charges brought upon it by the reaction to Paine’s work. The climate, however, was one in which attacks on revelation were ‘read with avidity, defences with indifference, if at all’, and he had ‘no great expectations’ of any of these works selling.73 By virtue of his continued correspondence with Priestley and Thomas Cooper, American works began to make their way onto Johnson’s list as he was able to cultivate relations with their adopted booksellers, notably Thomas Dobson in Philadelphia. He still dutifully reprinted and sold Priestley’s works, which were now struck off first either close to Priestley in Pennsylvania or at Dobson’s press. He even had typeset those which went astray en route from America from copies which made it back to friends in England, keen that nothing of Priestley’s should be lost to his country.74 He was annoyed, however, to find that American copies which had been sent over to England by Priestley for sale were competing with his own and complained as much to Dobson. Distance increasingly gave rise to such


miscommunication and delay and Johnson often found himself not only faced with the enormous expense of importation duty and freight but overburdened with copies which arrived in poorly-printed, uncollated and barely legible sheets. Concerned also with the loss of copyright resulting from books printed outside England, he repeatedly advised Priestley not to print in America but to send his manuscripts back to London. Partly through his own efforts to circumvent these problems (offering to take ‘a few hundred of any thing the Dr. prints in exchange for such of his former pieces’ as he could send Dobson), titles from Johnson’s own Unitarian back catalogue were now taken up, reprinted and sold in New England, specifically in those towns and cities where the slow infiltration of Unitarian ideas was beginning to take hold: in Salem, Massachusetts, for example, where the Reverends John Prince and William Bentley were sympathetic to Priestley’s views and ‘read and circulated English Unitarian books’; and in Portland, Maine, where the rector of the Episcopal church sought to reform its liturgy along Unitarian lines after reading Priestley and Lindsey.75 From the evidence of his business letterbook, Johnson’s transatlantic dealings were quick to develop and offered an alternative (though always highly speculative and never sizeable or reliable) new channel of business. Unitarian views still remained deeply unpopular in America and it came as no surprise to his English bookseller that the sale of Priestley’s books there continued to be ‘trifling’. He was amazed to learn from Dobson that even his shipments of best-selling books did not meet with a ready sale but welcomed the fact that, over the next five years, there were American editions of Wollstonecraft’s Historical and Moral View of . . . the French Revolution, William Enfield’s Speaker, John Newton’s Letters and Sermons (in nine volumes), the Olney Hymns and Cowper’s Task (which had been imported as early as 1787), Mrs Barbauld’s Hymns in Prose for Children and the Aikins’ Evenings at Home, Sarah Trimmer’s Easy Introduction to the Knowledge of Nature (specifically ‘adapted to the United States’) and Fabulous Histories, James Hurdis’s Poems, Erasmus Darwin’s Botanic Garden and Zoonomia, and Thomas Percival’s A Father’s Instructions to His Children and Moral and Literary Dissertations.76 The majority of these were printed by Dobson in Philadelphia, whose press noticeably increased its productivity at this time and whom Johnson also proposed using as an agent for the Analytical. By the end of 1795 the sheer scale of the revitalized reform movement led to further repressive action by the government. On 6 and 10 November the infamous ‘Two Acts’ against Seditious Meetings and Treasonable Practices were introduced, the former designed to clamp down on mass gatherings of more than 50 people (specifically targeting the LCS) and the latter modifying the law against treason to include anyone who by speech or writing ‘compassed or devised’ the death or deposition of the king or who sought to force him to change his ministers or to overawe parliament. Though


broadly popular, the bills were opposed by Fox and his small rump of supporters in Parliament and prompted an influx of anti-loyalist petitions and addresses to the king. It was amid this climate that Johnson published A Letter to the High Sheriff of the County of Lincoln, Respecting the Bills of Lord Grenville and Mr. Pitt, for Altering the Criminal Law of England, Respecting Treason and Sedition (1795) by John Cartwright, which condemned the politicians not the reformers for vandalizing the constitution; Thomas Beddoes’s A Word in Defence of the Bill of Rights, Against Gagging Bills (1795), which incited the public at large to assemble and organize petitions demanding that the Acts be revoked (echoing Fox in Parliament); and a set of Considerations on Lord Grenville’s and Mr. Pitt’s Bills (1795) by a ‘Lover of Order’, William Godwin, which appeared just as the actual debates on the bills were taking place on 21 November. Cartwright had attended every day at the treason trials and would have come into contact with Johnson specifically at the trial of John Horne Tooke. The bookseller had just published The Commonwealth in Danger (1795) in which Cartwright argued for an end to all ‘dissention’ and the formation of a people’s militia (resorting to ‘the true original principles of our Saxon constitution’) to defeat the French, whilst counselling political reform to restore the nation’s ‘true republican energy’.77 In the coming months Cartwright would entrust him with The Constitutional Defence of England (1796) and the first part of his Appeal, on the Subject of the English Constitution (1797). Godwin, too, was an important and deeply interested presence at the treason trials but had also long been a familiar face in London dissenting circles, close to Andrew Kippis and Abraham Rees under whom he had trained to become a minister at Hoxton. He had been introduced to Priestley, Lindsey, Disney, Heywood and Jebb by 1785, celebrated with the ‘Revolutionists’ in 1788 and dined with the ‘Anti-Tests’ in 1790. He had made sporadic visits to Johnson’s bookshop since November 1791 (when he first met and talked of monarchy and religion with Paine and Wollstonecraft) and his works had received lengthy notices in the Analytical, but his bookseller and long the principal source of his literary employment had remained George Robinson. During 1795 he had struck up a friendship with the Unitarian writer and critic Mary Hays, who moved in Essex Street circles and knew (and would soon reacquaint him with) Wollstonecraft. Yet only after Robinson turned down his Considerations did Godwin noticeably stray on to Johnson’s list, but curiously at the same time as others in his close personal circle: Joseph Fawcett, John Stoddart, James Marshall (his fellow-dissenter at Hoxton who translated Volney), and George Dyson.78 Godwin took no sides in his pamphlet, accusing both the government and the ‘enthusiastic advocates for liberty’ in the reform societies of extremism and irrationality. Though it was their primary duty to ensure public security and ‘peculiarly so in the present crisis’, Pitt and his ministers were deliberately threatening ‘one of the grand characteristics of English liberty’


and ‘the fundamental provision of the bill of rights’ – freedom of speech. The rabble-rousing tactics of the LCS, however, and especially its chief orator John Thelwall (an ‘impatient and headlong reformer’ who stoked up ‘all the indignant emotions of the mind’), were no less offensive to Godwin’s intellectual sensibilities.79 To him, the LCS appeared ‘a formidable machine’ and its ‘system of political lecturing . . . a hot-bed, perhaps too well adapted to ripen men for purposes, more or less similar to those of the Jacobin Society of Paris’. Therefore, the government ‘would be unpardonable, if it did not yield a very careful and uninterrupted attention to its operations’. This was no less than a repetition of the Lord Chief Justice’s words at the end of Horne Tooke’s trial and it seems telling that, rather than allow this pamphlet, like his previous one – an influential set of Cursory Strictures on the Charge Delivered by Lord Chief Justice Eyre to the Grand Jury (1794) – to be taken up by Thelwall and the LCS’s publisher, Daniel Isaac Eaton, he instead went with it to St Paul’s Churchyard.80 Central to Godwin’s Considerations, as with his earlier great work Political Justice (1793), was the concern to negotiate coolly between personal liberty and public safety and, on this, he expressed himself in a manner closely redolent of Burke: True, we must reform. . . . But reform is a delicate and an awful task. No sacrilegious hand must be put forth to this sacred work. It must be carried on by slow, almost insensible steps, and by just degrees. . . . Oh, Reform! Genial and benignant power! how often has thy name been polluted by profane and unhallowed lips! How often has thy standard been unfurled by demagogues, and by assassins drenched and disfigured with human gore!81 By 1796 the disgraced French Jacobins were being hailed in exactly the same terms in which Paine and Barlow had earlier addressed the old despotic kings of Europe and the revolution itself was no longer seen, even by many genuine supporters of reform, as a glorious turning-point. Godwin’s Considerations did not represent a parting of the ways between the more popular ‘radical’ elements within the reform movement and middle-class dissenting intellectuals (like himself). Rather it simply accentuated differences which had always existed but which, under the pressure of public events, were now becoming more explicit, between those who regarded enlightenment and instruction as the best route to reform and those wishing to mobilize public opinion more forcibly by agitation. For Joseph Johnson, who throughout the turbulent years of the revolution had continued to be identified with the liberal but still respectable and predominantly intellectual wing of ‘rational’ dissent, those differences had proved to be crucial and enabled him to steer clear of prosecution, despite his close association with several of France’s leading English and American sympathizers. The treason bill,


however, which Godwin optimistically dismissed as ‘an unwilling homage’ to ‘the rising genius of freedom’, again pointed up the government’s readiness in extreme circumstances to threaten the press. Before the end of the decade, this was to have devastating consequences for the bookseller.82

6 ‘Honest Joe’

. . . and all Who will not fall before their images, And yield them worship, they are enemies Even of their country! Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Fears in Solitude’ (1798) Sometime during February 1798 a man named ‘Hancock’ wandered into No. 72 St Paul’s Churchyard and bought a pamphlet. It was A Reply to Some Parts of the Bishop of Landaff’s Address to the People of Great Britain (1798) by Gilbert Wakefield. Hancock, however, was no innocent browser but an agent of the Attorney-General and Johnson, together with two other London booksellers (John Cuthell and Jeremiah Jordan), was immediately indicted for ‘publishing’ a seditious libel. On 17 July he was put on trial at the Guildhall, charged with being ‘a malicious seditious and ill-disposed person’, ‘greatly disaffected to our said sovereign Lord the King’, who had ‘wickedly’ contrived to ‘traduce and vilify, and to bring into contempt’ the government and constitution and dissuade the King’s subjects from opposing his enemies.1 An English jury, in effect, was being asked to consider whether Joseph Johnson’s intentions as a bookseller were really as dangerous and radical as those of Thomas Paine. There is no doubting that Wakefield’s Reply contained much that was offensive to government. Not only was it a full-frontal attack on the Bishop’s (self-interested) defence of the war as ‘just and necessary’, in particular his proposal that assessed taxes should be increased even amongst the poor to help pay for it, but it reprised older, more deep-seated constitutional criticisms of the hereditary peerage (‘something alas! besides virtue is nobility in England’) and the fraudulent ‘confederacy’ between church and state. What Pitt and his ministers would also have found exceptionable was its bitter tirade against their own ‘pestilential operations’. A ‘prostitute majority of borough-mongers, loan jobbers, military officers, pensioners, and official sycophants’, they had persecuted, exiled and imprisoned many 155


of their ‘fellow-citizens’, used religion as ‘a state engine of despotism and murder’, corrupted a constitution of ‘ideal excellence’ and reduced ‘tens of thousands’ to ‘wretchedness and beggary’. These ‘enormities’, coupled with Pitt’s aversion to ‘a hearty reconciliation and friendly intercourse with the French’, made it impossible, Wakefield declared, for him personally to defend such a regime in the event of an invasion. Nor did he think it likely that the poor could be induced to take up arms against an enemy under whom they ‘cannot well be poorer, or made to work harder’ and the only trifling alteration they would face would be ‘the name of Their sovereign’.2 This last insinuation – that the mass of the poor would not be ‘prejudiced by a revolution in the government of this kingdom’ – was undoubtedly the most alarming aspect of Wakefield’s pamphlet from the point of view of the authorities, who naturally construed it as an attempt ‘to withdraw the affection and allegiance’ of the British people from the ‘Monarchy, the Nobility, the Church Establishment, the House of Commons, every order of the state, and all that is venerable in the country’, and a ‘treasonous incentive to traitorous inactivity’. The Attorney-General, however, tried to couch it in much wider terms: Wakefield had ‘deviated from the path of manly discussion’. His Reply was all ‘abuse and invective without argument’ and ‘such species of publications’ had ‘at all times’ been considered dangerous and ‘libellous’ since they could not, ‘in the weak minds of those who believe them, be refuted by reasoning’.3 It was one thing, however, to decide that a book was seditious, to adjudge its publisher guilty quite another (as Johnson’s defence lawyer, Thomas Erskine, pointed out), since that involved determining the difficult question of malicious ‘intent’. On that score, Johnson could honestly plead ‘not guilty’ as the evidence against him did seem highly dubious. He was not, after all, Wakefield’s original publisher (that was Cuthell) and, like many other ‘respectable’ booksellers in London (including the Bishop of Llandaff’s own, Robert Faulder), he had simply sold copies of the Reply which he had seen advertised and then ordered from Cuthell’s shop.4 Yet no attempts were made by the authorities to search other booksellers’ premises, which does tend to suggest that Johnson’s shop, and Jordan’s, were swiftly and somewhat cynically targeted. Ironically, Wakefield had long since abandoned Johnson as a publisher and his controversial views, particularly on the propriety of church worship, had been challenged by Priestley, Mrs Barbauld and other dissenting pamphletists published by the bookseller. Though notoriously heated in debate, his reputation was as a writer of scholarly not political works, none of which had ever been the subject of any kind of legal action. Nor did the Reply itself appear, on the face of it, to be of ‘a seditious tendency’. The price, the ‘size of the print and the goodness of the paper’ (as Wakefield put it) all tended to ‘disprove a contemplation . . . of general dispersion among the public’,

‘Honest Joe’ 157

nor did the title . . . hold out any invitation of acceptable materials to the lovers and sowers of sedition. . . . The composition also [was] learned and scholastical . . . interlaced with Latin and Greek quotations; refuting instantaneously all imputation of seditious application to the passions of the multitude, and demonstrating an exclusive appeal to the more enlightened classes of society.5 At 1s 6d, Wakefield’s Reply compared favourably to Llandaff’s Address which could be had for as little as ‘Three-pence’ and came out in at least 14 editions during 1798. Moreover, Johnson himself had sold many (possibly up to ten times) more copies of the latter, making accusations of cheap or mischievous mass-circulation patently absurd. One of only two bishops to favour repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts and previously held in ‘high estimation’ by the Analytical, Watson had actually defended dissenters in his pamphlet for not having abandoned their ‘attachment to the house of Brunswick and the principles of the revolution’. Johnson had even figured with the Rivingtons among the publishers of his Apology for Christianity (6th edn, 1797) and Apology for the Bible (7th edn, 1797; 8th edn, 1799), a popular work addressed to Thomas Paine which deeply incensed William Blake, and after his trial would be involved in a collection of his Chemical Essays (5 vols; 7th edn, 1800).6 The way in which the case was conducted against Johnson raises similar grounds for suspicion. He and Jordan both rather sinisterly had ex officio informations filed against them specifically to ensure they went to trial and that their cases were put before a special jury. Their trials both took place before Cuthell’s, which was deliberately put off, and unusually proceedings against them were continued, despite Wakefield admitting his authorship of the work.7 To a sympathetic onlooker such as Charles James Fox, this was not only surprising but established an extraordinary and highly disturbing precedent. At the request of the Attorney-General, Johnson’s bail was set in exactly the same manner as Wakefield’s.8 Sentencing was arbitrarily deferred for several months (until February 1799) and, for three months prior to that, the bookseller was detained in the King’s Bench Prison. Jordan’s readiness to plead guilty and ‘not give his Lordship and the Jury any trouble in this business’ (as earlier over Rights of Man) also begs further questions, not least because it certainly made it difficult, if not impossible, for the jury to acquit Johnson of the same offence.9 All these circumstances suggest that there were broader, more insidious and possibly vengeful motives at work and that the authorities’ behaviour rather than the booksellers’ may actually have been the more subversive. Political tensions were running peculiarly high during 1798, with the breakdown of peace negotiations with France, tangible fears of an invasion and the threat of armed rebellion in Ireland (where the French had already attempted to land) all fuelling a more extreme determination by Pitt and


his ministry to clamp down on dissent.10 In February an Irish priest, James Coigley (together with four accomplices Arthur O’Connor, an LCS deputy John Binns, John Allen and Jeremiah Leary), was arrested at Margate just as he was about to sail for France and, in May, put on trial for treasonable communication with the enemy. From March onwards, more than 70 members of the popular reform societies (including the LCS) were taken into custody on the grounds of their Jacobinical activities and suspected links with the Irish rebels. In his Reply, Wakefield had accused the government of trying to ‘establish their own power by a military despotism in due time over England like that which now tramples bleeding Ireland to the earth’ and it would not have escaped public notice that, over the past 12 months, Johnson had sold several works which, in their various ways, could be linked to the activities of United English and Irishmen and caught him (however peripherally) within this wider web of sedition.11 Among these were three Letters to Earl Camden (1797) by the United Irishman Roger O’Connor, protesting against the legal abuses which had led to him being imprisoned at Cork; John Binns’s earlier published trial for sedition (in August 1797), sold by Johnson in conjunction with Jordan and reviewed approvingly in January 1798 by the Analytical; and two pseudonymous works by the Sheffield printer and poet James Montgomery, one of the main provincial distributors of the account of Binns’s trial, and editor of the Sheffield Iris, who had himself been imprisoned for seditious libel during 1795. The Attorney-General would have been long familiar with Johnson’s customary anti-loyalist stance as a bookseller, already tarred by his association with Rights of Man and his appearance at the treason trials, and who had continued to publish works which, if not directly supportive of France, were often severely critical of the British government. But what he, and certainly Pitt’s lackeys within the Treasury, appear to have found most vexatious by 1798 was Johnson’s ability to re-invoke and underline these criticisms in the Analytical. It was not, therefore, just that he had sold Wakefield’s pamphlet but that he was also seen to have welcomed and given a repeat airing to many of Wakefield’s views when they were reviewed, together with the Bishop of Llandaff’s, in February. The subsequent determination of his reviewers to defend the freedom of the press and ensure that the booksellers’ prosecutions were not prejudiced in any way only deepened the official sense of irritation. Yet more damning may have been the Analytical’s new monthly feature on domestic and foreign affairs, a ‘Retrospect of the Active World’, which ran throughout 1798 and proved notably vigorous and persistent in its criticisms of Pitt and his policies. Indeed, it supported Wakefield’s line against Pitt’s ‘cruel and tyrannical’ bill for increasing assessed taxes, expressed sympathy for ‘the poor oppressed irish’ and, above all, continued to be fiercely and ever more unpopularly anti-war. In the spirit of so many of Johnson’s publications of the 1790s, it condemned the present conflict as ‘the most destructive and terrible of any recorded


in the annals of mankind’ and war generally as the ‘scourge of the human race’.12 By July 1798, then, the Analytical had become a deep thorn in the side of government and one of the principal subjects for attack in the Treasurysponsored Anti-Jacobin Review. Alarmed by the growth of religious as much as political infidelity (particularly among the popular reform societies, which were now industriously circulating Paine’s Age of Reason as they had earlier Rights of Man), and regarding it as an inevitable consequence of the kind of extreme Unitarian ideas which Johnson had sought to promote, the AntiJacobin heavily preoccupied itself with the atheistic and immoral tendencies of much of his output. Eight days before the bookseller went on trial, it printed a poem, the ‘New Morality’, by George Canning which accused Paine, Priestley and Wakefield (among others) of dangerous ‘Pacification’ and collusion with members of the French Directory. Canning’s poem inspired a satirical cartoon by James Gillray the following month, which brought together all the Anti-Jacobin’s standard bugbears – democratic poets and philosophers, Foxite Whigs and their temporary bed-fellows among the ‘radicals’ and dissenters – and depicted them processing in abject and undignified homage to the French. Central to Gillray’s satire were the Monthly, Critical and Analytical reviews which were made to form a ‘Cornucopia of Ignorance’ (supported by raggedy-looking sansculotte types), spewing out a stream of works ‘destructive of social happiness’ and ‘subversive of social order’ by Priestley, Horne Tooke, Wollstonecraft, Godwin, Wakefield and Erasmus Darwin (whose free-thinking evolutionary speculations in Zoonomia had made him as heretical a figure to some as Paine). Another of the Anti-Jacobin’s targets was the Monthly Magazine which Johnson copublished from March 1796 with his new next-door neighbour in St Paul’s Churchyard, Richard Phillips, formerly a Paineite bookseller in Leicester. Though less political than the Analytical, it involved much the same staff (Aikin, Barbauld, Enfield, Dyer, Toulmin, Mary Hays and Capel Lofft) and cost roughly the same price (1s 6d) – but hit much higher circulation levels – and its aim was to help propagate ‘liberal principles respecting some of the most important concerns of mankind, which have been either deserted or virulently opposed by other Periodical Miscellanies’.13 In truth, the Analytical was far from reverent in its view of the Directory, which it saw as an ambitious ‘faction’ acting separately from the interests of the French people, although that had not stopped its proprietor publishing an anonymous discourse entitled Atheism Refuted (1798) by Paine, and originally delivered to the Society of Theophilanthropists in Paris, which was smiled upon by the Directorial head, Lépeaux, and ridiculed as such in Gillray’s cartoon. Johnson also demonstrated his famed ability to transcend party animosity even at its height by publishing a sharply critical set of Observations on Zoonomia (1798) with the Piccadilly bookseller John Wright, whose shop acted as a front for the Anti-Jacobin’s offices, and


A New and General Biographical Dictionary (15 vols, 1798) revised by William Beloe and Robert Nares, editors of the equally Tory-minded British Critic.14 Showing scant regard for such subtleties, the Anti-Jacobin chose to review Wakefield’s Reply (‘a publication replete with the most scurrilous invective that ever disgraced the press’) in the very month of Johnson’s trial, and chiefly by casting an eye over the ‘vain’ and arrogant critique in the Analytical. It immediately followed this with notices of Godwin’s Memoirs of the Author of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798) and Wollstonecraft’s Posthumous Works (4 vols, 1798), in which her ‘visionary theories and pernicious doctrines’ were castigated at length and her ‘antihierarchical and anti-monarchical’ prejudices attributed to the time spent reviewing for her bookseller.15 Indeed, it shamelessly delighted in Johnson’s prosecution and the ‘death-blow’ it delivered to the Analytical and poured scorn on the attempts of his reviewers to plead Cuthell’s cause, in a manner that reveals just how bitter and deeply personalized the campaign had become: It is not the prosecution of Mr. Cuthell . . . but the prosecution of MR. JOHNSON, that excites the indignation of these venal and contemptible critics, as well as that of the whole party, who are bursting with spite, and thirsting for revenge. It is by his orders to men whom he pays for scribbling in his miserable Review, that every writer who exposes the defects, as they are delicately termed, of Mr. Wakefield’s pamphlet, is abused in the most scurrilous and indiscriminate manner. We advise, therefore, these critics, in future, to throw off a mask which will no longer conceal their object, and boldly, if they dare, pronounce an eulogy on the loyalty of this favourite publisher and friend of the PRIESTLEYS, the DARWINS, the GODWINS, and other unprejudiced authors, who have kindly taken upon themselves, for the last twenty years, the important task of enlightening the public mind.16 It is no surprise to find, then, that the September number of the Analytical was introduced as further incriminating evidence by the Crown at the hearing held in mitigation of Johnson’s punishment in November. This contained a review of a letter (written immediately after Johnson’s trial) by Gilbert Wakefield and ‘conveyed in no very courtly terms’ to the Attorney-General, Sir John Scott, who read it aloud in court and denounced it as ‘a gross and scandalous libel on the administration of justice.’17 Heading the ‘Politics’ section was a review of The State of Ireland (1798) by Arthur O’Connor (tried by the Attorney-General and acquitted of treason in May but still held in custody on a further charge) which praised the author as ‘the implacable enemy of the whole system under which venality, corruption, and tyranny, have dared to trample on the liberties of his country’.18 In its overview of that month’s ‘National Affairs’ (dealing with Bonaparte’s


conquest of Egypt), the Analytical could also be found directly echoing Wakefield’s sentiments about the disaffectedness of the British poor: . . . the directory have found a secret, to which little attention has been paid by their political opponents: it is, that the mass of the people, in every country which they can overrun, do not regret the overthrow of their ancient rulers, and are not disposed to make any counterrevolutionary exertions to replace them.19 Other of Johnson’s publications to have appeared in the months since his trial can only further have rankled the prosecution, notably a volume of Joseph Fawcett’s Poems (1798), which featured the revised ‘Art of War’, ‘An Ode on the Commemoration of the French Revolution’, and a homage to Rousseau, ‘On Visiting the Gardens of Ermenonville’, and A View of the Causes and Consequences of English Wars (1798) by one of the Analytical’s principal reviewers Anthony Robinson. Robinson’s work criticized Britain’s long and bloody military record (with the memorable exception of Alfred’s ‘humane and compassionate’ reign) and placed responsibility for the current hostilities against France squarely with Pitt. It received a favourable mention in the Analytical in August but was damned by the Anti-Jacobin for its ‘unhallowed’ attempts to ‘lower the public spirit of the kingdom’.20 There was another slim quarto collection of poems, Fears in Solitude (1798), containing the title-poem, ‘France, An Ode’ and ‘Frost at Midnight’, by another of the Anti-Jacobin’s targets, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. This, too, had appeared in September and, despite its obvious misgivings about the French, expressed ‘bitter truth[s]’ about the war (‘We, this whole people, have been clamorous/For . . . bloodshed’), religious hypocrisy and parliamentary corruption.21 As a political journalist and lecturer, and intimate of John Thelwall, Coleridge had already attracted his fair share of Home Office attention. Moreover, his fervent admiration for Priestley and known links with prominent West Country dissenters, such as Joshua Toulmin (for whom he occasionally preached) in Taunton and John Prior Estlin and Thomas Beddoes in Bristol, implicated him in the infectious spread of Unitarianism in the provinces. He had introduced himself to Johnson at the end of August and called in at least three times at St Paul’s Churchyard over the next fortnight, where he browsed the shelves, read and ordered books (including John Horne Tooke’s newly reissued Diversions of Purley) and finally prevailed upon the bookseller to publish his poems. Since rejecting his early dramatic effort with Robert Southey, The Fall of Robespierre (1794), Johnson would have been much more aware of Coleridge’s ‘considerable talents’, which were flagged up by the Analytical, and (like the first printers of ‘France, An Ode’ in the Morning Post) doubtless approved his ‘public censure of the unprincipled and atrocious conduct of France’ whilst remaining ‘so steady and zealous an


advocate for Freedom’.22 His relationship with Coleridge, though quick to develop, was relatively short-lived and ended when the poet left for Germany mid-way through September with Wordsworth. He did not go empty-handed, Johnson providing him with letters of introduction to the Hamburg bookseller William Remnant and an order for £30 credit.23 Moreover, on the very eve of their departure, Wordsworth (somewhat jealously perhaps) set about trying to transfer the ‘Interest’ in Lyrical Ballads from Joseph Cottle in Bristol to Johnson, keen to improve the work’s prospects and (curiously) re-connect himself with a ‘seditious’ bookseller. Rather presumptuously he scribbled off a note asking Johnson to send six copies of the poems to his brother Richard in London, but Cottle had already arranged for the volume to be sold in London by the Gracechurch Street firm of John and Arthur Arch so, much to Wordsworth’s annoyance, these efforts came to nothing. Back in London the following year, Coleridge dined and socialized widely with Godwin, Mrs Barbauld and Mary Hays, all of whom frequented Johnson’s table, and even after he quit London for the Lake District a ‘batch’ of his books was still lodged at St Paul’s Churchyard.24 Yet, by this stage he thought Johnson no longer concerned about Fears in Solitude, of which 200 copies at most had been sold, and tried to recover the copyright for his friend Southey to print in his Annual Anthology (2 vols, 1799–1800). Furthermore, when it came to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads in June 1800, he arranged with Cottle for it to be printed in Bristol and sold in London by the Longmans. Still, Johnson’s very public association with Coleridge at such a critical moment in 1798 can only have aggravated the bookseller’s case, especially as the Analytical appeared to draw a direct link with his prosecution when it reviewed Fears in Solitude (together with Lyrical Ballads) in December: ‘Mr. C., in common with many others of the purest patriotism, has been slandered with the appellation of an enemy to his country.’25 If the conduct of the Attorney-General and the Anti-Jacobin are to serve as any kind of barometer of government opinion, then other scores were clearly being settled and it was not merely for his involvement in the sale of Wakefield’s pamphlet but his tenure (‘for the last twenty years’) as a stubbornly independent-minded publisher in St Paul’s Churchyard, prominently serving the irreligious and unconstitutional interests of ‘rational’ dissent and dangerously sympathetic to the ideas of foreigners (most visibly through the pages of the Analytical) that Joseph Johnson was ultimately being brought to book.26 A jury in 1798 was sufficiently ‘packed’ as to be ready to accept this version of Johnson, finding him guilty of wilful not negligent criminal publication (as in Cuthell’s case) and thereby helping to establish what remains the received impression of him today – a by-word for ‘radical’ publishing in the 1790s. This impression, however, was forged at a moment when his activities (like those of other reform-minded men and women) were being ‘deliberately misrepresented’, as H. T. Dickinson has


argued, and many of the writers with whom he was linked ‘portrayed as dangerous conspirators’ by government-hired hacks and propagandists and ‘the nature and consequences of their arguments grossly exaggerated’.27 Thomas Erskine had directly to contend with such deliberate misrepresentation in court, arguing that the Attorney-General had not put a ‘true construction’ on Wakefield’s pamphlet, which ‘addressed itself to the administration and conduct of the government, and not to the government itself’. Unfortunately, the mistake Erskine made in Johnson’s case was precisely that he ‘felt bound’ to defend the book and not the bookseller. Despite a ‘wonderfully eloquent speech’ lasting three hours, he completely lost sight of the fact that the Reply had already been pronounced a libel earlier in the day at Jordan’s trial and that the same jury was not about to ‘unsay’ what it had just said when faced with exactly the same evidence.28 Ultimately, it was left to Johnson’s friends, John Aikin, George Fordyce and John Hewlett, to ‘speak to the Defendant’s character’, but their efforts carried little legal weight and were quickly and authoritatively swept aside by the judge who declared the bookseller to be one of ‘those who had it in their power to do much hurt, and to give much pain to pious and devout minds’ and ‘certainly liable’.29 As a result, he was finally sentenced to six months in the King’s Bench Prison and fined £50 (and asked to provide sureties totalling £700), whereas Cuthell was only required to pay £20 plus court costs (around £150) and then discharged. It is important, given the grievous and inadequate way in which he was represented and the heavily coercive nature of his trial, that this ‘official’ view of Johnson be seen for what it is, and for having obscured other attempts to do his career (and his politics) greater justice. Not the least of these was his own personal effort to defend himself in a written affidavit in November 1798 which he submitted to the court. According to this, he was not a dangerously ‘malicious’ or ‘seditious’ bookseller, hell-bent on destroying the fabric of the constitution, but a frail man ‘within a few days of sixty years of age’ who had carried on in business for almost forty years, during which time he had consistently ‘endeavoured to demean himself as a quiet peaceable and good subject’. His connections were not predominantly with political philosophers and pamphletists, but with ‘respectable and scientific Writers and his publications generally of a Moral, Philosophical, and Medical Nature, many of which [were] an honour to his Country.’ He had, in fact, actively attempted to avoid publishing works that could be construed as potentially seditious. Indeed, he even made it a rule to ‘caution his servants’ against selling such material.30 In his views and conduct, he was essentially ‘well affected to the Constitution’, which he claimed ‘he would be very sorry to do any act to injure or bring into contempt’ and, indeed, where he could take the liberty of doing it, he ha[d] uniformly recommended the Circulation of such publications as had a tendency to


promote good morals instead of such as were calculated to mislead and inflame the Common people.31 Though obviously designed to plead his innocence, much in Johnson’s statement is borne out by a summary view of his activities. Just as in the years preceding the outbreak of the American war he had never been a Wilkite publisher, so latterly he had not been a vehemently Paineite one, certainly not in the way of Daniel Isaac Eaton, James Ridgway or Thomas Spence, who were all active members of the LCS. His imprint had only briefly appeared on less than 500 copies of Rights of Man and, though he evidently sold the second part, he did so quietly, in its respectable three-shilling guise, and before any criminal proceedings for libel had taken place. Notwithstanding Paine and Barlow’s visits to St Paul’s Churchyard in 1791–92, the purely ‘radical’ nature of Johnson’s coterie has perhaps been over-stated since, like most booksellers in ‘a considerable line of business’ and of an ‘inquisitive turn’, his shop was a resort for writers of all talents and persuasions. Nor was it composed entirely of Arians and Socinians but embraced ‘persons of opposite sentiments and connexions’ who, ‘with himself, were capable of considering a man’s performance of the duties of his life apart from his speculative opinions.’32 His inner sanctum consisted chiefly of old friends such as Henry Fuseli, John Bonnycastle and George Fordyce who, if they are remembered at all, it is certainly not for their political or religious extremism. Fordyce enjoyed a fashionable private medical practice and Fuseli became a respected, if still wildly eccentric, professor at the Royal Academy of Art, whilst Bonnycastle, a considerably cultured man, was Professor of Mathematics at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich. A slightly younger member of this group, George Anderson, brought to London with Bonnycastle’s help, even rose to become a senior civil servant at the Board of Control, and his early death in 1796 was much lamented by Dundas. The social ties that bound the members of Johnson’s circle were more broadly intellectual than religious or political and, as Fuseli and Alexander Geddes’s irascibility towards each other in company showed, not always characterized by tolerance, rationality and good-natured benevolence. Links between Johnson and the English ‘Jacobins’, such as Godwin and Holcroft, have also tended to be somewhat over-played, influenced as they are by Godwin’s later relations with Mary Wollstonecraft. Godwin did not really form part of Johnson’s inner circle during the early and mid-part of the 1790s, when he more usually called in at either George Robinson’s or John Debrett’s bookshop. He did, however, visit St Paul’s Churchyard at increasingly frequent intervals after 1796 and his friendship with Johnson developed in earnest after Wollstonecraft’s death when the two took to dining in each other’s company almost monthly.33 He had become a regular though (in the view of one contemporary) ‘rather silent’ presence at St Paul’s


Churchyard by the end of the bookseller’s life, although the parlous state of his financial affairs may have had much to do with this.34 Apart from his frank and controversial Memoirs (1798) of Wollstonecraft and her Posthumous Works (4 vols, 1798), in which George Robinson had just as much of a stake, Godwin published only one decidedly anti-’radical’ pamphlet through the bookseller and yet, due largely to the Anti-Jacobin’s overblown response, their modest professional association has become infamous. Johnson, it is also worth noting, issued the most direct confutation of the naïvely optimistic and visionary view of human progress set out in Godwin’s Political Justice (1793) – An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) by Thomas Malthus. In fact, he probably published far more copies of Sarah Trimmer’s works than those of Paine, Wollstonecraft and Godwin combined and, like Wollstonecraft herself, had little time for the Jacobins’ native atheism. As to the day-to-day activities of the popular reform societies, Johnson was profoundly sympathetic to the aims of the SCI (which, during 1792 at least, he did join) and played host to several of its leading members. He seems not to have had any truck with the LCS or to have been involved in the systematic dissemination of any of its printed pamphlets, broadsheets or addresses, and it is notable that William Frend, who did join, was chastised in the Analytical for ‘not seem[ing] in the least ashamed to appertain to that class designated under the title of the “swinish multitude.” ’35 For the most part, the political works he published were free of such lower-class, artisanal sympathies and, whilst supportive of many of Paine’s ideas in theory, reluctant to take them to their logical extreme: absolute democracy and abolition of the monarchy. Johnson was, however, content to remain associated with ‘veteran radicals’ such as John Cartwright, Christopher Wyvill and John Horne Tooke, whose political agenda was rooted in a native English stream of republican thought which sought the reformation of a corrupt but essentially perfectible constitution and was concerned more to protect individual liberty than establish universal equality.36 Unwilling to abandon an appeal to history, like Priestley and Price, they sought their own precedents in a much earlier, purer spiritual and political past and to build upon, not reject out of hand, the constitutional improvements made in 1688. Johnson did not parade himself as ‘Citizen’ in his titles or style his shop the ‘British tree of liberty’ as the Soho printseller and publisher Richard Lee did, nor did he hawk his ‘radical’ wares from a Holborn bookstall like Thomas Spence, or descend to issuing such vulgar titles as Hog’s Wash or Pig’s Meat in the manner of Daniel Isaac Eaton. Unlike these more determinedly populist booksellers, whose careers were inextricable from (and would have been virtually non-existent without) the political turmoil produced by the French revolution in England, Johnson’s career cannot be seen solely as a political launch against the established government or political


system. As a bookseller, he was never so ideologically narrow or fixated. His raison d’être, in fact, was not political publishing at all but rather science and theology (both of which inevitably became mired in politics) and his aim was generally to promote intellectual liberty and useful learning across a wide range of subjects. He was responsible for many of the most influential, well-received and regularly reprinted practical and instructional works of his day, as well as several ground-breaking scientific and medical treatises. He regularly collaborated with some of the most longstanding, upright and respected names in the trade, including Burke’s publisher James Dodsley, the Rivingtons (‘whose presses,’ according to the Anti-Jacobin, produced ‘not one publication unfavourable to religion, morality, and sound constitutional principles’), the fashionable Pall Mall bookseller James Edwards, whose purse, it was said, eventually ‘exceeded that of even Crowned Heads’, and the king’s printer Luke Hansard, and by the end of his career was venerably esteemed by his contemporaries. He had also amassed a considerable estate of £60,000 whereas, as Chard points out, ‘other booksellers with a radical bent [such as Eaton and Jordan] were neither well regarded by the rest of the trade nor particularly successful.’37 For the greater part of his career, Johnson seemed accurately to gauge where the legal and political boundaries for booksellers were drawn and remained judicious in his efforts not to overstep them. Up until 1798, as J. E. Cookson has noted, this may not have been the most difficult of tasks, since the government ‘stuck to a fairly rigorous definition of sedition’ and ‘no liberal publisher ran foul of the law except by handling the Rights of Man’.38 As a tradesman, Johnson could ill afford to do otherwise, knowing that political connections were the most likely to damage his fortunes. As a policy, however, it probably had much to do with temperament. For, whereas press freedom certainly exercised him as a bookseller, he deplored all unnecessary licence. Indeed, he had a reputation for ‘not pushing’ and, like several of his leading authors ( John Aikin and Theophilus Lindsey, for example), he was inclined to shrink from political controversy, content to remain within a politely bourgeois intellectual milieu whose gently ‘improving’ imperatives he could safely promote. It was Aikin himself, for example, (no great admirer of Paine, whom he met at Johnson’s house) who described Johnson as a friend to large and liberal discussion as is not inconsistent with the peace and welfare of Society, and the preservation of due decorum . . . These were limits within which . . . he wished to see such discussion confined; for turbulence and sedition were utterly abhorrent from his nature.39 As a bookseller, Johnson embraced the fundamentally Whiggish task of seeking to inform public opinion as the first requisite of proper constitu-


tional government, on the basis that, as Mary Wollstonecraft observed, ‘[i]t is by thus teaching men from their youth to think, that they will be enabled to recover their liberty’. It was a task made all the more important by the conspicuous lack of support for (and even downright hostility towards) such a project within Parliament, and it was simply unlucky for Johnson that, during the 1790s, it came to be regarded as something of a ‘Jacobin undertaking’.40 The political works he published both before and after 1789 were distinguished by a natural tendency to be intellectual, responsible and didactic, their arguments based on the values of reason (which they perceived as fulfilling God’s purpose for man) and persuasion rather than agitation and force (which, as several commentators have noted, may consciously or otherwise have kept him from prosecution), and advocated reform only in the form of gradual, expressly non-violent change. More importantly, they did not hold only to one political or religious viewpoint but straddled a range of occasionally conflicting opinions, secure in the belief that ‘opposition’ was ‘salutary’ and essential to the nation’s liberties, and consistently informed by the tolerant, intellectually curious streak of ‘rational’ dissent. There were notable differences, for example, even among the standard replies Johnson published to Edmund Burke’s Reflections (1790), upon which so much of his ‘radical’ reputation traditionally rests. The majority were not pre-eminently concerned with political revolution at all but were largely dissenting apologies linked to the series of campaigns for greater religious liberty conducted between 1787 and 1790. Johnson’s centrality to these campaigns, however, is probably where his real significance and ‘radicalism’ lies and, far more than the French revolution, these, to him, probably represented the ‘most important event of all in the progress of English reform’.41 His own status as a dissenter, at a time when dissent and its values were being vigorously re-articulated, meant that Johnson not only shared but, through his professional activities, could help foster a conviction that moderate, ‘rational’ civil and, especially, religious reform of the constitution was necessary. Most of his energies as a bookseller were absorbed by the dissenting drive for greater religious freedom and toleration and, through his successive involvement with the anti-subscription movement, the subsequent attempts (by the leaders of that campaign) to establish and publicize a distinctly separatist Unitarian ideology, and the two great propaganda wars over the civil and religious liberties of dissenters and the French revolution, he did much to popularize the wider acceptance of liberal Whig Protestant principles. Equally, his ‘perceived’ threat as a publisher was most closely associated with his role as the main conduit for ‘rational’ dissenting ideas that were fundamentally challenging to orthodoxy, to temporal authority and to established interpretations of the scriptures. The main catalyst in all this was, of course, Joseph Priestley, whose rhetoric and values made an indelible contribution to the direction of the


reformist debate in England prior to the French revolution, combining Whig ideas about civil and religious liberty with the educational and religious concerns of contemporary dissent. Priestley’s prolific output dominated Johnson’s list throughout the entire length of his career and his extensive religious, political and scientific acquaintance proved just as vital to the direction and development of the bookseller’s business. Priestley’s uncompromising defence of Unitarian values and his extreme humanitarian and materialistic views early cast him as a dangerous secularizer who was as controversial (though not as widely disseminated) as Paine. Yet he was never an actively involved in the reform movement, although he was acquainted and in touch with those who were, and arguably contributed behind the scenes. Nor was he one for forcing change, confident in the belief that progress would happen providentially. Even with all his misgivings about the corruptions of the established church, he was never willing to go so far as Paine and reject revelation outright for pure reason and, in the same spirit, Johnson himself had produced a mass of publications explicitly attacking Paine’s unscriptural tenets. Nevertheless, from the 1770s onwards ‘rational’ dissent had to struggle not only to vindicate its own truths but to dissociate itself from charges of infidelity and atheism. On both fronts, Johnson’s loyalty to Priestley was unremitting, and sustained not only by ‘rational’ conviction but by his characteristic benevolence and willingness to fund works which he knew would not necessarily make money but which he held either to be intellectually valuable or practically useful. ‘[T]he greater the circulation the more extended the good’, he wrote, and to that end ‘let individual interest be sacrificed’.42 Probably the most over-archingly ‘radical’ and, in many ways, heroic feature of Johnson’s career as a bookseller was his scrupulous attempt to conduct his business independently during a period of intense political factionalism and when press-buying and hiring (by Opposition as well as Government) were commonplace. His chief vehicle in this regard was the Analytical which, despite all the carpings of the Anti-Jacobin, did manage to remain true to its original remit. ‘[S]trict impartiality’ was still its watchword in 1798, as it had been ten years earlier, and it deplored to the last the increasingly acute splits between Pitt and the Foxites, instead urging the need for greater ‘internal unanimity’ in the interests of the liberty and independence of the country. It continued to back the case for a moderate and considered reform of parliament, consistently plugged the advantages of representative government and remained fiendishly protective of the idea of an adequate separation of powers. In its view, the French revolution ‘exhibit[ed] at once the mischiefs that attend the abuse of power and those that attend the abuse of liberty’ and, whilst candidly admiring the Jacobins’ ‘energy’, it flatly condemned their ‘ferociousness’.43 The Analytical defended Paine as ‘one of the most extraordinary men, which the present century has produced’, and continued to devote space to his works, even


after 1792. This was not, however, on the basis of unadulterated support for his views but in line with its founding principle that, ‘in all questions that admit of dispute, it is only by attending to the reasoning or evidence on both sides’ that truth can be discovered. Zealously ploughing a middle course, ‘neither wedded to aristocracy and superstition, nor a blind admirer of equality and republicanism’, its reviewers continued to insist that [w]herever we find acuteness of reasoning, splendid imagery, or elegant purity of language; wherever we can trace the features or the energy of genius; to us it matters not on what altar it is offered; or what party it is designed to serve.44 Whiggishly reforming rather than ruggedly democratic, dryly intellectual not emotionally populist, sympathetic to the plight of the poor but resolutely middle class, the Analytical’s virtues were to others, however, the source of its greatest weakness and, by its very even-handedness it, was seen as failing, rather than serving, the cause of ‘radicalism’. Yet it was precisely by hitting at its proprietor – a moderate, independent bookseller at the ‘respectable’ end of the trade (‘a victim of name and character’, as in Wakefield’s case), whom no one expected to be punished – that the outcome of Johnson’s trial was made to seem such an important setback to reform.45 * In August 1799 Joseph Johnson was released after spending nine months in the King’s Bench. Though temporarily laid up with the gout, confinement had not seriously hindered his activities. Indeed, his letters from prison show him still diligently attending to publishing matters and sorting his accounts, and with ‘plenty of work & more visitors than are necessary’.46 At the head of these were Fuseli, Bonnycastle and Lindsey, but Godwin also called (at least six times), as did John Cartwright and the young Henry Crabb Robinson together with Mary Hays, whose Wollstonecraft-like Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in Behalf of Women (1798) and aptly-titled novel The Victim of Prejudice (2 vols, 1799) were published by Johnson. St Paul’s Churchyard had even acted as a clearing-house for letters during this time sent to a merchant ‘Care of Mr Barlow’ in Paris. His output experienced only a slight drop during 1799 and, in the following year, his name featured on just as many titles as it had before his trial. One of these – a seemingly innocent set of Medical Admonitions Addressed to Families (1799) – was by a Hoxton surgeon James Parkinson, who had sat on the SCI’s committee of correspondence with the LCS and been questioned in connection with the ‘Pop-Gun Plot’ to assassinate George III. However, Johnson had been forced to advise Christopher Wyvill to find another bookseller for a pamphlet vindicating the Whig secession from Parliament as he thought it ‘highly


imprudent’ to publish ‘anything offensive’ before being sentenced.47 He may equally well have passed over John Cartwright’s new and enlarged Appeal, on the Subject of the English Constitution (2nd edn, 1799) which had difficulty finding a publisher and ended up being printed for and sold by the author. Johnson did put his name to a slim anonymous pamphlet on divinity, Apeleutherus; or, An Effort to Attain Intellectual Freedom (1799), by his Unitarian friend William Sturch, who visited him in prison and soon afterwards accompanied him to Liverpool with Fuseli. But, despite its being decently written and without a word of politics, other booksellers ultimately feared to stock it. An early edition of a volume of poems by Gilbert Wakefield’s friend George Dyer, subscriptions for which were taken by a bevy of reform-minded booksellers including Johnson, was also suppressed, even though Dyer claimed to be silent on politics and wholly inoffensive in his choice of subjects.48 The most notable casualty, however, was the Analytical which Johnson had relinquished to another bookseller, Thomas Hurst on Paternoster Row, at the end of 1798 but which only managed to survive (in much-diluted form) for another six months. Even before his imprisonment, the loss of several of its most influential contributors (Christie, Wollstonecraft and William Enfield), coupled with the political dispersal of many of his authors, had probably sapped much of its strength. In the decade left to him as a bookseller, Johnson carried on producing works across his favoured range of subjects – science, education and theology – and characterized by a familiar ‘rational’ and inquisitive spirit. He made considerable additions to his medical list, with important pioneering works on medical ethics by Thomas Percival and experimental chemistry by Thomas Beddoes and his young assistant, Humphry Davy, at the Pneumatic Institute in Bristol.49 He persevered in his commitment to the Unitarians who, though more numerous, were now less vociferous as a group and (in Priestley’s absence) less inclined to religious controversy. His imprint appeared on another set of Commentaries and Essays (1800) from the Society for Promoting Knowledge of the Scriptures and several of his earlier works – including Priestley’s Appeal to the Serious and Candid Professors of Christianity (1771), Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religion (1772–4) and A General View of the Arguments for the Unity of God (1783), Lindsey’s Farewel Address to the Parishioners of Catterick (1773) and Conversations on Christian Idolatry (1792), and Toulmin’s Exhortation to All Christian People, to Refrain from Trinitarian Worship (1789) – were reissued as part of a second series of ‘Tracts’ (10 vols, 1805) by the Unitarian Book Society. He published Lindsey’s last but by no means least-advanced work, Conversations on the Divine Government (1802), which was sponsored by the Unitarian Society, and The Right and Duty of Unitarian Christians to Form Separate Societies for Religious Worship (1802), the opening sermon preached at Priestley’s rebuilt chapel in Birmingham by Thomas Belsham. Like other of Belsham’s titles, a copy was sent by Johnson


to Priestley in America. Priestley himself responded to the bookseller’s requests by shipping over from Pennsylvania a batch of his Comparison of the Institutes of Moses with those of the Hindoos and Other Ancient Nations (1799), which languished at the Customs House before being sold as waste, 200 copies of his Letter to an Anti-Paedobaptist (1802) addressed to Joshua Toulmin, plus 350 of his General History of the Christian Church (4 vols, 1802–3) and 400 of his Notes on the Scriptures (4 vols, 1803–4), for which subscribers were waiting. Johnson still acted as an obvious port of call for Newcome Cappe’s widow Catherine, who continued to collect, edit and publish her husband’s works, becoming an industrious educational and Unitarian promoter in her own right. Works by younger Unitarian critics and scholars, including Cappe’s influential successor, Charles Wellbeloved, at York, David Jones’s cousin John Jones, and Thomas Belsham’s former assistant Eliezer Cogan, were also appropriately enough placed with him and added to the sense of ongoing vigour. Yet the frosty ‘high-church’ atmosphere and a ‘general disrelish for everything of a theological nature which has lately taken place’ badly affected sales of such works.50 Sermons on such timeless and well-worn dissenting themes as ‘The Superiority of Religious Duties to Worldly Considerations’ (delivered by John Disney at Essex Street), ‘The Exercise of Reason, and Liberty of Conscience’ and ‘On the Right of Individual Judgment in Religion’ (preached before the Annual Provincial Meeting of Presbyterian Ministers in Lancashire by George Walker) continued to pepper Johnson’s list.51 Yet, against a background of economic recession and political crisis at home (famine and food rioting were rife in 1800–1) and military defeat abroad, there were discourses specifically addressing themselves to the serious shortages caused by the war, notably by Thomas Malthus. In the wake of the Peace of Amiens in March 1802, Johnson issued a clutch of addresses giving thanks for ‘an End to the Late Bloody, Extended and Expensive War’ by Belsham and Toulmin, among others, which were noted for putting the reader ‘in good humour with our Country, our Constitution, and the Peace’.52 He also published a sober volume of War Elegies ([1802]) by Joseph Fawcett. After the resumption of hostilities in May 1803, his name appeared on yet another series of fast-day sermons, exhorting ‘Trust and Confidence’ in the ‘Constant Providence of God’ and ‘Courage and Union in a Time of National Danger’, by Disney, Belsham and the current Secretary of the Unitarian Society, Jeremiah Joyce, who ten years earlier had been implicated as an SCI suspect in the treason trials. Joyce’s sermon, delivered at Essex Street, was consciously guarded in tone and typified the more pragmatic mood of the times, in which (as Mrs Barbauld observed) all Englishmen were obliged ‘to turn knights-errant and fight against the great giant and monster Buonaparte’. Like Belsham’s, it did not attempt to answer whether the present war was justified, since ‘the enemy allows no room for [such] inquiry’, and instead sounded a more


pressing call for unity and ‘manly resistance’ against a set of foes who threatened ‘nothing short of immediate and total destruction’ of Britain’s freedom and independence.53 Though sorely regretting his previous involvement in Gilbert Wakefield’s work, Johnson still put his name to a posthumous two-volume edition of Wakefield’s Memoirs (1804). These had first appeared over ten years earlier, when they were berated in the Analytical for their ‘egotism’ and lack of reserve, but, following Wakefield’s death shortly after leaving prison in 1801, had been revised by his close dissenting friend John Towill Rutt.54 Like the Works of his former tutor John Jebb, Wakefield’s Memoirs covered much of the main political and religious terrain of the previous twenty years. As effusive in their praise of Fox as they were in their criticisms of Pitt, they fiercely raised the question of subscription and the impolicy and injustice of ‘ecclesiastical restrictions’ at the universities, as well as the ‘execrable’ but still unresolved matter of the slave trade, and inevitably (though somewhat provocatively) touched on Wakefield’s and his bookseller’s trials: . . . it appeared throughout these proceedings that Sir John Scott was desirous that no one should consider this prosecution as imposed upon him among the unpleasant duties of his official situation. On the trial of Mr. Johnson, especially . . . he declared, that had he not been permitted to proceed against such a publication he would have resigned his office of Attorney General. ‘Credat Judaeus.’55 They also reprinted the arguments for a ‘perfectly unrestrained’ press from his ‘Letter to Sir John Scott’, in which he declared that to ‘forcibly suppress’ any book (even one as ‘detestable’ as Paine’s Age of Reason) and fine or imprison its publisher was an ‘insolent usurpation’. Wakefield’s imprisonment and fate had aroused an ‘eager curiosity’ which Johnson, like any other bookseller, would have been reluctant to ignore, but it was possibly more out of sympathy with its author’s sufferings than wholehearted endorsement of his rather hot-headed character and views, and out of deference to Rutt (also a firm friend and adherent of Priestley), that he agreed to act and ensure that all profits from the edition went to support Wakefield’s family.56 A steady supply of political works was kept up from St Paul’s Churchyard, including a new three-volume set of Benjamin Franklin’s Complete Works (1806), based on the original 1779 edition by Benjamin Vaughan, further volumes of Christopher Wyvill’s Political Papers (1802–4), the second part of John Horne Tooke’s Diversions of Purley (1805) – which met with hold-ups at the printer’s on account of its unpopular principles – and John Cartwright’s England’s Aegis; or, The Military Energies of the Empire (2 vols, 1806), a substantial work which addressed itself to the precarious state of the nation’s defences, by a writer still tacitly involved in drumming up


support for peace. The death of Fox, whose brief period in office in 1806 raised hopes for peace and reform, prompted a funeral sermon at Essex Street by Thomas Belsham which was given over to Johnson to publish. Many of the ‘rational’ dissenters in Johnson’s circle were zealous in support of the Foxite ‘Ministry of All the Talents’, which succeeded in abolishing the slave trade and strove to extend religious liberty, even to Catholics. In fact, at the general election in 1807, which virtually hinged on the issue of ‘No Popery’, the lawyer and journalist Henry Brougham tried to enlist the help of the group of writers ‘gathered round Dr Aikin’, all of whom had previously been associated with Johnson, as part of the Whig press campaign.57 In the main, however, educational and overtly ‘improving’ works – by Thomas Percival, John Aikin and Mrs Barbauld (both considerable literary figures by this stage), and John Bonnycastle (author of a series of elementary ‘Scholar’s Guides’ and introductions to arithmetic and algebra (1780), practical geometry (1782) and astronomy (1786), which passed through numerous editions until well into the nineteenth century and were adopted as standard textbooks in dissenting schools and academies) – were now the bookseller’s staple.58 It was a lucrative genre, and one which he had long championed, but which received a considerable boost with the emergence of Maria Edgeworth on his list, herself raised in the school of Mrs Barbauld. Edgeworth’s focus on children’s individual needs unfettered by dictat or dogma, her purposefully disinterested, unprescriptive approach (‘we do not address ourselves exclusively to any sector or to any party,’ she and her father declared in their 1798 manual Practical Education, and ‘we have no ambition to gain partizans, or to make proselytes’), her unashamed attachment to reason and scientific experiment and advocacy of the virtues of ‘Prudence’ and ‘Economy’ which meant so much to her bookseller, all revealed the extent of her indebtedness to the educational ideas promoted within Johnson’s circle ever since Priestley’s days at Warrington.59 Yet her children’s books and especially her novels (which exhibited a similar didactic thrust) also introduced something of a marked change of tone. Fully rejecting the force of Wollstonecraft’s purely ‘speculative’ arguments, they sharply criticized women who openly aired their dissatisfactions or made dangerously ambitious claims (Manon Roland, for example, drew little sympathy from Edgeworth) and, whilst defending the virtues of ‘rational’ improvement and understanding, tended to be much more accommodating of women’s domestic situation and the status quo. Acutely sensitive to public opinion, Edgeworth deliberately kept herself away from active politics – ‘like a true woman,’ she said, ‘I trouble myself not to enquire’. It was a policy curiously at odds with much of Johnson’s previous output but one evidently well-suited to the times. Virtually all her novels quickly passed through several editions, reaping substantial profits for both her and her bookseller and justifying advances running to hundreds of pounds. Left to her own devices (and not her father’s), it has been argued, it is doubtful


whether Edgeworth would have used Johnson. As one of her early memorialists rather piously tells us, ‘[h]e became too much connected with Godwin and Holcroft, and afterwards it was a disadvantage to Maria that her works were published by the printer of what were considered seditious and sectarian books.’ Edgeworth herself called Johnson ‘a generous, able, kindhearted man’ and eulogized him after his death as a ‘respectabiliser’ of the trade, though she did admit at the time of his trial to being not ‘invulnerable to the dread of slander’.60 Time, as well as politics, was also beginning to tell. By 1802 Johnson’s two most commercially successful authors, William Cowper and Erasmus Darwin, had died and, like many of his contemporaries in the trade, he had begun to relieve himself of some of the duties of business. Demand for Cowper’s poems, however, steadily increased and he continued to put out lucrative new, improved-quality editions, in a range of formats at different prices (in some cases with Fuseli’s illustrations), thus exploiting his remaining copyright ownership to the full. In 1806 he released the most complete edition of the Poems so far, as an accompaniment to the best-selling Life and Posthumous Writings of William Cowper (4 vols, 1803–6). This latter had been compiled under the restrictive gaze of Cowper’s friends by William Hayley. No mention, for instance, was made of his role as an Analytical reviewer and its subject portrayed as an eminently loyal Englishman (‘he loved the constitution’ and ‘revered the religion of his country’) and stripped of any remotely Whiggish-sounding comments on ‘Royalty or Government’.61 Hayley also used the bookseller to sell Cowper’s translation of the Latin and Italian Poems of Milton (1808). Darwin’s posthumous reputation likewise rested in Johnson’s hands. He brought out the doctor’s long scientific poem The Temple of Nature (1803) which reworked Zoonomia’s ideas in verse and again horrified reviewers with its warring, factious, overly materialistic view of the universe, Anna Seward’s bitterly unflattering Memoirs of the Life of Doctor Darwin (1804), which was heavily cut before publication in response to protests from family, friends and his bookseller, and a three-volume collected edition of his Poetical Works (1806), though Darwin’s stock by now was falling. The literary remains of some of his other longstanding authors were also published and distributed through St Paul’s Churchyard in the months immediately following their deaths, notably the Works, Literary, Moral and Medical (4 vols, 1807) of Thomas Percival and John Newton’s Works (6 vols, 1808). Added, if somewhat belated, impetus came from established writers such as Charlotte Smith, whose ‘extraordinary talents’ Johnson had long appreciated and whose own attempts at blank verse had been much inspired by Cowper’s. First approached with her suitably didactic set of Conversations Introducing Poetry: Chiefly on Subjects of Natural History for the Use of Children and Young Persons (2 vols, 1804), he was also responsible for the publication of her unfinished posthumous collection Beachy Head and Other Poems


(1807). This contained some of Smith’s most deeply-felt musings on the vicissitudes of time, nature, fortune and the horrors of war and, from the exposed Sussex vantage point of its title-poem, intoned against the prospect of another Norman invasion: . . . let not modern Gallia form . . . Presumptuous hopes, that ever thou again, Queen of the isles! shalt crouch to foreign arms. The enervate sons of Italy may yield; And the Iberian, all his trophies torn And wrapp’d in Superstition’s monkish weed, May shelter his abasement, and put on Degrading fetters. Never, never thou! Imperial mistress of the obedient sea.62 Johnson commissioned Mary Hays to undertake the odd bit of hack work but, tellingly perhaps, it was his neighbour Richard Phillips who engaged to publish her six-volume Female Biography (1803).63 She did though (briefly) return to St Paul’s Churchyard with her Historical Dialogues for Young Persons (3 vols, 1806–8). Conversely, William Blake, who had complained in 1799 of Johnson and Fuseli having ‘discarded’ him and of being ‘laid by in a corner as if I did not Exist’, was back engraving for the bookseller (and told that there was ‘no want of work’) four years later.64 Blake, too, was familiar with Richard Phillips who confessed to him that Johnson was ‘the most generous and honest man [he] ever knew’ and that he was ‘averse to interfere’ in any way with his interests. The two booksellers did share much the same literary acquaintance. John Aikin, for example, records dining with Phillips in the company of ‘Mr Edgeworth, the Belshams, Dr Gregory, [and] Godwin’.65 However, there is evidence that Phillips may, by this stage, have been indulging in some subtle poaching. He occasionally took it upon himself to send publications to Priestley in America and also stirred relations by letting it be known to Priestley’s son that Johnson netted £500 a year by the sale of his father’s popular Charts of history and biography from the 1760s, thus convincing Priestley that his bookseller was not being open with him about the profits. Only half-jokingly, one suspects, he also offered money to the Edgeworths. Yet, crucially, Phillips was ‘a man of vast spirit & enterprize’ only half Johnson’s age and his business, specializing in cheap educational works, was thriving. Like Mary Hays, John Aikin’s daughter, Lucy, entrusted her anthology of Poetry for Children (1803) to him and, when it came to a possible life of Joseph Fawcett (who died in 1804), Charles Lamb’s advice to William Hazlitt was: ‘I should think, if you liked it, and Johnson declined it, that Phillips is the man. He is perpetually bringing out Biographies . . . without number: little trim things in two easy volumes price 12s.’66 To compound matters, Johnson’s


own negligence had evidently become so great that even Priestley, towards the very end of his life, was driven to transfer his order to the ‘younger and more active’ bookseller.67 On 6 February 1804 Priestley died in Pennsylvania. News of his death reached England early in April and his dissenting friends and fellow ministers immediately took to their pulpits to notice the occasion: Thomas Belsham (on 8 April) at the Gravel Pit Meeting in Hackney, John Disney (a week later) at Essex Street, and (on 22 April) John Edwards and Joshua Toulmin, newly appointed to the New Meeting in Birmingham. Johnson sold printed versions of all four memorial sermons. He also updated and reissued his ‘Catalogue of Books Written By Joseph Priestley, LL.D. F.R.S. and Printed for J. Johnson, Bookseller’, and, in due course, brought out Priestley’s Memoirs (2 vols, 1806–7), which were completed by his son with notes by Thomas Cooper and William Christie. These gave rise to some typically sneering anti-bourgeois comments in the Edinburgh Review from Francis Jeffrey: It has often occurred to us . . . that there is universally something presumptuous in provincial genius, and that it is a very rare felicity to meet with a man of talents out of the metropolis, who does not overrate himself and his coterie prodigiously. . . . We need only run over the names of Darwin, Day, Beddoes, Southey, Coleridge, and Priestley, to make ourselves perfectly intelligible. It is . . . chiefly, we believe, for want of that wholesome discipline of derision to which everything is subjected in London . . . There is something . . . in the perpetual presence of the more permanent aristocracies of wealth, office, and rank, which . . . teaches aspiring men to measure their own importance by a more extended standard.68 The potential gap left by Priestley in Johnson’s activities was partially plugged by Thomas Belsham, who succeeded Disney at Essex Street in 1805 and went on to establish himself as the leading Unitarian preacher of his day, as well as ‘rational’ dissent’s most effective spokesman. In 1808 Johnson helped the Unitarian Society compile and print its ‘improved’ version of the New Testament by offering them his copyright of Archbishop William Newcome’s translation. Edited by Belsham, this was fiercely attacked by the Tory Quarterly Review but exerted a permanent influence over Unitarian ministers and congregations. Following Lindsey’s death the same year, Johnson published Belsham’s funeral sermon, together with ‘A Brief Biographical Memoir’. Eventually the firm of ‘J. Johnson & Co.’ would bring out Belsham’s full-length Memoirs of the Late Reverend Theophilus Lindsey (1812) which contained ‘A General View of the Progress of the Unitarian Doctrine in England and America’ and raised a storm of protest, especially across the Atlantic.69 Johnson also kept up links with Joshua Toulmin who, though by


now well into middle age, had another ten years in which to consolidate his reputation as an important dissenting historian and biographer. Toulmin was linked to the ‘Fund for Promoting Unitarianism by Means of Popular Preaching’, established in 1806 to inject evangelical zeal into spreading the ‘rational’ gospel (the last outcrop of dissent to do so). Lindsey was known to have been sympathetic and it seems no coincidence that Johnson sold works by David Eaton, a Baptist lay preacher and zealous convert to Unitarianism from York, who had lobbied hard for the formation of a missionary society, and also Richard Wright, a General Baptist preacher at Wisbech in Cambridgeshire, whom the Fund actively sent out into the field.70 Johnson’s output was further bolstered by a younger generation of dissenters, including Arthur and Charles Rochemont Aikin, William Henry (the chemist son of Thomas Henry) and William Hazlitt, with each of whose families the bookseller had long been associated.71 Hazlitt’s upbringing in Shropshire had early enmeshed him in the familial and ministerial networks of provincial dissent. His father, who was acquainted with Priestley, Lindsey and Price, also knew their good friend William Tayleur of Shrewsbury (a wealthy Essex Street benefactor) and was ‘in the habit of exchanging visits’ with John Rowe, Unitarian minister at the town’s High Street Chapel. It was Rowe whom Coleridge famously came to Shrewsbury to succeed in 1798, as Hazlitt recounted in his essay ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’. (In 1799 Johnson sold a discourse delivered to the Western Unitarian Society by Rowe, by which time its author was ministering alongside John Prior Estlin at Bristol.)72 Hazlitt’s family also knew the Godwins, and like Godwin he had forged a close personal acquaintance with Joseph Fawcett. As a boy, he had spent time with his father’s Unitarian friends in Liverpool, including the minister of the Gateacre Chapel, Dr William Shepherd, who supped with Fuseli and Johnson on his trips to London, and William Roscoe, both of whom would patronize Hazlitt and his brother in their careers as artists. Like Arthur Aikin, he had trained for the dissenting ministry at Hackney under Priestley, Rees and Belsham but had quickly come to reject the idea of a career in the church. Yet, for all the obvious lines of contact with St Paul’s Churchyard, it was only out of desperation that Hazlitt approached Johnson with his first work, having had difficulty in interesting a publisher. An Essay on the Principles of Human Action (1805) was a lengthy philosophical disquisition arguing for the ‘natural disinterestedness of the human mind’ against the selfish, materialistic principles promoted in the works of Hartley and Helvetius. Though likely to have only a limited appeal, it was urged upon Johnson by William Godwin and also recommended by the Unitarian Anthony Robinson, whom Hazlitt had known since the late 1790s. On the basis of his own experience (a long life spent holding out against partisanship and prejudice), Johnson may have quibbled with that word ‘natural’ and been unconvinced by the Essay’s somewhat delusory


Godwinian premise. He already had Malthus’s work on population under his belt and was all set to bring out new editions in 1806 and 1807. Hazlitt, indeed, drafted his own Reply (1807) to Malthus at this time which, significantly perhaps, he published through the Longmans. Johnson did, however, agree to take on the Essay but only on the basis that all costs were met before the author received any of the profits. On Hazlitt’s own admission, it was a dry piece of work and evidently he made nothing from it. Early in 1806 he again went to Johnson with an abridged version of a curious but engaging set of ethical ramblings which had first appeared thirty years earlier and again owed much to Hartley and Locke – Abraham Tucker’s The Light of Nature Pursued – again using Godwin as his intermediary. Godwin dropped in at St Paul’s Churchyard one Wednesday (‘Johnson’s open day’) in January only to find that the bookseller had not even opened the manuscript. Indeed, he ‘would not come down, or give any answer’ to his enquiries but promised to give a decision within a month. Days later, the bookseller’s shop was struck by fire which ‘put him so back’ that, when Godwin called again, he was forced to ‘crave’ another month. Persistence, however, finally paid off and Hazlitt’s anonymous abridgement rolled off the presses courtesy of Johnson early in 1807.73 In the meantime, Hazlitt had penned a more topical political work condemning the war with France, entitled Free Thoughts on Public Affairs (1806), but this work, like his next, The Eloquence of the British Senate (1807), was not printed for Johnson who, if he ever saw the manuscript, was sufficiently deterred by previous sales of Hazlitt’s work. For the time being, Hazlitt remained in touch with Johnson: he wrote to him from Holborn concerning the publication of his father’s Sermons (1808) and even tried to fix a day when the bookseller could sit for his portrait. In future, however, he adopted the common practice of shopping around with his works and it was some years after Johnson’s death before he returned to St Paul’s Churchyard with his Characters of Shakespear’s Plays (1817), and only then after it had been rejected by another bookseller. Ironically, he turned with his next work to Godwin, who had started up as a publisher and set up in premises on Skinner Street in Holborn with Johnson’s support and advice. One of Godwin’s first commissions was Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespear (1807), a reaction against the sternly didactic tradition of children’s writing with which Johnson was so heavily involved and which warned of the ‘danger of creating a ROMANTIC TASTE’ and held poetry to be ‘unfit for children’ – what Lamb (to Coleridge in 1802) called ‘Mrs B[arbauld]’s and Mrs Trimmer’s nonsense’.74 Godwin, for his part, continued to resort to Johnson’s bookshop, meeting and dining with him regularly, borrowing money from him (to the tune of at least £200) and prevailing upon him to help with his business affairs right up until the bookseller’s death. But the literary climate was changing. Soaring paper costs were putting up prices (which seriously reined in the Unitarian Book Society’s activities), copyrights were expiring and the trade itself – with over 300


booksellers in London, almost three times as many as 30 years before – becoming much more uncertain and hostile. As a relatively small trading operation, with only two or three employees, it was recognizably harder for Johnson to compete with the larger, increasingly corporate-style houses epitomized by the Longmans who, by 1800, were one of the largest publishers in London and, by virtue of their partnership with the Welsh Unitarian Owen Rees, well positioned to take over from him as the main publishers of liberal dissent.75 Joseph Johnson died at St Paul’s Churchyard on 20 December 1809. (He had outlasted his exact contemporary, Paine, by just six months.) Ranged on his shelves were pamphlets still deploring the present state of national affairs (Britain at war with France, as it had been at the start of his career 50 years earlier), offering hints as to the best means of improving the condition of the labouring poor and characteristically promoting the cause of religious truth. Among his very last publications were two sermons commemorating the start of the royal ‘Jubilee’ – one (appropriately enough) by Thomas Belsham delivered at Essex Street, the other by Mary Wollstonecraft’s old friend, the Anglican clergyman John Hewlett. Hewlett’s was subtitled ‘Motives for Thanksgiving Derived from a Consideration of the Character and Conduct of His Most Gracious Sovereign, King George the Third’, and offered up copious expressions of gratitude and devotion to ‘our beloved Monarch’, who (during the course of a long but ‘mild and moderate’ reign) had shown ‘zealous affection for the welfare and happiness’ of his subjects, even ‘in those dangerous times of popular commotion, when men talked about equality like fanatics’ but behaved like ‘tyrants’, and ‘liberty and philosophy were the flimsy pretexts for the subversion of all civil government’.76 Belsham’s was a much more sober-sounding discourse on the derivation of the word ‘Jubilee’ from the scriptures which, whilst avoiding modern ‘political topics’, made telling allusions to the fairness, justice and equality of the laws of the Hebrews. Both took the same text for their sermon – Leviticus, xxv. 10, beginning ‘And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year’ – but Belsham (unlike Hewlett) quoted the lines that follow: ‘. . . and proclaim liberty throughout all the land, unto all the inhabitants thereof . . .’.77 Johnson’s burial took place on 29 December, not in the traditional dissenting graveyard at Bunhill Fields, but in a corner of Fulham Churchyard, close to the country house he had rented for the past five years at Purser’s Cross. In attendance were his old friends Fuseli, Bonnycastle and William Sturch, Theophilus Lindsey’s widow, the late George Robinson’s son, and Fuseli’s friend John Knowles. Under the terms of Johnson’s will, the business and lease of St Paul’s Churchyard were split equally between his two assistants in the trade, Rowland Hunter and (his great-nephew) John Miles.78 The two carried on trading uninterruptedly as ‘J. Johnson & Co.’, publishing original literary works and criticism by the Aikins and Mrs Barbauld,


including her final and most controversial published poem Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (1812), Maria Edgeworth’s hugely successful Tales of Fashionable Life (6 vols, 1809–12), Cowper’s Milton (4 vols, 1810) edited by William Hayley, reprints of Sarah Trimmer’s works and (together with the Rivingtons) an Account (1814) of her life and writings, Alexander Stephens’s Memoirs of John Horne Tooke (1813), and works arguing the case for constitutional reform by the elderly but still active John Cartwright. They continued to publicize the Unitarian cause, printing tracts and sermons (some hitherto unpublished) by Priestley, Disney and Belsham. In 1811 Belsham used his pen to fend off attempts (largely aimed at Methodists) to tighten up the Toleration Act in the Lords and followed his own The Claims of Dr. Priestley in the Controversy with Bishop Horsley Restated and Vindicated (1814) by editing Priestley’s collected Tracts in Controversy with Bishop Horsley (1815) for the Unitarian Society. The remnants of Johnson’s circle still managed to reconvene, with Fuseli, Bonnycastle, Hewlett and (occasionally) Godwin dining on Fridays at St Paul’s Churchyard, where they were joined by a young political journalist newly married to Rowland Hunter’s step-daughter – Leigh Hunt. It was most likely Hunter who engineered Hunt’s first meeting with Shelley in May 1811. Shelley may have taken one of his early political poems to St Paul’s Churchyard but his reputation, as a rash young atheist recently expelled from Oxford, probably advised Hunter to steer clear. He nonetheless mentioned Shelley to Hunt, to whom the poet had already written as ‘a common friend to liberty’.79 Personal connections overwhelmingly drew Hunt to St Paul’s Churchyard but, politically and intellectually, he was naturally fitted for Johnson’s table. He was the product of a liberal (though strongly anti-Paineite) Anglo-American household, in which ‘Politics and divinity occupied almost all the conversation’ and all sides of the question were customarily aired, and (via a mutual fondness for speculation) both his parents had become Unitarians.80 His weekly paper the Examiner had been up and running since 1808 and its stated aim was ‘to assist in producing Reform in Parliament, liberality of opinion in general (especially freedom from superstition), and a fusion of literary taste into all subjects whatsoever’. It scorned the idea of party, reserving its fire generally for those placemen and ‘Corruptionists’ who, in its view, were daily damaging the constitution. Like ‘True Whigs’, its editors declared (in 1810), they were ‘for monarchy but not for tyranny, for the nobles but not for monopoly, for the people but not for licentiousness.’ However, the Examiner’s fearless expression of its views and ongoing battle with the Tory Quarterly Review naturally proclaimed its opposition and, just like the Analytical, it was repeatedly accused of ‘Bonapartism’, ‘republicanism’ and ‘disaffection to Church and State’.81 As with Johnson, its conduct also resulted in Hunt and his brother both being victimized and finally thrown into prison in 1813 for a libellous attack on the Prince Regent.


In 1814 Johnson’s nephew, Miles, withdrew from the business and joined with another bookseller, leaving Hunter to carry on trading under his own name until 1836, mainly kept afloat on the gradually diminishing proceeds of his inheritance. Though Johnson’s personal business may not long have survived him, the liberal, independent-minded press tradition he did so much to forge proved a much more durable legacy. There is a connective thread running from the Analytical to the Westminster Review founded in 1824 by ‘Philosophical Radicals’ who could trace their utilitarian origins back to Priestley, and to the Manchester Guardian established by Unitarians in the wake of the Peterloo Massacre in 1821, which professed the same ‘sincere and undeviating attachment to rational liberty’ and addressed itself to the ‘friends of freedom’.82 Even Hunt’s Examiner managed to outlive the travails of its founder and survive (albeit in politically more muted form) up until the 1880s. Four years after Johnson’s death an end to the anti-trinitarian legislation which, for over a century, had effectively outlawed Unitarian worship and to the repeal of which he had given so much support, was finally secured. It would be another generation before the Test and Corporation Acts were abolished and yet the campaigning methods used were still indebted to the activities of earlier dissenters, such as Johnson and his circle, who, from the 1770s onwards, had consistently helped to promote the cause of civil and religious liberty in print. Indeed, at the celebratory dinner held at the Freemasons’ Tavern on 18 June 1828, a series of toasts were made to the ‘Immortal memory’ of ‘the enlightened Patriots who maintained our cause in less prosperous times’.83 These were the breakthroughs which would have meant most to Joseph Johnson as a bookseller and any reputation he might have as an explicitly ‘radical’ publisher has its roots less in the world of ‘radical’ politics than ‘radicalized’ dissent.

Notes Introduction 1. William Godwin, obituary in Morning Chronicle, 21 December 1809, quoted in Tyson, p. 215.

1 Dissenting Origins 1. John Palmer (1729–90), King David’s Death, and Solomon’s Succession to the Throne, Considered and Improved (London: C. Henderson, R. Griffiths and J. Johnson, [1760]), pp. 1–2; and John Johnson (1706–91), Jesus the King of Kings (London: J. Johnson, 1762), p. 28. 2. See Chard, 52; and Tyson, pp. 3–4. 3. Byrom Street’s fortunes picked up markedly after 1772 with the appointment of Samuel Medley (1738–99). Following Medley’s death, Johnson published a volume of his original Hymns (1800) and a set of Memoirs (1800) compiled by his son. 4. See E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), p. 30n1; and Donald Read, The English Provinces, c.1760–1960: a Study in Influence (London: Edward Arnold, 1964), pp. 4–5. 5. J. C. D. Clark, English Society 1688–1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice during the Ancien Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 277. 6. Michael Watts, The Dissenters: From the Reformation to the French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), p. 48. Successive attempts to repeal the Test and Corporation Acts were made by dissenters in the 1730s but, despite (or, perhaps, even because of ) their loyalty to the Whigs in government, had been defeated. 7. Robert Halley, Lancashire: Its Puritanism and Nonconformity (2 vols; London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1869), II. 312n, 375. 8. Gentleman’s Magazine, 30 (1760), 519–20. 9. Simon Maccoby, English Radicalism 1762–1785 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1955), p. 7. 10. See Halley, Lancashire, II. 163. 11. Medicine as a profession was not off-limits to dissenters who, by training in Scotland or on the continent, could evade the proscriptions of the Test Act. Guy’s Hospital had been founded by a Baptist in 1723 and its treasurer (Dr Benjamin Avery), a former Presbyterian minister, was one of three medical men to serve as chairman of the lay London Protestant Dissenting deputies in the eighteenth century. 12. John Almon (1737–1805), (anon.) An Impartial History of the Late War (London: J. Johnson and J. Curtis, 1763), pp. 387–8, 303. 13. Almon, Memoirs of a Late Eminent Bookseller (London: n.p., 1790), pp. 14–15. 14. As well as introductions to Johnson, Fuseli was given letters of credit to Thomas Coutts, with whom he also struck up a lifelong friendship. William West speaks

182

Notes 183

15.

16.

17. 18.

19.

20. 21.

22. 23.

24.

25. 26.

27.

of Johnson handing him ‘a check on Coutts for upwards of 300l.’, suggesting not only considerable means but that the bookseller (as well as the king) used Coutts as banker. See West, p. 205. See Tyson, p. 16n39. Among the ranks of Lancashire dissenting ministers who trained at Kendal Academy was one ‘William Davenport of Hindley’ and one of the officers in charge of the widows’ fund for Protestant dissenters in Lancashire and Cheshire, set up by Joseph Priestley at Warrington in 1764, was a ‘Mr. Davenport of Chowbent’. See Herbert McLachlan, The Warrington Academy (Manchester: Chetham Society, 1943), p. 6; and David L. Wykes, ‘The Dissenting Academy and Rational Dissent’, in Enlightenment and Religion: Rational Dissent in Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 130–9, which pursues these points more thoroughly. Memoirs, I. 54, 61n. Joseph Priestley (1733–1804), An Essay on a Course of Liberal Education for Civil and Active Life (London: C. Henderson, T. Becket and P. De Hondt, and J. Johnson and B. Davenport, 1765), pp. 10, 34–5, 32; and Memoirs, I, pp. 47–8. The section beginning ‘Only tyrants . . .’ was quoted approvingly in the first number of the Analytical Review. A Scientific Autobiography of Joseph Priestley (1733–1804), ed. Robert E. Schofield (Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press, 1966), p. 17; and MS 12.57 (61) Dr Williams’s Library (hereafter DWL). John Macgowan (1726–80), (pseud.) The Arians and Socinians Monitor (3rd edn, London: W. Row, G. Porter, M. Priestley and J. Barker, 1795), p. 4. DNB entry for Edward Harwood (1729–94); and James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 744. The Analytical Review even felt obliged at this stage to plead the writer’s cause: ‘Dr. Harwood’s labours in the cause of literature have not, we fear, been duly rewarded. It gives us pain to learn, that in his old age he feels the pressure of want. Should not some of his rich pupils see to this, and gild the evening of their respectable master with a comforting ray of beneficence?’ See AR, 4 (1789), 341n. William Hazlitt, ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’, Liberal, 2 (1823), 28. Memoirs of the Forty-Five First Years of the Life of James Lackington (7th edn, London: printed for the author, 1794), pp. 153–6. Originally published in 1756, Buncle in many ways took its religious and romantic cue from Amory’s Memoirs: Containing the Lives of Several Ladies of Great Britain (1755). This was also previously the property of the London bookseller John Noon (d. 1763), whose stock Johnson bought, and would, in turn, be reissued by him. Rutt, 1. 69. Priestley’s editor highlights the inappropriateness of this label, even though Priestley used it himself. Unlike Faustus Socinus, the sixteenth-century originator of the sect, Priestley no longer upheld the worship and adoration of Christ and was, therefore, strictly speaking, a Unitarian. The two terms, however, appear to have been used almost interchangeably during this period. Priestley was sent a copy of Macgowan’s remarks (possibly by his bookseller) but thought them ‘altogether unworthy of notice’. See Rutt, I. 142. Priestley had submitted some of his early scriptural observations to Fleming and Lardner (which they part-published in 1761) and visited them in Hoxton Square whenever he was in London. By the 1780s Lardner’s writings had become so scarce and expensive that Johnson arranged for a cheap edition of his Works (11 vols, 1788), edited by


28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37.

38.

39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44.

Andrew Kippis (1725–95), to be published by subscription. The Analytical Review hailed it as a fitting monument to the memory of ‘one whose fame is above our praise, and whose works are of such allowed utility, importance and merit, as to recommend themselves to the regard and approbation of persons of different tastes and various parties.’ See AR, 6 (1790), 67–78. Personal testimony of Johnson’s regard for Lardner’s principles can be found in his business letter book. The same group of booksellers was responsible for Priestley’s History and Present State of Electricity (1767) and Familiar Introduction to the Study of Electricity (1768). Priestley, An Essay on the First Principles of Government (London: J. Dodsley, T. Cadell and J. Johnson, 1768; 2nd edn, London: J. Johnson, 1771), pp. viii (1771), iv–vi, 16–17, 59, 38–9. Ibid., pp. 128–9, 134–5, 22. Ibid., pp. 19–20, 16–17 (1771), 119–20. Ibid., pp. 20, 108, 139–41 (1771), 113. Ibid., p. 175. Ibid., pp. 158, 165–6; and Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961), p. 272. Andrew Kippis, who reviewed it in the Monthly, found this the ‘most exceptionable part of his treatise’ and friends and former colleagues at Warrington were worried that it would make others think less favourably of the academy. Johnson’s close friend Henry Fuseli, however, who designed a frontispiece for the book, was sufficiently impressed to order copies for friends. See Monthly Review, 39 (1768), 473; and MS 12.12 (13) DWL. Essay on . . . Government, pp. 119, 116. Richard Baron (c.1720–68), The Pillars of Priestcraft and Orthodoxy Shaken (4 vols; 2nd edn, London: T. Cadell, G. Kearsley, J. Payne and J. Johnson, and N. Young, 1768), II. iii–iv. This had first appeared in 1752. All profits from the 1768 edition were to go to Baron’s family. James Murray (1732–82), (anon.) Sermons to Asses (London: J. Johnson and T. Cadell; and Newcastle: W. Charnley, 1768), pp. 5, 93; and Priestley, A View of the Principles and Conduct of the Protestant Dissenters (2nd edn, London: J. Johnson, [1770]), p. 4. William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (4 vols; Oxford, 1765–69), IV. 46, 53. Priestley, Remarks on Some Paragraphs in the Fourth Volume of Dr. Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, Relating to the Dissenters (London: J. Johnson and J. Payne, 1769), pp. 2–3. Priestley had quoted from Blackstone and dubbed him an ‘excellent author’ in his Essay on a Course of Liberal Education (1765). Blackstone replied in a curt but civil pamphlet in September 1769. Priestley, A View of the Principles . . . of the Protestant Dissenters, pp. 41–2; and Rutt, I. 73n. Anon., An Alarm to Dissenters and Methodists (London: G. Keith, and Johnson and Payne, 1769), p. 23. Anon., An Ode to the People of England (London: G. Kearsly [sic], Johnson and Payne, and G. Woodfall, 1769), pp. 3, 10. An early example of this was A Suitable Present for Every Free-Born Englishman; or, The People’s Antient and Just Liberties Asserted (1771), a centennial edition of the trial of the Quaker preacher William Penn, which had done much to enshrine the right to trial by jury.

Notes 185 45. 46. 47. 48.

49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58. 59.

60.

61.

62.

A View of the Principles . . . of the Protestant Dissenters, pp. 4, 45, 49, 54–5, 6. Rutt, I. 72n; and Tyson, pp. 27–8. TR, I. xiv, xi. Rutt, I. 72; and TMW, VII. 297. The early numbers were dominated by essays rejecting the idea of the crucifixion as a ‘proper sacrifice’, including Priestley’s ‘Essay on the Doctrine of Atonement’, an update of the tract first published by Lardner and Fleming. TR, I. x–xi. Essay on . . . Government, p. 163. Priestley had corresponded with Annet (1693–1769) during his student days. Rutt, I. 158; and T. E. Thorpe, Joseph Priestley (London: J. M. Dent, 1906), p. 68. See Robert E. Schofield, The Enlightenment of Joseph Priestley (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), p. 195; and Tyson, p. 39. Priestley’s final losses came close to £50 and he and Johnson attempted to recoup these by issuing a collected three-volume edition (remotely priced at 18s) in 1773. Rutt, I. 138–40. Fifteen years later, the Appeal had sold as many as 30,000 copies. Rutt, I. 115, 118, 120. Terry Belanger, ‘A Directory of the London Book Trade, 1766’, Publishing History, 1 (1977), 36; and Schofield, A Scientific Autobiography, p. 73. The Butterworths and Bayleys were among the leading families in Manchester and worshipped at the city’s large dissenting meeting house. An ‘active and patriotic country gentleman’, Bayley (1744–1803) was also an enlightened magistrate and prison reformer and (like Percival) a later mover in the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society. See Halley, Lancashire, II. 311–12; and William Turner, The Warrington Academy (Warrington: Library and Museum Committee, 1957), p. 79. West, 204. MS 12.12 (13) DWL; and Rutt, I. 108. Essay on . . . Government (2nd edn, 1771), pp. ix–x. Sales of this revised edition were evidently more sluggish than the first as Johnson was still advertising copies 20 years later. Francis Stone (1738/9–1813), (pseud.) A Short and Seasonable Application to the Public, In Behalf of A Respectful Address to the Parliament, to Procure a Legal Redress of Notorious, Religious Grievances (London: J. Johnson and J. Payne, 1768), pp. 8, 21. Dawson (1729–1814) was part of an old-established Presbyterian family in Yorkshire and his brother Obadiah was a member of Priestley’s congregation. He had links with Edward Harwood, whom he had assisted at his school in Cheshire, and also with Warrington Academy. Priestley was incensed by Dawson and surprised at his joining Lindsey. Dawson, however, continued to publish through Johnson, as did his brothers, Abraham (1712/13–89), who also quit the Presbyterian ministry, and Thomas (1725?–82), who remained a dissenter but took up medicine and worked at the London and Middlesex Hospitals. Johnson’s name had appeared on Two Dissertations (1766), including one on ‘the absurdity and injustice of bigotry’, by Thomas Edwards (1729–85), a treatise on Locke and some Observations Occasioned By the Contest About Literary Property (1770) by Edmund Law (1703–87), and a sermon, Christianity Consistent with Every Social Duty (1769), by Richard Watson (1737–1816). He is also listed as London seller of Two Sermons Preached Before the University of Cambridge (1768) by Samuel Hallifax (1733–90), an eminent college fellow who (unlike his cousin


63. 64.

65. 66.

67.

68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

73.

74. 75.

76.

Jebb) argued heavily in favour of subscription. Priestley had criticized the fact that the taking of degrees at Oxford and Cambridge was impeded by subscription in his View of the Principles and Conduct of the Protestant Dissenters (1769). Cambridge relaxed their statutes on this issue in 1772, although undergraduates still had to declare themselves bona fide members of the Church of England. Anti-subscription moves were rejected at Oxford in 1773. MS 12.44 (1) DWL; MS JP1 University of Birmingham Library; and Rutt, I. 144n, 169. Rutt, I. 160. The petition was introduced by the Liverpool MP and former student of Peterhouse, Sir William Meredith. Its chief opponent was Sir Roger Newdigate, MP for Oxford, but it was also rejected by Lord North, the young Charles James Fox and Edmund Burke, who believed it would only revive ‘dissensions and animosities, which had slept for a century’. In Lindsey’s view, Burke spoke ‘entirely like a Jesuit’. See PH, XVII. 245–97; and Rutt, I. 159–60n. Rutt, I. 162. Hopkins (1706–86) had first aroused controversy with his anonymous Appeal to the Common Sense of All Christian People . . . With Regard to an Important Point of Faith and Practice Imposed Upon Their Consciences By Church Authority (1753) which Johnson arranged to reprint in 1775 and 1787. He did the same with Hopkins’s The Liturgy of the Church of England Reduced Nearer to the Standard of Scripture ([1763]) and An Attempt to Restore Scripture Forms of Worship ([1765]) in the mid-1780s. Rutt, I. 164; and PH, XVII. 437–8. Burke had known Priestley since the late 1760s and, like Fox and Wilkes, subscribed to his History and Present State of Discoveries Relating to Vision, Light, and Colours (1772). Rutt, I. 171n. TMW, II. xvii; and PH, XVII. 441. Raymond V. Holt, The Unitarian Contribution to Social Progress in England (London: Lindsey Press, 1952), p. 324. Rutt, I. 173, 183; and MS 12.44 (7) DWL. James Buckland seems originally to have been involved in publishing Thomas’s work but a new title-page was printing in February 1774 as (according to Lindsey) he refused to have his name attached to it. Copies were sold by Johnson in London and Thomas Cadell’s bookseller-father in Bristol. See Rutt, I. 230. Joshua Toulmin (1740–1815), Two Letters on the Late Applications to Parliament By the Protestant Dissenting Ministers (London: J. Johnson, 1774), pp. 8–10, 200. In the Commons, Burke had argued against the idea that the dissenters currently enjoyed liberty, albeit ‘by connivance’: ‘What, Sir, is liberty by connivance but a temporary relaxation of slavery? Is this the sort of Liberty calculated for the meridian of England?’ See PH, XVII. 775–8. Priestley, (anon.) A Letter of Advice to those Dissenters who Conduct the Application to Parliament for Relief from Certain Penal Laws (1773), in TMW, XXII. 442–3. Rutt, I. 86; and MS 12.44 (9) DWL. Rutt includes the Letter (dated ‘London, 1773’) in his edition of Priestley’s works and it is also listed in A Bibliography of Joseph Priestley 1733–1804 (London: Library Association, 1966) by Ronald Crook, but I have been unable to trace an original copy. Rutt, I. 140–1n. Lindsey attended the Commons hearing, which touched upon his own decision to leave the Church, together with Priestley, Price and Ebenezer Radcliff. Burke again opposed the motion, alleging that the petitioners’ demands would ‘turn the House of Commons into a cock-pit of religious controversy’.

Notes 187

77. 78. 79.

80.

81.

82.

83.

There were less than 20 members in support and it was dismissed without a vote. See PH, XVII. 1326–7. See Belsham, p. 70; and MS 12.44 (11) DWL. Belsham, p. 98; and Rutt, I. 87, 228n, 85. Johnson had already published some of Paterson’s rather curious miscellaneous works, including Another Traveller! (2 vols, 1767–69) and Joineriana: or, The Book of Scraps (2 vols, 1772). A close friend of Samuel Johnson, Paterson would later become one of Priestley’s successors as Shelburne’s librarian. A. E. Peaston, ‘The Revision of the Prayer Book by Dr. Samuel Clarke’, Transactions of the Unitarian Historical Society, 12 (1959–62), 27–38; and MS 12.44 (13–14) DWL. See Belsham, pp. 125, 104–5, 113–16. A visitor to Essex Street at this time described Lindsey as ‘a palpable Arian in his ideas of Christ’s person’ but ‘a thorough-paced Socinian as far as concerns the doctrine of atonement.’ Both he and Priestley still believed in Christ’s miracles and the literal truth of the second coming. Lindsey had also not yet rejected the idea of the virgin birth. See Rutt, I. 258n. John Gascoigne, ‘Anglican Latitudinarianism and Political Radicalism in the Late Eighteenth Century’, History, 71 (1986), 28; and Belsham, p. 111n. For Essex Street’s connections with the power elite, see John Seed, ‘Gentlemen Dissenters: the Social and Political Meanings of Rational Dissent in the 1770s and 1780s’, Historical Journal, 28 (1985), 299–325. MS 12.44 (7, 29) DWL. Such publications also contributed to excite ‘a variety of conversation and debate upon the controverted points in theology’ among undergraduates at Cambridge. See Memoirs of the Life of Gilbert Wakefield, ed. John Towill Rutt (2 vols; London: J. Johnson, 1804), I. 114.

2 Striving for independence 1. See Thorpe, Joseph Priestley, pp. 70–1; and Anna Laetitia Barbauld (née Aikin) (1744–1825), Poems (London: J. Johnson, 1792), pp. 1–12, from which all quotes are taken. 2. The theme of animal welfare was more expressly tackled in other works which Johnson sold, including A Dissertation on the Duty of Mercy and Sin of Cruelty to Brute Animals (1776) by Humphrey Primatt (d. 1777) – a ‘Dr. Primatt’ is mentioned among the original congregation at Essex Street – and The Cry of Nature; or, An Appeal to Mercy and to Justice, on Behalf of the Persecuted Animals (1791) by the republican John Oswald (d. 1793). 3. Poems of Anna Letitia Barbauld, ed. William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft (Athens, GA, and London: University of Georgia Press, 1994), p. xxxiii. 4. Priestley had touched on the ‘[i]mportance of our American colonies’ and the ‘entire subserviency of a colony to the mother country’ in his Warrington lectures. See Essay on a Course of Liberal Education, p. 60. 5. Joseph Priestley: Political Writings, ed. Peter N. Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 129, 130, 140. 6. Ibid., p. 129. These ideas were pursued in the second edition of Priestley’s Essay on Government (1771): ‘. . . when those who lay the tax upon others exempt themselves, there is tyranny . . . Upon these principles it is evident, that there must have been a gross inattention to the very first principles of liberty . . . in


7. 8.

9.

10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

19.

the first scheme of taxing the inhabitants of America in the British parliament.’ This was printed in Philadelphia in 1772. Political Writings, pp. 135, 138–9, 134, 131, 144. Gentleman’s Magazine, 39 (1769), 405; AR, 18 (1794), 337; and Jenny Graham, ‘Revolutionary Philosopher: The Political Ideas of Joseph Priestley (1733–1804). Part One’, Enlightenment and Dissent, 8 (1989), 57. Crook only lists one edition, with Johnson’s name, in 1769, although the ESTC lists a new edition (from Johnson) the same year. If it was circulated in such numbers, it seems strange that so few appear to have survived. I have been unable to inspect an original copy. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison both read and admired Priestley’s early political writings and, like him, were in favour of religious freedom and church disestablishment. Jefferson also later befriended and corresponded with Priestley, to whom he wrote in 1800, ‘Yours is one of the few lives precious to mankind.’ In 1803 Johnson fulfilled an order of books for Madison (then Secretary of State), which he received from a Philadelphia bookseller. See Colin Bonwick, English Radicals and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), on which this chapter draws pp. 38–9. John Sainsbury, Disaffected Patriots: London Supporters of Revolutionary America 1769–1782 (Kingston, Ont.: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1987), pp. 30–1; Biographical Dictionary of Modern British Radicals, Volume 1: 1780–1830, ed. Joseph O. Baylen and Norbert J. Gossman (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1979), p. 17; The Auto-Biography of Luke Hansard, ed. Robin Myers (London: Printing Historical Society, 1991), p. 61; and John Feather, A History of British Publishing (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 118. Quoted in Carla H. Hay, James Burgh: Spokesman for Reform in Hanoverian England (Washington: University Press of America, 1979), p. 125 n76. Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman, p. 46. Walter Graham, English Literary Periodicals (New York: Octagon Books, 1966), p. 216. Essay on . . . Government, pp. 36–7; and Remarks on . . . Blackstone’s Commentaries, p. 39. Verner W. Crane, ‘The Club of Honest Whigs: Friends of Science and Liberty’, William and Mary Quarterly, 23 (1966), 229. James Burgh (1714–75), The Dignity of Human Nature (2 vols; London: J. Johnson and J. Payne, and T. Cadell, 1767), I. vii, 1, 248, 254–5. The sections on the ‘Peculiar Management’ and education of daughters and the ‘Dignity of Female Life’ almost certainly influenced Mary Wollstonecraft, who became friendly with Burgh’s widow. The ESTC lists Johnson among the publishers of Rush’s Dissertation on the Spasmodic Asthma of Children (1770), though not with the Dillys. Not incidentally perhaps, Johnson suffered from chronic asthma. Twenty years later, he would reprint Rush’s essay On the Punishment of Murder By Death (1793) and, by the end of the century, was shipping copies of his own publications out to Rush (who was in contact with Priestley in America), as well as managing through the press some of Rush’s pieces sent to him from Philadelphia. Matthew Robinson-Morris (1713–1800), (anon.) Considerations on the Measures Carrying On With Respect to the British Colonies in North America (London: R. Baldwin, [1774]), pp. 10, 159–60, 44–5; and C. H. Timperley, A Dictionary of Printers and Printing (London: H. Johnson [etc.], 1839), p. 838.

Notes 189 20. Bonwick, English Radicals and the American Revolution, pp. 70–1; and Benjamin Franklin’s Letters to the Press 1758–1775, ed. Verner W. Crane (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1950), p. xxxiv. It should be noted that, out of around 40 new titles published by Johnson that year, fewer than five might have been categorized expressly under politics. The same proportions hold for 1775. 21. Macaulay’s was ‘A name, to ev’ry son of freedom dear,/Which patriots yet unborn shall long revere’ (ll. 317–18), while Aikin was attributed with ‘taste, and spirit, wit, and learning’ (l. 422) and urged: Proceed! bright maid! and may thy polish’d page Refine the manners of a trifling age . . . Teach them [‘Thy sex’] with thee on Fancy’s wing to soar, With thee, the paths of science to explore; With thee, the open book of Nature scan, Yet nobly scorn the little pride of Man. (ll. 429–36).

22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29.

All quotes are from Mary Scott, The Female Advocate; a Poem (London: J. Johnson, 1774). Ibid., p. vi. Further evidence of this was provided by his publication of The Laws Respecting Women (1777), an anonymous work in four books dealing with the rights of women and marriage, property, crimes ‘committable by and with women’, and the legal relationship between parents and children. Priestley had touched on ‘Laws Relating to the Commerce of the Sexes’ in his Warrington lectures, to which Scott (perhaps knowingly) alludes in her ‘Preface’ where she hopes that the ‘advantages resulting from a liberal education’ can be more widely ‘diffused’. Johnson would also sell Poems on Chiefly Devotional Subjects (3 vols, 1780) by ‘Theodosia’ (Anne Steele), to whom The Female Advocate was dedicated. This new edition was printed in Bristol and edited by Caleb Evans (1737–91), a prominent Calvinist Baptist and one of the most vociferous pro-American dissenters. Charles Gerring, Notes on Printers and Booksellers (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., 1900), p. 61. PH, XVII. 1077–8. The Correspondence of Edmund Burke (10 vols; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1958–78), II. 540–1 (hereafter cited as Burke, Correspondence). PH, XVII. 1079; and William Enfield (1741–97), Observations on Literary Property (London: J. Johnson, 1774), pp. 51, 7. Enfield cited Priestley as an example of an author ‘so poorly indemnified for their labour, as to be obliged to give up the execution of noble and useful designs’ – a reference to the latter’s projected History and Present State of all the Branches of Experimental Philosophy which was suspended after the poor reception of his History and Present State of Discoveries Relating to Vision, Light, and Colours (1772). Johnson had helped Priestley publish this by subscription. See ibid., p. 49. PH, XVII. 1099–1100, 1086; and Gwyn Walters, ‘The Booksellers in 1759 and 1774: the Battle for Literary Property’, Library, 29 (1974), 287–311. Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (3 vols; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1945), I. xxv n2; and Alexander Stephens, ‘Stephensiana – No. III’, Monthly Magazine, 52 (1821), 426–7.

190 Romanticism, Publishing and Dissent 30. The amendment would have enforced the requirement in the 1710 Act (which was widely ignored) for booksellers to lodge ten copies of each newly-printed work with the Stationers’ Company. Johnson was among the 46 signatories of the petition. 31. Aikin, 1167–8; and Johnson to E. Jones, 4 April 1800, BL. 32. PH, XVII. 1099. 33. Johnson to Longman, 9 September 1806, BL; and Enfield, Observations on Literary Property, pp. 7, 52. 34. Schofield, A Scientific Autobiography, p. 22; and The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Leonard W. Labaree (13 vols; New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1960–9), XIII. 484. Johnson’s name would have been familiar to Franklin from at least July 1764 when the British writer on agriculture John Mills (d. 1784) mentioned him in a letter, though not in the most flattering of terms: ‘I expect the 2d., 3d. and 4th volumes of my work [A New and Complete System of Animal Husbandry] hourly from my bookseller [‘Mr. Johnson’] . . . but such is the negligence of those gentry in all affairs which are not their own immediate concern, or attended with lucre to them, that I fear I shall not yet be able to get them in time for the ship.’ See ibid., XI. 257–8. 35. Priestley and Lindsey’s views were still generally too extreme for an American audience, although some slight inroads would be made by the Reverend William Hazlitt who went over in 1783 and lectured on the evidences of Christianity. He reprinted a number of Priestley’s tracts and showed copies of Lindsey’s revised Prayer Book to preachers in Boston who eventually followed suit, but the spread of ‘rational’ religion in New England remained isolated and tentative. 36. MS 12.44 (25) DWL. 37. See Bonwick, English Radicals and the American Revolution, p. 43. 38. See James E. Bradley, Religion, Revolution, and English Radicalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 190–1; and TMW, XXV. 396. 39. Priestley, (anon.) An Address to Protestant Dissenters of All Denominations, on the Approaching Election of Members of Parliament, With Respect to the State of Public Liberty in General, and of American Affairs in Particular (London: J. Johnson, 1774), pp. 9, 3, 14, 5. 40. Ibid., p. 10; and Bradley, Religion, Revolution, and English Radicalism, pp. 197–8. 41. An Address to Protestant Dissenters, p. 15. 42. Gentleman’s Magazine, 46 (1776), 505; and Henry P. Ippel, ‘British Sermons and the American Revolution’, Journal of Religious History, 12 (1982), 191–2, 199. Ippel notes that, as not every sermon was printed, these may only represent a minority of the number actually delivered. 43. Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman, p. 251; and G. M. Ditchfield, ‘Anti-trinitarianism and Toleration in Late Eighteenth Century British Politics: the Unitarian Petition of 1792’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 42 (1991), 46. 44. Quoted in Bradley, Religion, Revolution, and English Radicalism, p. 357, which examines Walker’s role in detail. 45. Ebenezer Radcliff (1732–1809), A Sermon Preached at Walthamstow, December 13, 1776 (London: J. Johnson, 1776), pp. 5, 26, 6; and Seed, ‘Gentlemen Dissenters’, 319. Savile evidently had trouble obtaining as many copies as he wanted and even considered footing the cost of a new edition. 46. Newcome Cappe (1733–1800), A Sermon Preached on Friday the Fourth of February, MDCCLXXX (York: printed by A. Ward and sold by J. Johnson and T. Cadell, London, and by the booksellers in York, 1780), pp. 27, 32; and A Sermon Preached

Notes 191

47.

48.

49.

50. 51. 52. 53.

54. 55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

64.

on Wednesday the 21st of February, MDCCLXXXI (York: printed by A. Ward and sold by J. Johnson, and T. Cadell, London, and by the booksellers in York, 1781), p. 9. After leaving Cambridge, Wakefield (1756–1801) had briefly served as a curate in Liverpool where he was used to visiting John Gore’s bookshop. After resigning his living on account of his Arian beliefs in 1779, he was appointed classics tutor at Warrington on Priestley and Gore’s recommendation. Bradley, Religion, Revolution, and English Radicalism, p. 158, makes the point that the majority of English pro-American sentiment was still Anglican, not dissenting, in origin, although dissenters did help to establish ‘the dominant ideology of opposition’. Rutt, I. 289–90; and Anne Durning Holt, A Life of Joseph Priestley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1931), pp. 73–4. Price had quoted from Shelburne’s ‘plan of pacification’ speech to the Lords on 10 November 1775: ‘The surest as well as the most dignified mode of proceeding for this country. – Suspend all hostilities. – Repeal the acts which immediately distress America’. See Richard Price (1723–91), Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, the Principles of Government, and the Justice and Policy of the War with America (11th edn, London: T. Cadell, E. and C. Dilly and J. Johnson, 1776), p. 57. Burke, Correspondence, III. 322. Burke’s view was shared by many orthodox dissenting ministers. Anon., Political Empiricism: a Letter to the Rev. John Wesley (London: J. Johnson, 1776), pp. 4, 31–2, 16, 27–8, 23. PH, XVIII. 1282–98. Wilkes referred members to ‘the works of the incomparable Dr. Price’ in his speech. Life and Correspondence of Major John Cartwright, ed. F. D. Cartwright (2 vols; London: Henry Colburn, 1826), I. 115–16; and Price, Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, pp. 9–10. Priestley, Address to Protestant Dissenters, p. 7. Dunning (1731–83) was a prominent barrister and Shelburnite MP with whom Priestley associated and talked politics. A former Solicitor-General in Grafton’s ministry (1768–70), he had resigned over the affair with Wilkes. He had defended John Almon (in 1765), supported the Feathers’ Tavern petition in 1772 and spoken on behalf of the London booksellers’ copyright bill in 1774. His motion that ‘the influence of the Crown has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished’ was famously carried in the Commons in April 1780. See Alexander Stephens, Memoirs of John Horne Tooke (2 vols; London: J. Johnson and Co., 1813), II. 8, 54. Ibid., II. 22–4. TMW, XXV. 396. PH, XIX. 850. Memoirs, I. 79–80. Quoted in Holt, A Life of Joseph Priestley, p. 81. G. M. Ditchfield, ‘The Subscription Issue in British Parliamentary Politics, 1772–79’, Parliamentary History, 7 (1988), 61–4. Henry Zouch (1725?–95), Observations upon a Bill, Now Depending in Parliament, Entitled ‘A Bill (With the Amendments) to Punish by Imprisonment, and Hard Labour, Certain Offenders, and to Establish Proper Places for their Reception’ ([1779]). Christopher Wyvill (1740–1822), Political Papers (6 vols; York: printed for J. Johnson, J. Debrett and J. Mawman, London; and J. Todd, York, 1794–1804), I. 2–3, 8–9.

192 Romanticism, Publishing and Dissent 65. G. S. Veitch, The Genesis of Parliamentary Reform (London: Constable & Co., 1913), pp. 58–61; and A Defence of Dr. Price, and the Reformers of England ([York]: printed for J. Johnson and J. Stockdale, London; and J. Todd, York, 1792), p. 7. 66. See Eugene Charlton Black, The Association: British Extraparliamentary Political Organization 1769–1793 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), pp. 178–82. The SCI started with 15 charter members (including Jebb, Cartwright and Price) but had doubled its numbers within a month. John Disney (a disciple of Jebb at Cambridge) soon became active and George Walker was brought in by Cartwright. John Horne was one of 18 new members recruited in April 1781. 67. TMW, III. 449. 68. John Jebb (1736–86), (anon.) An Address to the Freeholders of Middlesex (3rd edn, London: J. Dixwell, T. Cadell, J. Almon, J. Johnson and J. Bew, 1780), pp. 19, 15n. 69. John Bew was publisher of the General Evening Post (1774–91) and Political Magazine (1780–85). He and Johnson also issued a volume of Poems (1779) by the Anglican cleric William Tasker (1740–1800), which included the staunchly jingoistic ‘Ode to the Warlike Genius of Great Britain’. Dixwell chiefly sold medical books. 70. Jebb, Address to the Freeholders of Middlesex, pp. 20–1n. 71. Ibid., pp. 18–19n, 15n, 9–10n. 72. Baylen and Gossman, Biographical Dictionary of Modern British Radicals, pp. 260–3; John Disney (ed.), The Works Theological, Medical, Political, and Miscellaneous, of John Jebb (London: T. Cadell, J. Johnson and J. Stockdale; and Cambridge: J. and J. Merrill, 1787), I. 167; and Gascoigne, ‘Anglican Latitudinarianism and Political Radicalism’, 30. 73. Benjamin Franklin (1706–90), Political, Miscellaneous, and Philosophical Pieces (London: J. Johnson, 1779), pp. 550–4, vi. 74. Critical Review, 49 (1780), 174. 75. Towers (1737–99) was the son of a second-hand bookseller and had served an apprenticeship in the trade at the same time as Johnson, under the well-known Whig provincial bookseller Robert Goadby in Sherborne, Dorset. Their names, in fact, appeared together as sellers of A Letter Address’d to the Right Honourable Brass Crosby, Esq; Lord Mayor of . . . London, Respecting the Present High Price of Provisions (1771). Towers had given up business in 1774 and become ordained as a dissenting minister. In 1778 he was appointed morning preacher alongside Richard Price at Newington Green but continued to write and edit. He was a prominent (and much-caricatured) member of the SCI, his ‘Whiggish democratical notions’ being ruefully commented upon by Boswell. Latterly Johnson would help publish his Tracts on Political and Other Subjects (3 vols, 1796) and Thoughts on National Insanity (1797).

3 A Friend to Reformation 1. Quoted in Herbert McLachlan, ‘More Letters of Theophilus Lindsey’, Transactions of the Unitarian Historical Society, 3 (1926), 365. 2. William Beloe, The Sexagenarian (2 vols; London: F. C. and J. Rivington, 1817), I. 346.

Notes 193 3. Thorpe, Joseph Priestley, pp. 94–5. Galton (1753–1832) had studied commerce at Warrington in the late 1760s and now helped to run his Quaker family’s gun foundry at Birmingham. Johnson published his Natural History of Birds (3 vols, 1787–91), the first book of its type for children. 4. From its deliberations emerged the idea for a ‘Society for Promoting Medical Knowledge’, founded by Hunter and George Fordyce in 1783, whose Communications (2 vols, 1784–90) Johnson published. This, in turn, spawned a ‘Society for the Improvement of Medical and Chirurgical Knowledge’ which similarly entrusted him with its Transactions (3 vols, 1793–1812). 5. Percival and Henry were founders of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society in 1781. Aikin was elected a member in 1784 and Priestley, Darwin and Gilbert Wakefield (another of Aikin’s friends) were all made honorary members. In a letter to Johnson in April 1783, Henry refers to ‘all your Friends here’ in Manchester. Quoted in Leslie F. Chard, ‘Bookseller to Publisher: Joseph Johnson and the English Book Trade, 1760 to 1810’, Library, 32 (1977), 146–7. 6. Rutt, I. 339. 7. Priestley, An History of the Corruptions of Christianity (2 vols; Birmingham: printed for J. Johnson, London, 1782), I. 2–3, 153, v–vi. 8. MS 12.58 (31, 35) DWL. Johnson also sold new editions of Priestley’s Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religion (1772–4), Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit (1777) and Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity Illustrated (1777), printed in Birmingham in 1782, and continued to send copies of his works to Dutch correspondents. 9. Rutt, I. 364, 362; and Priestley, History of the Corruptions of Christianity, II. 484. 10. MS 12.58 (37–8) DWL; and Tyson, p. 72. 11. The ‘Animadversions’ were by an ex-dissenter Samuel Badcock, whom Gilbert Wakefield accused of ‘labouring, like many others, to prove the sincerity of his conversion by the most vehement attacks on his first connexions.’ In 1783 Griffiths had begun to move the Monthly away from offering its readers ‘mere abstracts’, largely on Badcock’s advice, thus vacating territory subsequently occupied by Johnson’s Analytical Review. See Memoirs of . . . Gilbert Wakefield, I. 252; and Graham, English Literary Periodicals, p. 209. 12. Rutt, I. 368–9; and MS 12.58 (40) DWL. 13. Maccoby, English Radicalism, p. 479; and Samuel Horsley, A Charge to the Clergy of the Archdeaconry of St. Albans (London: n.p., 1783), p. 67. 14. MS 12.58 (42) DWL; and Rutt, I. 370. 15. Jebb, Works, II. 250–3, 242–3. 16. Ibid., II. 245. 17. Gentleman’s Magazine, 55 (1785), 112. 18. Rutt, I. 377–8, 385. 19. Rutt, I. 379. 20. TMW, VII. 82, 67. 21. TMW, VII. 57–8; and Rutt, I. 379. 22. Priestley, The Importance and Extent of Free Inquiry in Matters of Religion (Birmingham: printed for J. Johnson, London, 1785), pp. 33, iv, 3; and Rutt, I. 383–4n. Priestley’s sermon was advertised at 1s 6d. 23. The Importance and Extent of Free Enquiry, p. 23. 24. Ibid., pp. 40–1 (my italics). 25. Ibid., p. 6. 26. Memoirs, I. 75; and Wyvill, Political Papers, IV. 158.

194 Romanticism, Publishing and Dissent 27. Theophilus Lindsey and Newcome Cappe’s wife, Catherine, had kept religious Sunday schools during the 1760s but the idea was really only popularized by Robert Raikes of Gloucester in the 1780s. Trimmer praised Raikes in The Oeconomy of Charity (1787) and he reprinted her Sacred History (1788) for Johnson, George Robinson and Longman, possibly for use in his classroom. Sunday school sermons and addresses featured prominently in Johnson’s output over the next ten years and the Analytical gave positive notices to such works, including Trimmer’s own Sunday-School Catechist (1788) and Sunday-Scholar’s Manual (1788). 28. Anon., Some Account of the Life and Writings of Mrs Trimmer (2 vols; London: F. C. and J. Rivington, J. Johnson and Co., and J. Hatchard, 1814), I. 93, 60, 149; and Johnson to Longman, 9 September 1806, BL. 29. Josiah Bull (ed.), John Newton of Olney and St. Mary Woolnoth (London: Religious Tract Society, 1868), pp. 110, 129. 30. Ibid., pp. 212, 142, 239, 246, 219. Cowper (1731–1800) expounded his own views about fast days at exactly the same time in his poem ‘Expostulation’ (ll. 400–5): Thy fastings, when calamity at last Suggests th’expedient of an yearly fast, What mean they? Canst thou dream there is a pow’r In lighter diet at a later hour, To charm to sleep the threat’nings of the skies, And hide past folly from all-seeing eyes?

31.

32.

33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38.

39.

All quotes are from Poems By William Cowper, of the Inner Temple, Esq. (London: J. Johnson, 1782). F. A. Mumby, Publishing and Bookselling (London: Jonathan Cape, 1949), p. 200; and Bull, John Newton, p. 259. Earlier in his career with Davenport, Johnson had launched a monthly periodical, The Gospel-Magazine (1766–68), expressly designed to promote ‘Religion, Devotion, and Piety. From Evangelical Principles’. From 1787 Johnson also published an edition of Watts’s Divine and Moral Songs for children. This was praised in the Analytical for its ‘utility’ in ‘inculcating lessons of piety and virtue’ and for appealing to ‘all denominations of believers’. Johnson’s version was nevertheless openly Unitarian in design and much criticized, as a result, by Sarah Trimmer. See AR, 1 (1788), 207. Norma Russell, A Bibliography of William Cowper to 1837 (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1963), p. 43; and West, 203n. LPW, II. 286, 276. All quotes are from The Task, A Poem, in Six Books (London: J. Johnson, 1785). The disillusion with Fox was powerfully felt by John Horne Tooke who contrasted his debauchery and fondness for party and cabal with Pitt’s sobriety and love of public virtue in a damning satire which Johnson published, Two Pair of Portraits (1788), designed to coincide with the Westminster election. Horne Tooke actually challenged Fox for his seat in 1790 and 1796, although, by that stage, the latter had largely rehabilitated himself in the eyes of many dissenters. Quoted in Veitch, The Genesis of Parliamentary Reform, p. 101. John Newton (in 1786) also described Lindsey’s works as being full of ‘sophistry and effrontery’ and too ‘dangerous to be in the way of . . . servants’. Quoted in Ursula Henriques, Religious Toleration in England, 1787–1833 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961), p. 228. Bull, John Newton, pp. 61, 134.

Notes 195 40. William Roscoe (1753–1831), (anon.) Mount Pleasant: A Descriptive Poem (Warrington: printed for J. Johnson, London; and Liverpool: S. Crane, 1777), p. 7; and Biographical Dictionary of Modern British Radicals, Baylen, pp. 417– 18. 41. Maria (b.1770/1) and Harriet Falconar (b.[1774]), Poems on Slavery (London: T. and J. Egerton, J. Murray and J. Johnson, 1788), p. 12. 42. Priestley, A Sermon on the Subject of the Slave Trade (Birmingham: printed for the author and sold by J. Johnson, London, 1788), pp. 23, 1, 35, 33. 43. William Dickson, Letters on Slavery (London: J. Phillips, J. Johnson, and Elliot and Kay, 1789), p. iii. 44. Read, The English Provinces, pp. 40–1. 45. It was initially printed by subscription and sold by the author. Johnson’s name features in the first three editions. It was reviewed in the Analytical by Mary Wollstonecraft who thought it an interesting ‘curiosity’, apart from the rather ‘tiresome’ account of its author’s religious opinions and conversion to Methodism. Her reading of it, though, clearly stayed with her: ‘Is one half of the human species, like the poor African slaves, to be subjected to prejudices that brutalize them . . .’. See AR, 4 (1789), 27–9; and Vindication of the Rights of Woman (London: J. Johnson, 1792), p. 330 (hereafter cited as Rights of Woman). 46. Alexander Geddes (1737–1802), (anon.) An Apology for Slavery (London: J. Johnson and R. Faulder, 1792), p. 47. 47. George Gregory (1754–1808), Essays Historical and Moral (London: J. Johnson, 1785), p. 300; and Anon., Thoughts on Civilization, and the Gradual Abolition of Slavery in Africa and the West Indies (London: J. Sewell, [1789]), p. 1. 48. See Henriques, Religious Toleration, pp. 59–61; and Richard Burgess Barlow, Citizenship and Conscience: a Study in the Theory and Practice of Religious Toleration in England During the Eighteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1962), pp. 223–7. Born in Liverpool, Heywood (1753–1828) was descended from an illustrious nonconformist family. Oliver (1630–1702) and Nathanael Heywood (1633–77) had both been ejected from their livings in 1662 but, as itinerant preachers, had helped found influential dissenting congregations throughout Lancashire and Yorkshire. Samuel’s father, the banker Benjamin Heywood (d. 1795), was a friend of William Roscoe and patronised Henry Fuseli. His uncle, Arthur Heywood (1717?–95), also a merchant and banker, served as treasurer of Warrington Academy. The Heywood brothers were heavily involved in the slavery business and Warrington itself educated the sons of several West Indies planters. 49. Heywood, The Right of Protestant Dissenters to a Compleat Toleration Asserted (2nd edn, London: J. Johnson and J. Debrett, 1789), p. iii. 50. Ibid., pp. iii, 22, 45, 38. 51. Ibid., pp. 50, 57, 63, 93. 52. Priestley, A Letter to the Right Honourable William Pitt (2nd edn, London: J. Johnson and J. Debrett, 1787), pp. 9–10, 13–14. 53. Ibid., pp. 16–17, 21–2. 54. Ibid., pp. 25, 28–9, 37–8. 55. Ibid., pp. 10–11, 14–15, 35. 56. Rutt, I. 412, 408n; and MS 12.58 (48) DWL. 57. Richard Price: Political Writings, ed. D. O. Thomas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 52, 165. 58. Ibid., pp. 160, 164–5.

196 Romanticism, Publishing and Dissent 59. Jebb, Works, I. iii. 60. Among the subscribers were Francis Blackburne, Newcome Cappe, John Cartwright, Charles Dilly, Thomas Erskine, John Prior Estlin, Catharine Macaulay, Andrew Kippis, Edmund Law, John Lee, Lindsey, Priestley, Price, Samuel Heywood, Edward Jeffries, (Jebb’s closest friend) Capel Lofft, Thomas Percival, Abraham Rees, Joshua Toulmin, Benjamin Vaughan, George Walker, William Wood, Christopher Wyvill and Thomas Christie. Of the 600, however, only 38 were dissenting ministers, compared to nearly 150 Anglican clerics. Priestley had received his copy by 11 June when he commented to Lindsey, ‘It is much beyond my expectation, and does Dr. Disney much credit.’ Disney was at pains to point out the similarity between Priestley and Jebb and spoke of ‘two great minds, uniformly and mutually acting under the influence of the best principles to be derived from the study of true religion and philosophy’. See R. K. Webb, ‘The Emergence of Rational Dissent’, Enlightenment and Religion, pp. 38–40; Rutt, I. 410; and Jebb, Works, I. 129. 61. Priestley, Defences of Unitarianism, In Three Parts (London: J. Johnson, 1787–90), pp. ix–x; and Rutt, I. 401, 406. 62. AR, 1 (1788), 229. 63. It appears that Frend did join the Society, uniquely among the Unitarian fellowship at Cambridge, most of whom objected to Jebb’s preamble, but that he later withdrew. 64. Frida Knight, University Rebel: the Life of William Frend (1757–1841) (London: Victor Gollancz, 1971), pp. 68, 99. 65. William Frend (1757–1841), Thoughts on Subscription to Religious Tests (St Ives: printed by T. Bloom and sold by J. and J. Merrill, and J. Bowtell, Cambridge, D. Prince, Oxford, and J. Johnson, London, 1788), pp. 3, 6–7. 66. Ibid., pp. 24, 19–20. 67. Quoted in Knight, University Rebel, pp. 68–9. 68. Rutt, II. 18, 22–3. 69. Knight, University Rebel, p. 69. 70. Ibid., p. 71. 71. Both William and Alexander Christie, Thomas’s father, appear to have set up accounts with Johnson. According to Lindsey, ‘Mr. Christie of Montrose’ wrote the opening theological review in the first number of the Analytical. 72. Christie (1761–96) had first come to London to study under Simmons (1750–1813) at the Westminster General Dispensary in 1784. He may also have been led to Johnson via the printer John Nichols, whom he befriended. Nichols had printed the ‘Chapter Coffee House’ edition of the ‘Lives of the Poets’ and, like Johnson, took a share in the posthumous Works of Samuel Johnson (11 vols, 1787). He also printed Christie’s Miscellanies: Literary, Philosophical and Moral (1788) for the bookseller. See Tyson, pp. 96–7. 73. See TR, I. v–vi: ‘The next thing we wish to see executed, is a set of periodical publications, appropriated to new discoveries in all the separate branches of knowledge; each of which . . . should contain only sketches, and outlines of new and general systems; and Tyson, pp. 95–8. The final three volumes of the Repository were reviewed in the Analytical in October 1788. 74. AR, 1 (1788), iv. 75. Quoted in Tyson, p. 97. 76. Derek Roper, Reviewing Before the ‘Edinburgh’ 1788–1802 (London: Methuen,

Notes 197

77.

78. 79. 80.

81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

1978), pp. 22–3; and AR, 1 (1788), ii, v. Contributors, however, still did not give their names, as had originally been hoped. Johnson had sold Geddes’s Letter to the Rev. Dr. Priestley (1787) which aimed to prove that the divinity of Christ was an original article of belief. Priestley was pleased enough with it to notice it in his Defences of Unitarianism for 1787 (1788). He himself, however, had recommended a Unitarian, Joseph Bretland of Exeter, to Johnson as ‘the most desirable theological reviewer he could engage’. See MS 12.58 (48) DWL; and Rutt, II. 10. DNB entry for Geddes; and Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson, ed. Thomas Sadler (3 vols; London: Macmillan, 1869), I. 64. LPW, III. 239; and Roper, Reviewing, p. 23 n41. For details of the reviews (signed ‘G.G.’ and ‘P.P.’), see Russell, A Bibliography of William Cowper, pp. 158–60. Toulmin inscribed himself ‘A.N.’, as he had done in the Theological Repository, and it was again owing to Priestley’s influence that he became a contributor. See Rutt, II. 20. Roper, Reviewing, p. 243. Heywood, Right of Protestant Dissenters, p. 95n. AR, 3 (1789), 87–8. PH, XXVIII. 25, 28–9, 38–40. Quoted in Henriques, Religious Toleration in England, p. 63.

4 Responses to Revolution 1. DNB entry for John Howard (1726–90). 2. Johnson went on to publish Aikin’s A View of the Character and Public Services of the Late John Howard (1792) and a set of Howard’s Intire Works (2 vols, 1792). 3. See Veitch, The Genesis of Parliamentary Reform, p. 106. 4. Leigh Hunt’s parents were both ‘Universalists, and great admirers of Mr. Winchester’. Priestley later preached at his meeting house in Philadelphia and adopted some of his Universalist opinions. See The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt, ed. J. E. Morpurgo (London: Cresset Press, 1949), p. 18. 5. William Enfield (1741–97), A Sermon on the Centennial Commemoration of the Revolution (London: J. Johnson, 1788), p. 17; and Mark Philp, Godwin’s Political Justice (London: Duckworth, 1986), p. 37. 6. Rutt, I. 256. 7. Private Correspondence of Benjamin Franklin, ed. William Temple Franklin (2 vols; London: Henry Colburn, 1817), I. 175–6. 8. Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke. Volume VIII: the French Revolution 1790–1794, ed. L. G. Mitchell (Oxford: Clarenden Press, 1989), p. 369. 9. Christie mentions private conversations with Necker and Rochefoucauld, and quotes from the work of Condorcet, in his Letters on the Revolution of France (1791). 10. Brian Rigby, ‘Radical Spectators of the Revolution: the Case of the Analytical Review’, in The French Revolution and British Culture, ed. Ceri Crossley and Ian Small (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 68–9, 74–5. 11. Lucy Aikin, Memoir of John Aikin, M.D. (2 vols; London: Baldwin, Cradock & Joy, 1823), p. 130. 12. Rutt, II. 27, 38; and Knight, University Rebel, p. 85.

198 Romanticism, Publishing and Dissent 13. Price, A Discourse on the Love of One’s Country (London: T. Cadell, 1789), pp. 2, 12, 34. In August the Analytical had reprinted a review of A Discourse on the Love of One’s Country delivered the previous November in Orléans by M. l’abbé de Thorame – a work which ‘paints in strong colours the oppressed poor, groaning under the burden which the rich man has thrown from his shoulders.’ See AR, 1 (1788), 518. 14. Priestley, The Conduct to be Observed By Dissenters in order to Procure the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts (2nd edn, Birmingham: printed by Thomas Pearson and sold by J. Johnson, London, [1789]), p. 15. 15. Rutt, II. 49, 41; and AR, 5 (1789), 471–5, and 6 (1790), 84–5. 16. See Barlow, Citizenship and Conscience, pp. 253–7. 17. The ‘Catalogue of Books and Pamphlets, Published During the First Six Months of 1790’ in the Analytical lists almost three pages of titles (85 in all) under ‘Corporation and Test Acts’, 39 of which can be assigned to Johnson. 18. John Aikin (1747–1822), (anon.) The Spirit of the Constitution, and That of the Church of England, Compared (London: J. Johnson, 1790), p. 14. 19. Price had paid tribute to the example and legacy of Milton and other seventeenth-century Commonwealth writers in his Discourse (‘They sowed a seed which has since taken root and is now growing up to a glorious harvest’) and it seems no coincidence that, from this point, Johnson became much more involved in reprinting their works. In August 1790, for example, he and Fuseli devised their ambitious plans for an illustrated edition of Milton’s poems (to be compiled by Cowper and engraved by Blake, among others) which would occupy Fuseli for the rest of the decade. 20. Burke, Correspondence, VI. 83–4. Johnson’s imprint appeared on the ninth and tenth editions of The Protestant-dissenter’s Catechism in 1792 and 1794. 21. PH, XXVIII. 356. The Substance of the Speech of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, in the Debate on the Army Estimates, in the House of Commons (1790) was reviewed in AR, 6 (1790), 334–6: ‘Such are the opinions of Edmund Burke! What follows is still more inconsistent with the principles of that gentleman to be found upon record.’ 22. Rutt, II. 56, 61–2. 23. AR, 7 (1790), 88. 24. Memoirs of . . . Gilbert Wakefield, I. 228, 318. In January 1789 Wakefield had written to William Frend declaring Johnson to be ‘as heedless, insipid, inactive a Mortal, to say the best of him, as consumes the Fruits of the Earth.’ See MS 12.45 (117) DWL. 25. George Walker (1734?–1807), The Dissenters’ Plea (Birmingham: printed by J. Thompson and sold by J. Johnson, London, 1790), pp. 3, 20–1. 26. Rutt, II. 60. 27. Vaughan’s 130-page Collection included extracts from Locke, Hoadly, Heywood, Franklin, Montesquieu, Necker, the Protestant pastor Rabaud de St Etienne, and the ‘Measures of the National Assembly of France respecting Non-Catholics’. Vaughan was in Paris with Shelburne’s eldest son in 1790 and attended the ‘fête de la fédération’ in the Champ de Mars on 14 July. 28. Lucy Aikin, Memoir of John Aikin, I. 150. 29. John Aikin (1747–1822), (anon.) An Address to the Dissidents of England on Their Late Defeat (London: J. Johnson, 1790), pp. 6, 16–17, 30, 22. 30. Barbauld, (anon.) An Address to the Opposers of the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts (2nd edn, London: J. Johnson, 1790), pp. 36, 4, 7; and AR, 6 (1790), 345–6.

Notes 199 31. Quoted in Anthony Lincoln, Some Political and Social Ideas of English Dissent 1763–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938), p. 256. 32. The Reflections were originally announced as ‘speedily [to] be published’ on 12 February 1790. 33. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), pp. 181, 93, 86. Burke’s criticisms generally betrayed deep fears about the collective threat of an organized and unified network of dissenting preachers, publishers and propagandists. His view that ‘Writers, especially when they act in a body, and with one direction, have great influence on the publick mind’ was approvingly picked up on by the Analytical. See ibid., p. 213; and AR, 8 (1790), 299. 34. Burke, Reflections, pp. 90, 148. In his Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air (1774) Priestley had predicted that scientific advances might prove so liberating as to cause the upper orders to ‘tremble, even at an air pump, or an electrical machine’ – a passage which, at that point, had had to be omitted by its French translator. Johnson was currently selling an abridged version as part of his Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air, and Other Branches of Natural Philosophy (3 vols, 1790), which Priestley had actually negotiated through Burke and Fox to be able to dedicate to the Prince of Wales. Burke at that time had written in support, believing it would help win dissenting votes at the 1790 election. 35. Burke, Reflections, p. 148; and Correspondence, VI. 84. 36. AR, 8 (1790), 416; and McLachlan, ‘More Letters of Theophilus Lindsey’, 372. 37. AR, 8 (1790), 295–307, 408–14. Rather rashly, it also predicted that, ‘as soon as the rapid tide of fashion shall have subsided’, the Reflections would have ‘but few readers, and still fewer admirers in this country.’ 38. Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797), (anon.) A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in A Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (London: J. Johnson, 1790), pp. 113, 96, 32–3, 73. 39. Priestley, Letters to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Occasioned By His Reflections on the Revolution in France (Birmingham: printed by Thomas Pearson and sold by J. Johnson, London, 1791), pp. iii–v, 49, 81, 128. 40. Capel Lofft (1751–1824), Remarks on the Letter of the Rt. Hon. Edmund Burke, Concerning the Revolution in France (London: J. Johnson, 1790; 2nd edn, London: J. Johnson; and J. Rackham, Bury St Edmunds, 1791), pp. 71, 9; (2nd edn), p. 91. 41. Ibid. (1st edn), pp. 2, 48, 54, 78; and AR, 3 (1789), 94. 42. Lofft, Remarks, pp. 8, 58–9, 79, (2nd edn) 104. 43. Priestley, Letters to . . . Burke, pp. 140–1. 44. Rutt, II. 89, 97, 99; and Priestley, Letters to . . . Burke, p. 141. 45. AR, 8 (1790), 414. 46. LPW, III. 458–9; and Rutt, II. 101. 47. Lindsey to William Tayleur, 23 February 1791, uncatalogued MS John Rylands University Library. The same day Priestley wrote to Lindsey, expressing his wish to see Paine’s work and asking that Johnson send him a copy. On 11 March he made further enquiries: ‘Is the edition cancelled, or will it be sold in France and America, and a new one printed for England? Was Mr. Johnson threatened, or did he take the alarm of himself?’ Lindsey’s reply has evidently not survived but Priestley did not seem unduly worried about his bookseller when he wrote back three days later: ‘I am glad that Mr. Paine’s book is to be published as it was


48. 49.

50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55.

56. 57. 58. 59.

60.

61. 62.

printed, though not by Johnson. It will be read the more on account of the stoppages.’ See Rutt, II. 103–7. Johnson later suggested that the manuscript of a work might just as easily be handed to the printer first as to himself. See ST, XXIV. 511. The Complete Works of Thomas Paine (London: E. Truelove, 1875), p. 781; and David Freeman Hawke, Paine (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), p. 204. Paine had learned that Burke’s book was in the press when he visited John Debrett’s bookshop in late March or early April 1790. Thomas Paine (1737–1809), Rights of Man (London: J. Johnson, 1791), pp. 68, 59, 76–8 (hereafter cited as RM). RM, pp. 6, 158, 82. Ibid., pp. 110–13; 115–16. Ibid., pp. 159, 153. Belsham, pp. 296, 301. The first set of ‘Tracts’ (1791) printed by the Unitarian Society contained Priestley’s Appeal to the Serious and Candid Professors of Christianity (1772), Familiar Illustration of Certain Passages of Scripture (1772) and General View of the Arguments for the Unity of God (1783). Before the end of the year, a collection of Priestley and Price’s sermons, William Frend’s two Addresses to Members of the Church of England (1788–9), Joshua Toulmin’s Review of the Life, Character and Writings of the Rev. John Biddle (1789) and Joseph Cornish’s Life of Thomas Firmin (1780) had been reprinted. In all, 13 volumes were issued by the Society between 1791 and 1802. Belsham, pp. 302–3; PH, XXIX. 1388n; and Hawke, Paine, p. 224. As if to emphasize this, the twice-yearly ‘Catalogue of Books’ in the Analytical Review contained a brand new section from 1791, ‘Politico-Theology’. PH, XXIX. 555. Hawke, Paine, p. 223; and Barlow, Citizenship and Conscience, p. 281. PH, XXIX. 1315. Complete Works of Thomas Paine, p. 747, which reprints the short-hand account of Paine’s trial taken by Joseph Gurney: cf. The Genuine Trial of Thomas Paine, for a Libel Contained in the Second Part of Rights of Man . . . Taken in Short-Hand By E. Hodgson (London: J. S. Jordan, 1792), pp. 3–4: ‘. . . it was ushered into the world under circumstances that led me to believe that it would not confound the judicious reader; and then such a man would refute it as he went along’ (my italics). Rights of Man, Common Sense and Other Political Writings, ed. Mark Philp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 354; and Veitch, The Genesis of Parliamentary Reform, p. 269. Jordan’s edition, which went through at least eight printings during 1791, was even pricier at 3s. AR, 9 (1791), 312–18, 322–3. See Burke, Reflections, pp. 129–30. Priestley had read the Letter by 25 March when he wrote to Lindsey: ‘The “Dissenting Attorney” you inquire after is thought to be Mr. Nash, of Royston. It is indeed an excellent piece.’ See Rutt, II. 108. William Nash (c.1744–1829) was a prominent solicitor whose family was ‘liberal in religious opinion and zealous for political reform.’ He was at the heart of a vibrant dissenting circle extending into Hertfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Suffolk which involved the Cambridge printer Benjamin Flower, George Dyer, the young Henry Crabb Robinson and Capel Lofft. Robinson later despaired of Nash as a ‘Godwinite’ and, in his Letter, he certainly adopts a harsh anti-prelatical tone. See Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence, I. 35–6, 46.

Notes 201 63. Christie admitted that his original intention had been to write ‘one letter on the origin of the revolution’: ‘But as Mr. Paine, in his answer to Mr. Burke, intends to undertake this, I shall content myself with referring to his account of it . . .’. Until 1790 at least, he was also friendly with Burke. See Letters on the Revolution of France (London: J. Johnson 1791), pp. 65–6; and Burke, Correspondence, V. 412. 64. Christie, Letters, pp. 58–9, 277; and AR, 10 (1791), 207. 65. Christie, Letters, pp. 114, 122–3, 202. 66. Ibid., pp. 32–3, 30. Like Lofft, Christie argued that the abolition of titles at home would be inappropriate since the English nobility were of an altogether different cast from the French. Nor did he want the law of primogeniture completely scrapped or equal hereditary rights given to women. Lofft inserted extracts from Christie’s Letters in the second edition of his Remarks, which Johnson advertised in July. 67. AR, 11 (1791), 275–83. Christie’s second volume of Letters was evidently in the press as early as June and contained letters on the state of the clergy in England and France, the alliance between Church and State, the ‘abolition of monks, and hereditary nobility’, the Jacobin Club and the consequences of the French revolution for Europe. See AR, 10 (1791), 208. However, I have been unable to establish whether it was ever actually published. 68. Benjamin Bousfield, Observations on the Right Hon. Edmund Burke’s Pamphlet, on the Subject of the French Revolution (London: J. Johnson, 1791), p. 19. 69. AR, 10 (1791), 463–4. This was read by the 12-year-old Hazlitt who immediately struck off a letter in defence of Priestley to the local Shrewsbury Chronicle. 70. AR, 13 (1792), 537. 71. AR, 15 (1793), 84; and Heywood, (anon.) High Church Politics (London: J. Johnson, 1792), pp. 3–4. Dyer (1755–1841) had left Cambridge for London and arrived at Gilbert Wakefield’s house in Hackney by 4 January 1792. Johnson began printing his book the next day and within a fortnight had helped find him lodgings just off Fleet Street and ‘a little Occupation’ (probably reviewing for the Analytical). See MS 12.45 (121, 123) DWL. 72. Rights of Woman, pp. 1–3, 49, 4–5, viii, xii. 73. Ibid., pp. xiv, 26, 83, 23–4; and Paine, Rights of Man. Part The Second (London: J. S. Jordan, 1792), p. 21 (hereafter cited as RM2). Paine’s influence is further suggested by her random and somewhat wild digressions on inequities within the clergy and the iniquity of standing armies, both issues he sought to address by his radical tax proposals in the second part of Rights of Man. 74. RM2, pp. 65n, 120. Johnson arranged for Paine to stay at the home of a mutual friend, the engraver William Sharp, at Bromley in Kent. According to Fuseli, Paine and Johnson travelled there together in a hackney coach with ‘all the movables which Paine possessed.’ See John Knowles (ed.), The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli (2 vols; London: Colburn and Bentley, 1831), I. 374–5. 75. AR, 12 (1792), 241–9, 287–304, and 13 (1792), 481–9. 76. RM2, p. 174. Barlow (1754–1812) was a Yale graduate and lawyer, diplomat, businessman, journalist and poet, by turns. During the 1780s he had been one of a highly conservative group of writers known as the ‘Hartford Wits’ which also included Timothy Dwight (1752–1817). Dwight’s epic poem, The Conquest of Canaan (1785), dedicated to George Washington, had been reprinted in London for Johnson in 1788. Cowper had reviewed it in the Analytical, together with Barlow’s equally ambitious The Vision of Columbus (1788). That year Barlow had left America for Europe and had quickly become absorbed in French and English


77. 78. 79. 80.

81. 82.

83.

84.

85.

86.

87. 88.

politics, mixing with Shelburne’s set in London. After the failure of his business deals in France, he had returned to London in the spring of 1791 with an introduction to Johnson. RM, p. 156. Barlow, (anon.) Advice to the Privileged Orders (New York: Childs and Swaine, 1792), pp. 8, 95, 2, 33, 36, 14. Ibid., pp. 40–3, 49, 53, 28. AR, 12 (1792), 452–60; and CL, p. 208. Horne Tooke proposed Barlow on 9 March and it seems likely he also admitted Johnson, since he was the member due to apply to the bookseller for payment. Johnson may well, then, have been on his way to an SCI meeting in April with Paine (as Tyson argues) when the latter was arrested (ostensibly for debt) outside the London Tavern and the bookseller agreed to stand bail. See ST, XXV. 101; and Nicholas Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge: the Radical Years (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 28. All quotes are from The Conspiracy of Kings: a Poem (London: J. Johnson, 1792). This initially sold for 1s 6d. By the autumn, copies were down to a shilling. In each case, there were strong overtones from Isaiah: ‘Shake thyself from the dust; arise, and sit down, O Jerusalem: loose thyself from the bands of thy neck . . .’ (lii. 2). By arming Liberty with ‘Plowshares’ instead of ‘swords’ and ‘pruning hooks’ for ‘spears’ (II. 389–90), Darwin placed himself in a direct line of descent from Priestley and Price who had famously drawn upon the same text (Isaiah, ii. 4) in their 1789 sermons. Johnson had issued new translations of Isaiah by Michael Dodson for the Society for Promoting Knowledge of the Scriptures in 1790 and by Robert Lowth in 1791. Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802), (anon.) The Botanic Garden; A Poem, in Two Parts (London: J. Johnson, 1791), p. v, from which all quotes are taken. Darwin’s poem was widely praised by the reviewers, including Cowper in the Analytical. Its lines on the French revolution, however, did manage to find their way into Daniel Isaac Eaton’s Politics for the People (1793). According to testimony which Johnson gave at the 1794 treason trials, there were three editions of Barlow’s Advice, totalling 1,500 copies, and ‘there were a considerable number left.’ Given the circumstances, however, he may have been eager to depress the figures. See ST, XXIV. 518, 520. The French Revolution was a seven-book epic poem projected by Blake of which only the first survives in uncorrected proof form. Sixteen quarto pages of typeset verse (unevenly printed and beset with errors) were produced probably some time during the early summer of 1791, among them a title page without Blake’s name but with the proposed price of one shilling and an ‘Advertisement’ informing the public that the ‘remaining Books of this Poem are finished, and will be published in their Order.’ See William Blake’s Writings, ed. G. E. Bentley, Jr (2 vols; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), II. 1688–9, from which all quotes are taken. Cf. Priestley, The Conduct to be Observed By Dissenters, p. 13: ‘. . . our security . . . arises from enlightening the minds of our countrymen, and teaching them not to fear where no fear is . . .’; Christie, Letters, p. 4n: ‘Those who are alarmed lest such examples should be followed here, most surely are afraid where no fear is’; and Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, p. 345: ‘. . . they fear where no fear should find a place . . .’. AR, 9 (1791), 518–20. Johnson had first hired Blake to work on Enfield’s Speaker (5th edn, 1780). He subsequently became his most consistent employer and 1790–1 was their busiest

Notes 203

89. 90. 91.

92. 93.

94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99.

100.

101.

102.

103.

period, Blake executing his largest group of around 34 plates for the bookseller. He often complained, though, of being prevailed upon by Johnson and Fuseli to do nothing ‘but the meer drudgery of business’. See Blake: Complete Writings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford, 1985), p. 812. See David Erdman, Blake: Prophet Against Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954), pp. 138–9. PH, XXIX. 1322–3. Thomas Cooper (1759–1839), A Reply to Mr. Burke’s Invective Against Mr. Cooper, and Mr. Watt, in the House of Commons, on the 30th of April, 1792 (2nd edn, London: J. Johnson; and Manchester: M. Falkner and Co., 1792), pp. 7–8, 5, 11, 38. Ibid., pp. 74, 69–70, 79n, 16. Ibid., p. 62. The Society of the Friends of the People was formed in April 1792 as the result of a well-to-do secession from the SCI. It immediately drew up a ‘Declaration’ outlining its aim to restore free elections and a more equal representation. This was printed and read out during the Commons debate on 30 April in which Burke spoke, expressly to show that its ambitions were ‘limited’. Among the signatories were John Cartwright, Joseph Towers, Andrew Kippis and Thomas Christie. Cooper was proposed for membership on 19 May but withdrew after several members threatened to resign. See PH, XXIX. 1327–8. Wyvill, A Defence of Dr. Price, pp. 63, 70, 59–60, i–ii. Ibid., pp. 64, 62, 54, 50. Ibid., p. 13. PH, XXIX. 1392–4. ST, XXV. 162–3. This copy was introduced as evidence at the 1794 treason trials. According to David Erdman, Johnson sold an abridged version of Rights of Man in August 1791. See Blake: Prophet Against Empire, p. 138n8. In May 1791 the Manchester Constitutional Society commissioned Thomas Cooper to produce an abridgement: ‘Cooper consulted Horne Tooke about the project, but as the latter did not reply, it seems to have fallen through.’ See Albert Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 177 n31. ST, XXV. 166–7. A London ironmonger and SCI veteran, Sturch (1753?–1838) was descended from a line of General Baptist ministers. His father, John Sturch, was in charge of a congregation at Newport on the Isle of Wight. Joshua Toulmin’s correspondence in the mid-1780s contains letters to the Reverend Sturch and suggests he may have been a ‘corresponding member’ of the Society for Promoting Knowledge of the Scriptures. Toulmin also featured on Sturch’s list for 100 copies. Johnson’s name, however, is not listed at any of the SCI meetings at which these matters were discussed. Paine’s letter was noticed in the September Analytical. AR, 12 (1792), 526. Copies were advertised at ‘One Penny, or Seven Shillings per hundred’. Richmond’s Letter would be read out at the 1794 treason trials to prove the respectable origins of the SCI and LCS. Barlow, A Letter to the National Convention of France (London: J. Johnson, 1792), p. 3. Barlow dated his Letter ‘Sept 26, 1792’, evidently unaware that the first act of the Convention on 21 September was to abolish the monarchy and decree that the first year of the French Republic should begin the following day. See Tyson, pp. 155–6. Johnson (like Priestley) contributed the modest sum of £2.11.0 to the fund, whereas Paine gave £21 and Horne Tooke £50. Johnson pledged another five guineas on 12 April 1793.

204 Romanticism, Publishing and Dissent 104. ST, XXIV. 526; and Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge, p. 82. 105. Advice to Privileged Orders . . . Part II (Paris: printed at the English Press and sold by Barrois, 1793), p. 4. Barlow had borrowed books from Johnson (including Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations) to complete this, which he subsequently took with him to Paris. 106. Like Barlow’s next work, A Letter to the People of Piedmont, on the Advantages of the French Revolution, and the Necessity of Adopting its Principles in Italy (1793), it was finally printed in London (from a copy possibly obtained directly from Barlow) by Daniel Isaac Eaton in 1795, when it was reviewed (and quoted from at length) in the Analytical. Barlow’s original manuscript was evidently lent by Johnson to John Horne Tooke and seized as part of his papers in 1794. 107. Complete Works of Thomas Paine, pp. 729–30, 771–2, 789. 108. Ibid., p. 797. 109. CL, pp. 222, 225–7. Joel Barlow was one of the few, it seems, not to worry, composing a set of verses to commemorate Louis’s execution.

5 The War of Opinion 1. The parallels between Wollstonecraft’s 26 December letter to Johnson and Wordsworth’s recollection of his final days in Paris in The Prelude are quite striking. Wordsworth would have come across Wollstonecraft’s letter in her Posthumous Works (4 vols, 1798), a copy of which reached Alfoxden in April 1798. 2. The Prelude (the 1805 Text), ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), IX. 96–7, from which all quotes are taken. Wordsworth (1770–1850) had made several visits to London from Cambridge at the start of the revolution, when he had called in at Price’s meeting at the Old Jewry, and lived (somewhat ‘obscurely’) in the city from late January until May 1791. During that time he struck up an acquaintance with Samuel Nicholson, a Unitarian dissenter and SCI member (contemporaneously with Johnson), who lived on Cateaton Street in Holborn, only doors away from Thomas Christie. For more on the ‘Nicholson’ connection, see Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge pp. 23–7. 3. Another point of contact may have been his college friend William Mathews. In May 1792 Wordsworth had urged Mathews to ‘form an acquaintance with some of the publishing booksellers of London, from whom you might get some hints of what sort of works would be the most likely to answer.’ Mathews’s father, James (c.1742–1804), was a Methodist stationer and bookseller on the Strand who had long been associated with Johnson in the sale and publication chiefly of theological works (their names, for instance, appeared together on the third and fourth editions of Olney Hymns) and who continued to collaborate on a number of sermons and fast-day publications. 4. See Descriptive Sketches, ed. Eric Birdsall with Paul M. Zall (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1984); and Mary Moorman, William Wordsworth (2 vols; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957–65), I. 128–9, 197–9. 5. Priestley had touched on ‘the Divine Being producing good by means of evil’ in his Lectures on History and General Policy (1788), which were recommended to undergraduates at Cambridge. They were reissued by Johnson in 1793. 6. The central theme of An Evening Walk, the ‘memory of departed pleasures’ (l. 16), evokes Samuel Rogers’s poetic bestseller The Pleasures of Memory (1792) and Johnson may have hoped to capitalize on that work’s success and reputa-

Notes 205

7.

8. 9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

14. 15.

16. 17.

18.

tion. All quotes are from An Evening Walk, ed. James Averill (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1984). RM, p. 24; and Rights of Woman, p. 118. In a note, Wordsworth claimed his depiction owed something to a ‘spirited’ French description in the ‘l’Agriculture ou les Georgiques Françoises of M. Rossuet.’ Cowper had painted a ‘Resign’d’ picture of the cock, ‘wading’ ahead of the ‘feather’d tribes domestic’ (V. 58–76), in The Task (1785). ST, XXIII. 1014–19. The Analytical bravely re-quoted the ‘game-cock’ passage in its review of the printed Trial of Daniel Isaac Eaton (1794). See AR, 18 (1794), 416–17. AR, 15 (1793), 294–7. Descriptive Sketches was read and discussed among liberal circles in Exeter and Cambridge (most notably by Coleridge). In May 1794 Wordsworth wrote to William Mathews to ask Johnson ‘if he ever sells any of those poems and what number he thinks are yet on his hands.’ By 1801 Johnson was apparently telling would-be purchasers they were out of print. According to Wordsworth, this was a mistake: ‘Unless he has sent them to the Trunk-maker’s they must be lying in some corner of his Warehouse, for I have reason to believe that they never sold much.’ See Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth I: The Early Years 1787–1805, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, rev. C. L. Shaver (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), pp. 120, 327–8. Prose Works of William Wordsworth Volume I, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), pp. 53, 38, 32 (hereafter cited as Prose Works). Ibid., pp. 47, 37–8. Ibid., pp. 48, 38; and Rights of Woman, p. 335. Wordsworth, indeed, argued that equality could only be achieved in ‘that state in which no distinctions are admitted’. There were other notable similarities with Wollstonecraft, and not simply on the points they had in common with Paine. Their criticisms of London’s tramps and prostitutes, for example, whose existence they both attributed to ‘aristocratical prejudices’. (Joel Barlow also depicted aristocracy as ‘a decayed prostitute, whom painting and patching will no longer embellish’, in the second part of his Advice, the manuscript of which was in Johnson’s possession.) Both also despised the ‘hypocrisy and sycophancy of our intercourse in private life’ and the ‘necessity of dissimulation’. See Prose Works, pp. 42, 45; and Barlow, Advice to the Privileged Orders . . . Part II, pp. 24–5. Prose Works, pp. 46, 43; and Rights of Woman, p. 335. Gentleman’s Magazine, 63 (1793), 146, quoted in Prose Works, p. 50; and RM2, p. 21. In April 1793 the Leicester bookseller Richard Phillips was sentenced to 18 months in prison on the evidence of a paid informer and John Thompson of Birmingham was also tried (and acquitted). Phillips wrote to William Cowper from jail requesting a ‘Sonnet in his favour’. Cowper obliged but ‘fear’d to send it’ as ‘Government is so jealous and rigorous at present’. See LPW, IV. 354–7. In June Daniel Isaac Eaton was indicted (but acquitted) for selling a reprinted version of the second part of Rights of Man with all the libellous passages removed. Prose Works, pp. 34, 49. See ibid., pp. 24, 34–5. It is telling that the Letter abruptly breaks off at the point where he is discussing the faithlessness of many ‘false adherents’ to the revolution, such as Lafayette and Mirabeau. See ibid., p. 49. The Prelude, X. 233, 378–9, 311–12, 329. John Aikin, for example, outlined the dilemma he and other dissenters faced soon after the start of the conflict: ‘We


19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35.

36.

are fairly immersed in a bloody, expensive, and I think, unjust war, and we must either lament its success, or rejoice in the calamities of our country. Such an alternative is enough to make one draw off entirely from political discussion . . .’ Quoted in Betsy Rodgers, Georgian Chronicle: Mrs. Barbauld and Her Family (London: Methuen, 1958), p. 120. The Prelude, X. 265. Tyson, p. 124. Cooper, Reply to Mr. Burke’s Invective, p. 77. For further details, see Shelley and his Circle 1773–1822, ed. Kenneth Neill Cameron (4 vols; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961–70), I. 121–32. In both cases Wollstonecraft was drawing on Johnson to repay money loaned to her by Thomas Christie in Paris. The bookseller does still seem to have acted as a conduit for letters from Wollstonecraft’s sisters. Posthumous Works of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (4 vols; London: J. Johnson and G. G. and J. Robinson, 1798), IV. 39–51. Paine was helping Condorcet draft a revised constitution for the new French republic. This was presented to the Convention on 15 February but unanimously rejected. Wollstonecraft herself was preoccupied with writing ‘a plan of education’ for the Committee of Public Instruction, of which Condorcet was a member. In the Commons on 18 February Burke denounced Condorcet as ‘the most humane of all murderers’, Brissot (another member of the Constitutional Committee) as ‘the Prince of Pickpockets’ and all representatives of the Convention as ‘stained by the most infamous crimes’. See CL, p. 230; and PH, XXX. 438–9, 446. William Godwin (1756–1834), Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (London: J. Johnson and G. G. and J. Robinson, 1798), pp. 102, 105–6. Wollstonecraft, An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (London: J. Johnson, 1794), p. 515. Similar efforts to justify and come to terms with the ‘phrensy of liberty’ were played out in the Analytical. See AR, 18 (1794), 515. CL, p. 253; and AR, 21 (1795), 17. AR, 16 (1793), 85–7; and Henry Roscoe, Life of William Roscoe (2 vols; London: T. Cadell; and Edinburgh: W. Blackwood, 1833), I. 125–6. AR, 15 (1793), 212–14. J. E. Cookson, The Friends of Peace: Anti-war Liberalism in England, 1793–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 89. Quoted in ibid., p. 94, which cites Jeremiah Jordan as its London distributor. Anon., An Essay on Parliament, and the Causes of Unequal Representation (London: J. Johnson, 1793), pp. 50–1; and Cookson, The Friends of Peace, p. 140. According to Wyvill, Hodgson (1760?–1800) was ‘a man . . . very firm to the cause of liberty & reform & . . . not to be dismay’d at the threats that are constantly made to intimidate him’. See Cookson, The Friends of Peace, p. 133; and Stephen Harbottle, The Reverend William Turner (Newcastle: Northern Universities Press, 1997), pp. 53–66. See Cookson, The Friends of Peace, pp. 93–6, who estimates that between 1,000 and 1,500 copies of The Oeconomist were sent to St Paul’s Churchyard every month for Johnson to sell or distribute, as well as to booksellers in Edinburgh, Carlisle, York, Manchester, Cambridge and Bristol. The first number was priced ‘only three-halfpence, or one guinea for 250.’ AR, 16 (1793), 104, 178–9.

Notes 207 37. Barbauld, (anon.) Sins of Government, Sins of the Nation (4th edn, London: J. Johnson, 1793), pp. 5, 9, 28–30, 11–13. 38. AR, 18 (1794), 339, and 21 (1795), 312–13. 39. Priestley, The Present State of Europe Compared with Antient Prophecies (London: J. Johnson, 1794), pp. 1–2, 21, 26, 31. The April 1794 number gave the fast day similar coverage, though none of the five titles reviewed were published by Johnson. 40. James Hurdis (1763–1801), Equality: a Sermon (1794), in Political Writings of the 1790s, ed. Gregory Claeys (8 vols; London: William Pickering, 1995), VIII. 197–200. 41. Ibid., VIII. 201–3, 210. 42. Johnson had regularly published Hurdis’s work (which was much inspired by Cowper’s) since the late 1780s and his early poems, The Village Curate (1788) and Adriano; or, The First of June (1790), were reviewed by Wollstonecraft in the Analytical. In 1793 the bookseller had offered to buy the complete copyright of Hurdis’s works, albeit for a paltry £35. He continued to act as Hurdis’s bookseller, even putting his name to A Poem . . . upon a Prospect of the Marriage of the Prince of Wales (1795), a rather brazen attempt to win the poet laureateship which drew some criticism from the Analytical. 43. Darwin, Zoonomia; or, The Laws of Organic Life (2 vols; London: J. Johnson, 1794–96), II. 670–1; and Priestley, A Catechism for Children (6th edn, Birmingham: printed for J. Johnson, London, 1791), p. 25. 44. LPW, IV. 334–5. 45. Priestley, The Present State of Europe, pp. ix–x. 46. Ibid., pp. iii–v, x–xiii. Several of Priestley’s friends were ‘advised to remove their papers, and other most valuable effects, to some place of greater safety in London’. This may explain the fate of Johnson’s early business letter books up to 1795, although he also later destroyed many of his papers whilst in prison. See ibid., p. xiv. 47. Earl Morse Wilbur, Our Unitarian Heritage (Boston: Beacon Press, 1925), p. 372. 48. AR, 18 (1794), 318–20. 49. DNB entry for Geddes. 50. Chard, 66 n39. Johnson continued to be involved in new editions of Trimmer’s previously-published works and her schoolbooks were still noticed (and praised for their candid and liberal spirit) in the Analytical. 51. Johnson to Joseph Priestley Jr, 9 December 1805, BL. 52. According to Johnson, 3,000 copies of this were run off and advertised at 1s 6d each, but ‘not more than [1100] sold, the profit about 10£ –.’ See Johnson to Priestley, September 1795, BL. It was reviewed in the Analytical in April. 53. Quoted in Dumas Malone, The Public Life of Thomas Cooper 1783–1839 (London: Humphrey Milford, 1926), pp. 67–8. According to his biographer, Cooper had stopped sympathizing with the revolution by February 1793, ‘if not earlier’. Certainly, the failure of his textile-printing business towards the end of that year, owing to the war-time lull in trade, did nothing to cure his growing antagonism. See ibid., p. 67. 54. Carl Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin (New York: Viking Press, 1938), pp. 704–5. 55. ST, XXIV. 511–12. 56. ST, XXV. 610, XXIV. 511–20. 57. ST, XXV. 185–6, 611. 58. ST, XXV. 732–3.

208 Romanticism, Publishing and Dissent 59. See Tyson, p. 156. Thomas Christie’s name also appears on the SCI ‘arrears’ list (for the same amount as Johnson), as does Charles Dilly’s, though with the sum against his name deleted. He had evidently settled his subscription for the previous two years. The lapsing of Johnson’s subscription would certainly coincide with a marked decline in the SCI’s activities with the start of the French war. 60. ST, XXV. 734. 61. ST, XXV. 731, 743, 712. A copy of his Letter to John Dunning (1778) was even introduced to illustrate and defend his political sentiments. 62. AR, 21 (1795), 95. 63. Ibid., 394–6, and 22 (1795), 214. Joseph Butterworth (1770–1826) was the son of a Lancashire-born Baptist minister based in Coventry, John Butterworth (1727–1803), whose New Concordance to the Holy Scriptures (1767) Johnson had published. The two booksellers also collaborated on Samuel Heywood’s A Digest of So Much of the Law Respecting Borough Elections (1797). 64. There were separate sections ‘On the Fast Day, Feb. 25, 1795’ in the February, April and March issues of the Analytical. 65. Estlin (1747–1817) had served for 25 years as pastor at Lewin’s-Mead Chapel in Bristol and, as yet another product of Warrington Academy, was friendly with Priestley and Mrs Barbauld. (John Simpson had preached a sermon at Lewin’sMead in 1792, which Cruttwell printed and Johnson sold.) Jardine (1766–97) was minister at the Unitarian Chapel in Bath, where Coleridge made his first appearance as an occasional preacher. 66. AR, 22 (1795), 73. 67. Wordsworth read Fawcett’s poem during his long stay in London in 1795 and it appears to have fuelled his deepening sense of disillusion with the conflict. He also attended Fawcett in his Sunday evening lectures at the Old Jewry, which were printed and published through Johnson the same year. 68. A Liste Générale et Alphabétique . . . de Tous les Conspirateurs qui ont étés Condamnés à Mort par le Tribunal Révolutionnaire (1795) seems also to have circulated from St Paul’s Churchyard and Johnson later issued The Works (Never Before Published) of Jeanne-Marie Roland (1800) and Memoirs of the Revolution ([1800]) by Garat, who had succeeded Roland’s husband as French Interior Minister. The Analytical in August 1795 and January and July 1796 contained a lengthy review of Helen Maria Williams’s Letters Containing a Sketch of the Politics of France from 31 May 1793 Till 28 July 1794 (1795) which were chiefly concerned with the imprisonment and execution of the Girondins. 69. The fact that Johnson’s output clearly reflected the vogue for German literature at this time must be seen as partly due to his association with Remnant and his brother, William, who remained in Hamburg. In the July 1795 number of the Analytical the editors were pleased to announce that they could resume their usual section on foreign ‘Literary Intelligence’, ‘communication with the continent’ having been ‘opened through a new channel’. Since the majority of the news was from Germany, it seems fair to assume that the Remnants may have been instrumental in this. Comments in his letterbook suggest that Johnson also received French works courtesy of William Remnant, although by mid-1796 he speaks of being able to procure them from Paris himself. See AR, 22 (1795), 104. 70. ST, XXV. 735; AR, 22 (1795), 374; and Anti-Jacobin Review (AJ), 1 (1798), 632. Roland and Louvet’s works circulated in Bristol circles and were read by Wordsworth and his friends.

Notes 209 71. Volney later produced his own translation, with Joel Barlow’s help, which was published in Paris in 1802. Johnson would go on to arrange a translation of Volney’s View of the Climate and Soil of the United States of America (1804), even though it was of ‘too philosophical a nature to become popular’. See Johnson to T. and J. Swords, 24 February 1804, BL. 72. AR, 22 (1795), 498–505. 73. Johnson to Priestley, September 1795, and to William Russell, 24 August 1796, BL. 74. See Johnson to Priestley, 24 August 1796, BL. 75. Johnson to Thomas Dobson, 10 October 1796, BL; and Conrad Wright, The Beginnings of Unitarianism in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), pp. 400–1. 76. Johnson to Joseph Priestley Jr, 9 December 1805, BL. 77. John Cartwright (1740–1824), The Commonwealth in Danger (London: J. Johnson, 1795), pp. 17, 98. On the subject of the ‘real causes’ of war, Cartwright referred his readers to Barlow’s Advice to the Privileged Orders: ‘True – he is an American; he is a Republican; but if he will instruct me in peace, wisdom and virtue, I will be his disciple.’ See ibid., p. 37. 78. Johnson published Dyson’s translations of a German tale, The Sorcerer (1795), by Leonhard Wächter (which Godwin records reading in his Diary) and Select Fairy Tales (2 vols, 1796) by Wieland. He was also one of the booksellers to bring out a translation of Schiller’s Fiesco; or, The Genoese Conspiracy (1796) by Stoddart, a young lawyer and aspiring journalist and the future brother-in-law of William Hazlitt. 79. Godwin, (anon.) Considerations on Lord Grenville’s and Mr. Pitt’s Bills (London: J. Johnson, 1795), pp. 85, 7–8, 23, 17, 21. Godwin was, in fact, a friend of Thelwall’s, whom he had helped defend against the charge of treason the previous year, but his instincts as a reformer were naturally much more private and quiescent. The Analytical praised the fact that Godwin ‘deprecat[ed] every idea of violence, tumult, and confusion’ in its review. See AR, 22 (1795), 541–3. 80. Godwin, Considerations, pp. 22, 14–15. Johnson sent a copy of Godwin’s work to Priestley in America on 15 January 1796, together with Manon Roland’s Appeal, Dumouriez’s Life and three months’ worth of the Analytical. 81. Ibid., pp. 17–18. 82. Ibid., p. 86.

6 ‘Honest Joe’ 1. ‘Indictment of Joseph Johnson’, quoted in Tyson, p. 159. 2. Wakefield, A Reply to Some Parts of the Bishop of Landaff’s Address to the People of Great Britain (3rd edn, [London:] sold by the author at Hackney, 1798), pp. 38–9, 22, 26, 43, 35; and ST, XXVII. 721. All quotations here were cited in the booksellers’ indictments. 3. ST, XXVII. 653–5, 643, 702, 722. 4. Ibid., 659, 661; and The Times, 18 July 1798, p. 2. Unbeknown to Johnson, his servant, ‘Mr. Day’, had actually bought in copies. Day only informed Johnson after learning of Cuthell’s arrest, at which point all copies were removed. 5. ST, XXVII. 720. 6. AR, 22 (1795), 511; and Watson, An Address to the People of Great Britain (8th edn, London: R. Faulder, 1798), pp. 17–18.

210 Romanticism, Publishing and Dissent 7. The Times, 18 July 1798, p. 2. Ex officio informations were also potentially ruinous as they made it impossible for a defendant, even if acquitted, to recover his costs. Johnson’s trial cost him around £600 and he spent much of his time in prison poring over letters and accounts trying to recoup the expense. 8. He must, therefore, have been asked to pay £1,000 and provide two sureties of £500 each. Jordan was unable to put up bail and so remained in custody throughout. See ST, XXVII. 737. 9. The Times, 18 July 1798, p. 2. 10. In January 1798 Pitt had made the ‘excitement of patriotic feeling’ in the country one of his ‘great objects’ and, central to this policy, was the ‘besmirching of anti-war opponents’. See Cookson, p. 167. 11. Wakefield, Reply, p. 22. Wakefield’s statement was taken as proof that his real grievance against Pitt was the improper application of public money in ‘crushing the Irish rebellion’. See ST, XXVII. 644, 719. 12. AR, 27 (1798), 90, 14, 224. 13. Quoted in Andrea Altea Engstrom, ‘Joseph Johnson’s Circle and the Analytical Review’, PhD Thesis, University of Southern California (1986), p. 102. Johnson and Phillips had similarly combined to ‘threaten the public’ (in the Anti-Jacobin’s view) with a set of Biographical Anecdotes of the Founders of the French Republic, and of Other Eminent Characters, Who Have Distinguished Themselves in the Progress of the Revolution (2 vols, 1797–98). 14. Johnson was one of the first men Beloe had met on arriving in London ten years earlier and had published a volume of his Poems and Translations (1788). For some years Beloe attended his dinners (where he became ‘slightly acquainted’ with Mary Wollstonecraft and was introduced to Sarah Trimmer) but the onset of the French Revolution (he later noted) was ‘the signal for the dissolution of those amicable bonds.’ In The Sexagenarian (1817) he depicted Johnson as ‘a Dry Bookseller’ of the ‘old Presbyterian school’ but benevolent in his dealings with authors. See Beloe, I. 350, 345, II. 252–3. 15. AJ, 1 (1798), 72–8, 91–102. It also picked up on her friendship with the fugitive United Irishman Archibald Hamilton Rowan, suggesting she was ‘apprized of what was projected in Ireland’. 16. AJ, 1 (1798), v, 85. 17. Memoirs of . . . Gilbert Wakefield, II. 128. The Anti-Jacobin had denounced Wakefield as a ‘calumniator of his country’ when reviewing the Letter in August. See AJ, 1 (1798), 156. 18. AR, 28 (1798), 305. The Anti-Jacobin lambasted this review in October and accused Johnson of being able to get hold of a copy via his ‘connection with the traitors, incendiaries, or members of the London Corresponding Society’. See AJ, 1 (1798), 463. 19. AR, 28 (1798), 333–4. 20. AJ, 1 (1798), 618. 21. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), Fears in Solitude, Written in 1798, During the Alarm of an Invasion (London: J. Johnson, 1798), ll. 155, 93–4. 22. Morning Post, 16 April 1798. For reviews of Coleridge’s Conciones Ad Populum (1795) and Poems on Various Subjects (1796), see AR, 23 (1796), 90–2, 610–12. His poetry had also been printed in the Monthly Magazine. Southey (whose Botany Bay Eclogues Johnson also refused) had made his own sequence of visits to St Paul’s Churchyard in the spring of 1797. 23. Coleridge called in at Remnant’s three times in September to buy books. William

Notes 211

24. 25. 26.

27. 28.

29.

30.

31. 32. 33.

34.

35. 36.

and Dorothy Wordsworth also visited Remnant’s shop and borrowed a copy of the Analytical. See The Letters of Charles Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas and arranged by Guy Pocock (2 vols; London: J. M. Dent, 1950), I. 141. AR, 28 (1798), 590–2. The reviewer was probably Mrs Barbauld, whom Coleridge had met in London at the same time as Johnson. According to John Aikin, Johnson’s prosecution was ‘by many considered as the ungenerous indulgence of a long-hoarded spleen against him on account of publications not liable to legal censure, though displeasing to Authority.’ See Aikin, 1167. H. T. Dickinson, British Radicalism and the French Revolution 1789–1815 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), p. 26. The Times, 18 July 1798, pp. 2–3. Lindsey lamented that Johnson’s case was ‘not set forth with all the force and distinction that was due to it’ and Fuseli thought that Erskine forgot ‘the interest of his client, in the wish to shew his own political opinions, and to make a display of his oratorical powers’. Erskine’s ‘exculpation’ of Cuthell was based entirely upon his ‘disconnecting [him] from the work as a CRIMINAL publisher’. See MS 12.57 (12) DWL; Knowles (ed.), Henry Fuseli, I. 202; and ST, XXVII. 656–7. The Times, 18 July 1798, p. 3. Samuel Heywood later submitted an affidavit stating that he held Johnson to be ‘a moral and upright man, and well affected towards the Constitution of this country’. See The Times, 16 November 1798, p. 3. Quoted in Tyson, pp. 160–1. Reportedly, Johnson would not allow the works of the atheist and republican John Hollis (1757–1824) to be brought into his shop, ‘at which place they were advertised to be sold’, because they were ‘so strongly tinged with extravagance and virulence’. See A Biographical Dictionary of the Living Authors of Great Britain and Ireland (London: Henry Colburn, 1816), p. 161. Hollis’s Sober and Serious Reasons for Scepticism, As It Concerns Revealed Religion (1796) appeared with Johnson’s imprint, just like his earlier Essays Meant as an Offering in Support of Rational Religion (1790). Quoted in Tyson, p. 161. Memoirs of . . . James Lackington, p. 239; and Aikin, 1167–8. I am extremely grateful to Beth Lau for allowing me to consult her as yet unpublished paper, ‘William Godwin and the Joseph Johnson Circle: the Evidence of the Diaries’ (read at the 2001 MLA Conference), in order to substantiate these points. West, 204. In his obituary of Johnson in the Morning Chronicle, Godwin described his shop as ‘the perpetual resort of all his connections in seasons of difficulty and embarrassment.’ Johnson, though helpful, seems always to have had Godwin’s measure: on the occasion of Wollstonecraft’s marriage he noted, ‘no money on either side, nor the means of procuring it but by literary exertion’. See Tyson, p. 215; and Johnson to Charles Wollstonecraft, 15 July 1797, BL. AR, 22 (1795), 636. See Dickinson, British Radicalism and the French Revolution, p. 69: cf. AR, 22 (1795), 348: ‘. . . the perfectibility of man . . . is not . . . a modern and a french [notion], terms that at present are sufficient to blacken any opinion, but an old english doctrine, asserted by writers of the best heads and best hearts that this country has produced.’

212 Romanticism, Publishing and Dissent 37. AJ, 1 (1798), 467; Ian Maxted, The London Book Trades 1775–1800 (Folkestone: Dawson, 1977), p. 73; and Chard, ‘Bookseller to Publisher’, 139–40. Eaton died in poverty in Deptford in 1814, having been tried eight times in all for seditious libel. 38. Cookson, The Friends of Peace, p. 99. 39. Aikin, 1168. Fuseli’s friend and biographer John Knowles, who visited St Paul’s Churchyard, echoes this view: ‘. . . though the conversation took a free range; yet the placid equanimity of their host regulated in some degree its freedom, and kept it within due bounds.’ See Knowles (ed.) Henry Fuseli, I. 301. 40. Wollstonecraft, Historical and Moral View of the . . . French Revolution, p. 239; and Veitch, The Genesis of Parliamentary Reform, pp. 131–2. 41. Priestley, Essay on . . . Government, p. 95; and Edward Royle and James Walvin, English Radicals and Reformers 1760–1848 (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1982), p. 43. 42. Johnson to R. L. Edgeworth 18–19 February 1799, BL. 43. AR, 27 (1798), 112, and 22 (1795), 20–1, 35. 44. AR, 22 (1795), 83, 499, and 27 (1798), 21, 389. 45. J. Ann Hone, For the Cause of Truth: Radicalism in London 1796–1820 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), p. 49. 46. Johnson to R. L. Edgeworth, 18 February 1799, BL. Gilbert Wakefield’s remarks during his trial suggest that he was aware of Johnson’s condition: ‘. . . confinement in a prison, and absence from home, is not the same evil to me in many respects as to a bookseller . . . who can employ himself at a distance in regulating his concerns and settling his accounts, whilst the current business of the shop and warehouse is conducted with little detriment to the principal by diligent and faithful substitutes’. See ST, XXVII. 750. 47. Chard, 73. 48. Dyer, Poems (London: J. Johnson, G. G. and J. Robinsons, Longman and Rees, Symonds, Debrett, Ridgeway and Bagster; and Cambridge: Flower, 1800), pp. xxxvi–xxxvii. Flower had only recently been released from Newgate, having served six months for libel for slating the Bishop of Llandaff in the Cambridge Intelligencer. Dyer’s edition was finally printed for the author and sold by Longman and Rees in 1801. 49. Johnson offered Davy £70 for his Researches, Chemical and Philosophical, Chiefly Concerning Nitrous Oxide (1800), a sizeable and controversial work which contained accounts of the effects of the gas by, among others, Coleridge and Southey, and which was seized upon by anti-Jacobin critics. Davy became a frequent guest at Johnson’s dinner table after his appointment as lecturer in chemistry at the Royal Institution in London in 1801. 50. Johnson to anonymous correspondent, October–November 1801, BL. John Jones (c.1768–1827) was a former student of Hackney who at this time ran a school in Halifax. His work, A Development of Remarkable Events, Calculated to Restore the Christian Religion to Its Original Purity, and to Repel the Objections of Unbelievers (2 vols, 1800), was printed in Leeds by Edward Baines, dissenting editor of the Leeds Mercury, the premier Whig newspaper in Yorkshire. Baines also printed two sermons by William Wood (one on the death of Newcome Cappe) which Johnson sold during 1800–1. 51. From 1798 until 1803, Walker was Professor of Theology at Manchester College (Warrington’s successor) and active in the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society.

Notes 213 52. Monthly Review, 38 (1802), 446–7. 53. Grace A. Ellis, A Memoir of Mrs Anna Laetitia Barbauld (2 vols; Boston: James R. Osgood & Co., 1874), I. 243; and Jeremiah Joyce (1763–1816), Courage and Union in a Time of National Danger (London: J. Johnson and W. Vidler, 1803), pp. 15–16, 20. Johnson also published a popular but anonymous set of Scientific Dialogues, Intended For the Instruction and Entertainment of Young People (6 vols, 1800–5) by Joyce, who was often obliged to suppress his name. Joyce mentions dining with the bookseller in an undated letter (probably written around 1808) to Belsham. See MS 12.58 (20) DWL. 54. AR, 13 (1792), 394–401. Rutt (1760–1841) was the son of a wealthy Cheapside druggist and had studied as a boy with Joshua Toulmin. He had joined his father’s business but retained a keen interest in literature and religion. He had early joined the SCI and was an original member of the Society of the Friends of the People. By 1796 he had become a leading member of the Gravel-Pit congregation at Hackney and a convert to Unitarianism. 55. Memoirs of . . . Gilbert Wakefield, I. 150, 195–6, and II. 128. 56. Ibid., I. vii, and II. 41–5. 57. Cookson, The Friends of Peace, pp. 91, 109. 58. Hazlitt mentions being lectured to from Bonnycastle’s ‘Algebra’ and Keats was awarded a copy of his popular Introduction to Astronomy as a school prize in 1811, the year a sixth edition appeared. 59. Maria (1767–1849) and Richard Lovell Edgeworth (1744–1817), Practical Education (2 vols; London: J. Johnson, 1798), I. ix. The Edgeworths referred readers to Priestley’s Essay on a Course of Liberal Education (1765) and praised the Aikins’ Lessons for Children (1778) and Evenings at Home (1793) as ‘by far the best books of the kind that have ever appeared’. In a sustained advertisement for St Paul’s Churchyard, they also recommended Enfield’s Speaker, ‘Priestley’s History of Vision, and parts of the Works of Franklin, of Chaptal, Lavoisier, and Darwin’. Johnson himself gave many presents of the work to ‘persons who had the care of children but could not well afford to buy it.’ See ibid., I. 81, 115–16; and Johnson to R. L. Edgeworth, 18–19 February 1799, BL. 60. Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth: a Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), pp. 114, 122–4, 207. Edgeworth visited Johnson in prison with her father in the spring of 1799, at which time her elder brother Lovell was a regular visitor to St Paul’s Churchyard. 61. William Hayley (1745–1820), The Life and Posthumous Writings of William Cowper, Esqr. (4 vols; Chichester: printed by J. Seagrave for J. Johnson, London, 1806), I. 17; and Russell, A Bibliography of William Cowper, pp. 158, 245. 62. ‘Beachy Head’ (1807), ll. 143–53, in The Poems of Charlotte Smith, ed. Stuart Curran (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 223. 63. See Tyson, p. 204. 64. Letters of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), pp. 11, 70. Blake made 18 engravings for Johnson in the period 1800–4, including six for Hayley’s Life of Cowper. 65. Ibid., pp. 99–100; and Rodgers, Georgian Chronicle, p. 132. George Gregory did a good deal of literary work for Phillips and succeeded Aikin as editor of the Monthly Magazine in 1806. 66. Letters of William Blake, p. 87; and Lamb, Letters, I. 273–4. 67. Tyson, p. 192. In 1802 Priestley claimed not to have heard from Johnson for two years. By mid-1803 he and his son had sent over a dozen letters to St Paul’s


68. 69. 70.

71.

72.

73.

74. 75.

76.

77.

78.

79. 80. 81.

Churchyard and received only one. See ibid., p. 189. The month before his death, however, Priestley received an unsolicited box of books from Johnson and asked Lindsey to apologize for his ‘dissatisfaction with respect to his conduct’. See MS JP10 University of Birmingham Library. Edinburgh Review, 9 (1806), 147. A further edition of the Memoirs was printed by ‘the several Unitarian Societies in England’ and sold by Johnson in 1809. Belsham only moved to Essex Street after Hannah Lindsey’s death in 1812. He was eventually buried in the same grave as Lindsey. In 1825 the Unitarian Fund merged with the Unitarian Book Society and the Association to Protect the Civil Rights of Unitarians (established in 1819) to form the British and Foreign Unitarian Society. Charles (1775–1847), John Aikin’s third son, was adopted by his aunt Mrs Barbauld and educated along with his brother at her school at Palgrave. He became a member of the Royal College of Surgeons and married Gilbert Wakefield’s daughter. Arthur Aikin (1773–1854) trained for the dissenting ministry but his real passion was science. He edited the Longmans’ Annual Review (1803–9), to which his father, aunt and sister, Lucy, all contributed. William Henry (1774–1836) trained with Thomas Percival and became physician at the Manchester Infirmary. He married the daughter of Thomas Butterworth Bayley. The Liberal, 2 (1823), 24. Born in Devon, Rowe (1764–1832) had been educated at Exeter and Hoxton. His name had appeared with Johnson’s on the SCI distribution list for Paine’s letter to Dundas in 1792. Lamb, Letters, I. 273, 278–9. Hazlitt even thought the preface long and tedious. Henry Crabb Robinson, however, thought it contained ‘some of the best remarks’ on Kant’s philosophy he had ever seen. See Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and Their Writers, ed. Edith J. Morley (3 vols; London: J. M. Dent, 1938), III. 844–5. Edgeworth, Practical Education, II. 154, 107; and Lamb, Letters, I. 228. See Cookson, The Friends of Peace, pp. 105–6. Owen Rees (1770–1837) had started out in the Bristol book trade before moving to London in 1794. His younger brother, Thomas (1777–1864), trained for the dissenting ministry and in 1807 was appointed afternoon preacher at Newington Green, where he became well acquainted with the Aikins. John Hewlett (1762–1844), The Jubilee; or, Motives for Thanksgiving and Congratulation Derived from a Consideration of the Character and Conduct of Our Most Gracious Sovereign, King George the Third (London: F. and C. Rivington, J. Johnson and J. Mawman, 1809), pp. 6–7, 10. Belsham, The Year of Jubilee Considered in a Discourse Delivered at the Unitarian Chapel in Essex Street, on Sunday, 22 October, 1809 (London: J. Johnson, 1809), pp. 36, 21. William West cites Hunter as Johnson’s nephew, as does Thornton Hunt in his edition of Leigh Hunt’s Autobiography. Certainly, he had lived for some time with Johnson (at least 12 years on the basis of Wollstonecraft’s letters) and been educated at the Barbaulds’ school at Palgrave. However, there is no strict evidence to support a family connection. See Hunt, Autobiography, p. 173 n2; and Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Roger Ingpen (2 vols; London: G. Bell, 1914), I. 70, 51. Hunt, Autobiography, pp. 18–19, 9. Ibid., p. 175; Examiner, 25 July 1819; and Leigh Hunt’s Political and Occasional Essays, ed. L. H. Houtchens and C. W. Houtchens (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1962), p. 37.

Notes 215 82. Raymond G. Cowherd, The Politics of English Dissent (New York: New York University Press, 1956), pp. 70–1. 83. Bernard Lord Manning, The Protestant Dissenting Deputies, ed. Ormerod Greenwood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952), p. 225. Throughout the 1820s ‘temperate discussion’ of the Test Act in ‘useful and judicious tracts and addresses’ was deemed highly valuable to the dissenters’ cause, just as in the 1780s. Samuel Heywood was asked (but proved too ill) to revise The Right of Protestant Dissenters to a Complete Toleration Asserted but 2,000 copies of Samuel Pearce’s 1790 sermon on the Test Act were reprinted. It was also in these years that John Towill Rutt published his large edition of Priestley’s Theological and Miscellaneous Works (25 vols, 1817–31). See Manning, The Protestant Dissenting Deputies, pp. 232, 248.

Bibliography 1. Manuscripts Bodleian Library Dep. e. 196–211 Diary of William Godwin (Abinger Collection)

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II. 284 Undated note from Alexander Geddes to Joseph Johnson II. 423/158 A. Jardine to Joseph Johnson (6 June 1792) II. 647/11–13 John Aikin to Joseph Johnson (1782–4) II. 647/85 Undated note from Thomas Christie to Joseph Johnson III. 379/500–1 Joseph Johnson to G. J. Thorkelin (1788)

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2. Biographical Material Joseph Johnson Aikin, John, ‘Biographical Account of the Late Mr. Joseph Johnson’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 106 (December 1809), 1167–8 Chard, Leslie F., ‘Bookseller to Publisher: Joseph Johnson and the English Book Trade, 1760 to 1810’, Library, 32 (1977), 138–54

216

Bibliography 217 — ‘Joseph Johnson: Father of the Book Trade’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 79 (1976), 51–82 Engstrom, Andrea Altea, ‘Joseph Johnson’s Circle and the Analytical Review: a Study of English Radicals in the Late Eighteenth Century’, PhD Thesis, University of Southern California (1986) Mann, Phyllis G., ‘Death of a London Bookseller’, Keats–Shelley Memorial Bulletin, 15 (1964), 8–12 Smyser, Jane Worthington, ‘The Trial and Imprisonment of Joseph Johnson, Bookseller’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 77 (1973–4), 418–35 Stephens, Alexander, ‘Stephensiana. No. III’, Monthly Magazine, 52, no. 361 (1821), 424–30 Tomalin, Claire, ‘Publisher in Prison: Joseph Johnson and the book trade’, Times Literary Supplement (2 December 1994), 15–16 Tyson, Gerald P., Joseph Johnson: a Liberal Publisher (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1979) — ‘Joseph Johnson, an Eighteenth-Century Bookseller’, Studies in Bibliography, 28 (1975), 1–16 West, William, ‘Letters to My Son at Rome: XI. Mr. Johnson, of St. Paul’s Church-Yard, and His Literary Connexions’, Aldine Magazine (1839), 201–5 Zall, Paul M., ‘The Cool World of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Joseph Johnson, or the Perils of Publishing’, Wordsworth Circle, 3, no. 1 (1972), 25–30

General A Biographical Dictionary of the Living Authors of Great Britain and Ireland (London: Henry Colburn, 1816) Ackroyd, Peter, Blake (London: Sinclar Stevenson, 1995) Aikin, Lucy, Memoir of John Aikin, M.D. (2 vols; London: Baldwin, Cradock & Joy, 1823) — Memoirs, Miscellanies and Letters of the Late Lucy Aikin, ed. Philip Hemery Le Breton (London: Longman, Roberts and Green, 1864) Aldridge, A. Owen, Man of Reason: the Life of Thomas Paine (London: Cresset Press, 1960) Anon., Some Account of the Life and Writings of Mrs Trimmer (2 vols; London: F. C. and J. Rivington, J. Johnson and Co. and J. Hatchard, 1814) Beloe, William, The Sexagenarian; or, The Recollections of a Literary Life (2 vols; London: F. C. and J. Rivington, 1817) Belsham, Thomas, Memoirs of the Late Reverend Theophilus Lindsey, M.A. (London: J. Johnson and Co., 1812) Biographical Dictionary of Modern British Radicals, Volume 1: 1780–1830, ed. Joseph O. Baylen and Norbert J. Gossman (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1979) Boswell, James, Life of Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980) Bull Josiah (ed.), John Newton of Olney and St. Mary Woolnoth. An Autobiography and Narrative Compiled Chiefly from His Diary by the Rev. Josiah Bull (London: Religious Tract Society, 1868) Butler, Marilyn, Maria Edgeworth: a Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972) Chandler, George, William Roscoe of Liverpool (London: B. T. Batsford, 1953) Dictionary of National Biography Durden, Robert F., ‘Joel Barlow in the French Revolution’, William and Mary Quarterly, 8, no. 3 (1951), 327–54

218 Romanticism, Publishing and Dissent Ellis, Grace A., A Memoir of Mrs Anna Laetitia Barbauld, With Many of Her Letters, and a Selection from the Poems and Prose Writings (2 vols; Boston: James R. Osgood & Co., 1874) Gibbs, F. W., Joseph Priestley, Adventurer in Science and Champion of Truth (London: Nelson, 1965) Gilchrist, Alexander, The Life of William Blake (London: Dent, 1942) Godwin, William, Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (London: J. Johnson and G. G. and J. Robinson, 1798) Good, John Mason, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Rev. Alexander Geddes (London: G. Kearsley, 1803) Harbottle, Stephen, The Reverend William Turner: Dissent and Reform in Georgian Newcastle upon Tyne (Leeds: Northern Universities Press, 1997) Hawke, David Freeman, Paine (New York: Harper and Row, 1974) Hay, Carla H., James Burgh: Spokesman for Reform in Hanoverian England (Washington: University Press of America, 1979) Hayley, William, The Life and Posthumous Writings of William Cowper, Esqr. (4 vols; Chichester: printed by J. Seagrave for J. Johnson, London, 1806) Hazlitt, W. Carew, Memoirs of William Hazlitt (2 vols; London: Richard Bentley, 1867) Holmes, Richard, Coleridge: Early Vision (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990) Holt, Anne Durning, A Life of Joseph Priestley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1931) Howe, P. P., The Life of William Hazlitt (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1947) Hunt, Leigh, Autobiography, ed. J. E. Morpurgo (London: Cresset Press, 1949) Jones, Stanley, Hazlitt: a Life. From Winterslow to Frith Street (Oxford, 1989) Keane, John, Tom Paine: a Political Life (London: Bloomsbury, 1996) Kegan Paul, Charles, William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries (2 vols; London: Henry S. King, 1876) King-Hele, Desmond, Doctor of Revolution: the Life and Genius of Erasmus Darwin (London: Faber, 1977) Knight, Frida, University Rebel: the Life of William Frend (1757–1841) (London: Victor Gollancz, 1971) Knowles, John, The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli (2 vols; London: Colburn and Bentley, 1831) Locke, Don, A Fantasy of Reason: the Life and Thought of William Godwin (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980) Malone, Dumas, The Public Life of Thomas Cooper 1783–1839 (London: Humphrey Milford, 1926) Marshall, Peter H., William Godwin (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984) Mathews, Godfrey, William Roscoe: a Memoir (London: Mitre Press, 1931) Miller, Victor Clyde, Joel Barlow: Revolutionist, London, 1791–2 (Hamburg: Friederichsen, de Gruyter and Co., 1932) Moorman, Mary, William Wordsworth: a Biography (2 vols; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957–65) Osborne, John W., John Cartwright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972) Priestley, Joseph, A Scientific Autobiography of Joseph Priestley (1733–1804), ed. Robert E. Schofield (Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press, 1966) — Memoirs of Dr. Joseph Priestley, To the Year 1795, Written By Himself: With A Continuation, to the Time of His Decease, By His Son, Joseph Priestley: And Observations on His Writings, By Thomas Cooper . . . and the Rev. William Christie (2 vols; London: J. Johnson, 1806–7)

Bibliography 219 Rodgers, Betsy, Georgian Chronicle: Mrs. Barbauld and Her Family (London: Methuen, 1958) Roscoe, Henry, The Life of William Roscoe (2 vols; London: T. Cadell; and Edinburgh: W. Blackwood, 1833) Rutt, John Towill (ed.), Memoirs of the Life of Gilbert Wakefield (2 vols; London: J. Johnson, 1804) Schofield, Robert E., The Enlightenment of Joseph Priestley: A Study of His Life and Work from 1733 to 1773 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997) St Clair, William, The Godwins and the Shelleys (London: Faber, 1990) Stephens, Alexander, Memoirs of John Horne Tooke (2 vols; London: J. Johnson and Co., 1813) Thomas, Peter D. G., John Wilkes: A Friend to Liberty (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996) Thorpe, T. E., Joseph Priestley (London: J. M. Dent, 1906) Tomalin, Claire, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft (London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974) Van Doren, Carl, Benjamin Franklin (New York: Viking Press, 1938) Wardle, Ralph M., Mary Wollstonecraft: a Critical Biography (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1951) — ‘Mary Wollstonecraft, Analytical Reviewer’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America (PMLA), 62 (1947), 1000–9 Williams, John, Memoirs of the Late Reverend Thomas Belsham (London: printed for the author, 1833) Woodress, James, A Yankee’s Odyssey: the Life of Joel Barlow (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1958)

3. Literary Sources Aikin, John, (anon.) An Address to the Dissidents of England on Their Late Defeat (London: J. Johnson, 1790) — (anon.) The Spirit of the Constitution and That of the Church of England, Compared (London: J. Johnson, 1790) Aikin, John, and Barbauld, Anna Laetitia, Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose (3rd edn, London: J. Johnson, 1792) Almon, John (anon.) An Impartial History of the Late War (London: J. Johnson and J. Curtis, 1763) Amory, Thomas (anon.), The Life of John Buncle, Esq. (London: J. Johnson and B. Davenport, 1766) Anon., A General History of Sieges and Battles By Sea and Land (12 vols; London: J. Curtis and J. Johnson, 1762) Anon., An Alarm to Dissenters and Methodists (London: G. Keith, and Johnson and Payne, 1769) Anon., An Essay on Parliament, and the Causes of Unequal Representation (London: J. Johnson, 1793) Anon., An Ode to the People of England (London: G. Kearsly [sic], Johnson and Payne, and G. Woodfall, 1769) Anon., Political Empiricism: a Letter to the Rev. John Wesley (London: J. Johnson, 1776) Anon., Thoughts on Civilization, and the Gradual Abolition of Slavery in Africa and the West Indies (London: J. Sewell, [1789]) Barbauld (née Aikin), Anna Laetitia, (anon.) An Address to the Opposers of the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts (2nd edn, London: J. Johnson, 1790)

220 Romanticism, Publishing and Dissent — Poems (London: J. Johnson, 1792) — Poems, ed. William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft (Athens, GA, and London: University of Georgia Press, 1994) — (anon.) Sins of Government, Sins of the Nation (4th edn, London: J. Johnson, 1793) — Works, ed. Lucy Aikin (2 vols; London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1825) Barlow, Joel, (anon.) Advice to the Privileged Orders in the Several States of Europe, Resulting from the Necessity and Propriety of a General Revolution in the Principle of Government. Part 1 (New York: Childs and Swaine, 1792) — Advice to the Privileged Orders . . . Part II (Paris: printed at the English Press and sold by Barrois, 1793) — A Letter to the National Convention of France, on the Defects in the Constitution of 1791, and the Extent of the Amendments Which Ought To Be Applied (London: J. Johnson, 1792) — The Conspiracy of Kings; A Poem: Addressed to the Inhabitants of Europe, From Another Quarter of the World (London: J. Johnson, 1792) Baron, Richard, The Pillars of Priestcraft and Orthodoxy Shaken (4 vols; 2nd edn, London: T. Cadell, G. Kearsley, J. Payne and J. Johnson, and N. Young, 1768) Belsham, Thomas, The Situation, the Prospects, and the Duties, of Britons in the Present Crisis of Alarm and Danger (London: J. Johnson, 1803) — The Year of Jubilee Considered in a Discourse Delivered at the Unitarian Chapel in Essex Street, on Sunday, 22 October, 1809 (London: J. Johnson, 1809) Blackstone, William, Commentaries on the Laws of England (4 vols; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1765–69) Blake, William, Complete Writings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985) — Letters, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980) — Writings, ed. G. E. Bentley, Jr (2 vols; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978) Bousfield, Benjamin, Observations on the Right Hon. Edmund Burke’s Pamphlet, on the Subject of the French Revolution (London: J. Johnson, 1791) Burgh, James, The Dignity of Human Nature (2 vols; London: J. Johnson and J. Payne, and T. Cadell, 1767) Burke, Edmund, Correspondence (10 vols; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958–78) — Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987) — Writings and Speeches. Volume VIII: the French Revolution 1790–1794, ed. L. G. Mitchell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989) Cameron, Kenneth Neill (ed.), Shelley and his Circle 1773–1822 (4 vols; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961–70) Cappe, Newcome, A Sermon Preached on Wednesday the 21st of February, MDCCLXXXI. . . . to a Congregation of Protestant-dissenters, in Saint Saviour-Gate, York (York: printed by A. Ward and sold by J. Johnson and T. Cadell, London, and by the booksellers in York, 1781) — A Sermon Preached on Friday the Fourth of February, MDCCLXXX. . . . (York: printed by A. Ward and sold by J. Johnson and T. Cadell, London, and by the booksellers in York, 1780) — (anon.) Remarks in Vindication of Dr. Priestley, on that Article of the Monthly Review for June, 1783, Which Relates to the First Part of Dr. Priestley’s History of the Corruptions of Christianity (London: J. Johnson, 1783)

Bibliography 221 Cartwright, John, Life and Correspondence, ed. F. D. Cartwright (2 vols; London: Henry Colburn, 1826) — The Commonwealth in Danger (London: J. Johnson, 1795) Christie, Thomas, Letters on the Revolution of France, and on the New Constitution Established By the National Assembly (London: J. Johnson, 1791) — The French Constitution, As Finally Settled By the National Constituent Assembly, and Presented to the King, Sept. 3, 1791 (London: J. Johnson, 1791) Claeys, Gregory (ed.), Political Writings of the 1790s (8 vols; London: William Pickering, 1995) Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, Collected Letters, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (6 vols; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–71) — Fears in Solitude, Written in 1798, During the Alarm of an Invasion. To which are added, France, An Ode; and Frost at Midnight (London: J. Johnson, 1798) Cooper, Thomas, A Reply to Mr. Burke’s Invective Against Mr. Cooper, and Mr. Watt, in the House of Commons, on the 30th of April, 1792 (2nd edn, London: J. Johnson; and Manchester: M. Falkner and Co., 1792) Cowper, William, Letters and Prose Writings, ed. James King and Charles Ryskamp (5 vols; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979–86) — Poems (London: J. Johnson, 1782) — Poems, Volume I: 1748–1782 and Volume II: 1782–1785, ed. John D. Baird and Charles Ryskamp (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980 and 1995) — The Task, A Poem, in Six Books (London: J. Johnson, 1785) Crabb Robinson, Henry, Books and Their Writers, ed. Edith J. Morley (3 vols; London: J. M. Dent, 1938) — Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence, ed. Thomas Sadler (3 vols; London: Macmillan, 1869) Darwin, Erasmus, (anon.) The Botanic Garden: a Poem, in Two Parts (London: J. Johnson, 1791) — Zoonomia; or, The Laws of Organic Life (2 vols; London: J. Johnson, 1794–96) Dickson, William, Letters on Slavery (London: J. Phillips, J. Johnson, and Elliot and Kay, 1789) Disney, John (anon.), A Short View of the Controversies Occasioned by the Confessional, and the Petition to Parliament for Relief in the Matter of Subscription (London: J. Johnson, 1773) Dyer, George, Poems (London: J. Johnson, G. G. and J. Robinsons, Longman and Rees, Symonds, Debrett, Ridgeway and Bagster; and Cambridge: Flower, [1800]) Edgeworth, Maria and Richard Lovell, Practical Education (2 vols; London: J. Johnson, 1798) Enfield, William, A Sermon on the Centennial Commemoration of the Revolution (London: J. Johnson, 1788) — Observations on Literary Property (London: J. Johnson, 1774) Equiano, Olaudah, Equiano’s Travels: His Autobiography. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa the African, ed. Paul Edwards (London: Heinemann, 1967) Falconar, Maria and Harriet, Poems on Slavery (London: T. and J. Egerton, J. Murray and J. Johnson, 1788) Fawcett, Joseph, The Art of War. A Poem (London: J. Johnson, 1795) — Poems (London: J. Johnson, 1798) — War Elegies (London: J. Johnson, [1802])

222 Romanticism, Publishing and Dissent Franklin, Benjamin, Letters to the Press 1758–1775, ed. Verner W. Crane (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1950) — Papers, ed. Leonard W. Labaree (13 vols; New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1960–69) — Political, Miscellaneous, and Philosophical Pieces (London: J. Johnson, 1779) — Private Correspondence, ed. William Temple Franklin (2 vols; London: Henry Colburn, 1817) Frend, William, An Address to the Inhabitants of Cambridge and Its Neighbourhood, Exhorting Them to Turn from the False Worship of Three Persons, to the Worship of the One True God (St Ives: printed by T. Bloom and sold by all the booksellers in Cambridge, W. Davis, Ely, and the printer, 1788) — Thoughts on Subscription to Religious Tests, Particularly That Required By the University of Cambridge (St Ives: printed by T. Bloom and sold by J. and J. Merrill, and J. Bowtell, Cambridge, D. Prince, Oxford, and J. Johnson, London, 1788) Fuseli, Henry, Collected English Letters, ed. David H. Weinglass (London: Kraus International, 1982) Geddes, Alexander, (anon.) An Apology for Slavery; or, Six Cogent Arguments Against the Immediate Abolition of the Slave-Trade (London: J. Johnson and R. Faulder, 1792) Godwin, William, (anon.) Considerations on Lord Grenville’s and Mr. Pitt’s Bills, Concerning Treasonable and Seditious Practices, and Unlawful Assemblies (London: J. Johnson, 1795) Gregory, George, Essays Historical and Moral (London: J. Johnson, 1785) Hazlitt, William, Complete Works, ed. P. P. Howe (21 vols; London: J. M. Dent, 1930–4) — Letters, ed. Herschel Moreland Sikes, assisted by Willard Hallam Bonner and Gerald Lahey (New York: New York University Press, 1978) — ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’, Liberal, 2 (1823) Hewlett, John, The Jubilee; or, Motives for Thanksgiving and Congratulation Derived from a Consideration of the Character and Conduct of Our Most Gracious Sovereign, King George the Third (London: F. and C. Rivington, J. Johnson and J. Mawman, 1809) Heywood, Samuel, (anon.) High Church Politics: Being A Seasonable Appeal to the Friends of the British Constitution, Against the Practices and Principles of High Churchmen (London: J. Johnson, 1792) — The Right of Protestant Dissenters to a Compleat Toleration Asserted (2nd edn, London: J. Johnson and J. Debrett, 1789) Horne Tooke, John, A Letter to John Dunning, Esq. (London: J. Johnson, 1778) — Epea Pteroenta. Or, The Diversions of Purley. Part I (London: J. Johnson, 1786) — Two Pair of Portraits (London: J. Johnson and J. Stockdale, 1788) Horne Tooke, John, and Price, Richard, (anon.) Facts: Addressed to the Landholders, Stockholders, Merchants, Farmers, Manufacturers, Tradesmen, Proprietors of Every Description, and Generally to All the Subjects of Great Britain and Ireland (London: J. Johnson and J. Almon, [1780]) Horsley, Samuel, A Charge to the Clergy of the Archdeaconry of St. Albans (London: n.p., 1783) Hunt, Leigh, Political and Occasional Essays, ed. L. H. Houtchens and C. W. Houtchens (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1962) Jebb, John, (anon.) An Address to the Freeholders of Middlesex, Assembled at Free Masons Tavern, in Great Queen Street, Upon Monday the 20th of December 1779 (3rd edn, London: J. Dixwell, T. Cadell, J. Almon, J. Johnson and J. Bew, 1780) — Works Theological, Medical, Political, and Miscellaneous, ed. John Disney (London: T. Cadell, J. Johnson and J. Stockdale; and Cambridge: J. and J. Merrill, 1787)

Bibliography 223 Johnson, John, Jesus the King of Kings: A Sermon Preached at Liverpool, on the 22d [sic] Day of September 1761 (London: J. Johnson, 1762) Johnson, Samuel, Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (3 vols; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1945) Joyce, Jeremiah, Courage and Union in a Time of National Danger (London: J. Johnson and W. Vidler, 1803) Lamb, Charles, Letters, ed. E.V. Lucas and arranged by Guy Pocock (2 vols; London: J.M. Dent, 1950) Lennox, Charles, A Letter from His Grace the Duke of Richmond to Lieutenant Colonel Sharman, Chairman to the Committee of Correspondence Appointed By the Delegates of Forty-Five Corps of Volunteers, Assembled at Lisburn in Ireland; With Notes, By A Member of the Society for Constitutional Information (London: sold by J. Johnson and all other booksellers in Great Britain and Ireland, 1792) Lindsey, Theophilus, Letters, ed. Herbert McLachlan (Manchester: Publication of University of Manchester, 1920) Lofft, Capel, Remarks on the Letter of the Rt. Hon. Edmund Burke, Concerning the Revolution in France, and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London, Relative to that Event (London: J. Johnson, 1790; 2nd edn, London: J. Johnson; and Bury St Edmunds: J. Rackham, 1791) Lonsdale, Roger, (ed.) Eighteenth-Century Women Poets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990) Macgowan, John, (pseud.) The Arians and Socinians Monitor (3rd edn, London: W. Row, G. Porter, M. Priestley and J. Barker, 1795) McLachlan, Herbert, ‘More Letters of Theophilus Lindsey’, Transactions of the Unitarian Historical Society, 3 (1926), 361–77 Murray, James, (anon.) Sermons to Asses (London: J. Johnson, T. Cadell; and Newcastle: W. Charnley, 1768) Newton, John, One Hundred and Twenty Nine Letters . . . to the Reverend William Bull, ed. T. P. Bull (London: Hamilton, Adams & Co., 1847) Paine, Thomas, Complete Works (London: E. Truelove, 1875) — Rights of Man (London: J. Johnson, 1791) — Rights of Man, Common Sense and Other Political Writings, ed. Mark Philp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) — Rights of Man. Part The Second (London: J. S. Jordan, 1792) — Writings, ed. M. D. Conway (4 vols; New York: AMS Press, 1967) Palmer, John, King David’s Death, and Solomon’s Succession to the Throne, Considered and Improved, in A Sermon, Occasioned By the Death of . . . King George the Second, and the Accession of . . . King George the Third Preached in New Broad-Street, Nov. 2, 1760 (London: C. Henderson, R. Griffiths and J. Johnson, 1760) Price, Richard, A Discourse on the Love of One’s Country, Delivered on Nov. 4, 1789, at the Meeting-House in the Old Jewry, to the Society for Commemorating the Revolution in Great Britain (London: T. Cadell, 1789) — Correspondence . . . Volume 1: July 1748-March 1778, ed. D. O. Thomas and Bernard Peach (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1983) — Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, the Principles of Government, and the Justice and Policy of the War with America (11th edn, London: T. Cadell, E. and C. Dilly and J. Johnson, 1776) — Political Writings, ed. D. O. Thomas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) Priestley, Joseph, A Catechism for Children, and Young Persons (6th edn, Birmingham: printed for J. Johnson, London, 1791)

224 Romanticism, Publishing and Dissent — (anon.) A Free Address to Those who have Petitioned for the Repeal of the Late Act of Parliament, In Favour of the Roman Catholics (London: J. Johnson, 1780) — A Letter to the Right Honourable William Pitt . . . on the Subjects of Toleration and Church Establishments (2nd edn, London: J. Johnson and J. Debrett, 1787) — (anon.) An Address to Protestant Dissenters of All Denominations, on the Approaching Election of Members of Parliament, With Respect to the State of Public Liberty in General, and of American Affairs in Particular (London: J. Johnson, 1774) — (anon.) An Appeal to the Serious and Candid Professors of Christianity (4th edn, London: J. Johnson, 1772) — An Essay on a Course of Liberal Education for Civil and Active Life (London: C. Henderson, T. Becket and P. De Hondt, and J. Johnson and B. Davenport, 1765) — An Essay on the First Principles of Government; and on the Nature of Political, Civil, and Religious Liberty (London: J. Dodsley, T. Cadell and J. Johnson, 1768; 2nd edn, London: J. Johnson, 1771) — An History of the Corruptions of Christianity (2 vols; Birmingham: printed for J. Johnson, London, 1782) — A Sermon on the Subject of the Slave Trade; Delivered to a Society of Protestant Dissenters, at the New Meeting, in Birmingham (Birmingham: printed for the author and sold by J. Johnson, London, 1788) — A View of the Principles and Conduct of the Protestant Dissenters (2nd ed, London: J. Johnson, [1770]) — Considerations on Church-Authority; Occasioned By Dr. Balguy’s Sermon, on That Subject (London: J. Johnson and J. Payne, 1769) — Defences of Unitarianism, in Three Parts (London: J. Johnson, 1787–90) — Letters to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Occasioned By His Reflections on the Revolution in France, &c. (Birmingham: printed by Thomas Pearson and sold by J. Johnson, London, 1791) — Life and Correspondence, ed. John Towill Rutt (2 vols; London: R. Hunter, M. Eaton and C. Fox, 1831–32) — Political Writings, ed. Peter N. Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) — Remarks on Some Paragraphs in the Fourth Volume of Dr. Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, Relating to the Dissenters (London: J. Johnson and J. Payne, 1769) — The Conduct to be Observed By Dissenters in order to Procure the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts (2nd edn, Birmingham: printed by Thomas Pearson and sold by J. Johnson, London, [1789]) — The Importance and Extent of Free Inquiry in Matters of Religion (Birmingham: printed for J. Johnson, London, 1785) — Theological and Miscellaneous Works, ed. John Towill Rutt (25 vols; Hackney [London]: printed by G. Smallfield, 1817–31) — The Present State of Europe Compared with Antient Prophecies (London: J. Johnson, 1794) — The Theological Repository; Consisting of Original Essays, Hints, Queries, &c. Calculated to Promote Religious Knowledge (1st series, 3 vols; Vol. I, 2nd edn, London: J. Johnson, 1773; Vol. II, London: J. Johnson and J. Payne, 1770; Vol. III, London: J. Johnson, 1771; 2nd series, 3 vols [IV-VI], Birmingham: printed by Pearson and Rollason for J. Johnson, 1784–88) Radcliff, Ebenezer, A Sermon Preached at Walthamstow, December 13, 1776, Being the Day Appointed for a General Fast (London: J. Johnson, 1776) Robinson-Morris, Matthew (anon.), Considerations on the Measures Carrying On with Respect to the British Colonies in North America (London: R. Baldwin, [1774])

Bibliography 225 Roscoe, William, (anon.) Mount Pleasant: a Descriptive Poem (Warrington: printed for J. Johnson, London; and Liverpool: S. Crane, 1777) Scott, Mary, The Female Advocate: a Poem (London: J. Johnson, 1774) Shelley, Percy Bysshe, Letters, ed. Roger Ingpen (2 vols; London: G. Bell, 1914) Smith, Charlotte, Poems, ed. Stuart Curran (New York and Oxford: and Oxford University Press, 1993) Stone, Francis, (pseud.) A Short and Seasonable Application to the Public, In Behalf of A Respectful Address to the Parliament, to Procure a Legal Redress of Notorious, Religious Grievances (London: J. Johnson and J. Payne, 1768) Tattersall, W. F., ‘Letters of James Hurdis to William Cowper’, Sussex County Magazine, 1 (1926–27), 75–8 Toulmin, Joshua, The American War Lamented (London: J. Johnson, 1776) — Two Letters on the Late Applications to Parliament By the Protestant Dissenting Ministers (London: J. Johnson, 1774) Tracts. Printed and Published By the Unitarian Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge and the Practice of Virtue (13 vols; London: 1st series, 1791–1802; 2nd series, 1805) Trimmer, Sarah, The Oeconomy of Charity: or, An Address to Ladies Concerning SundaySchools (London: printed for T. Longman, G. G. J. and J. Robinson, and T. Johnson, 1787) Wakefield, Gilbert, A Reply to Some Parts of the Bishop of Landaff’s Address to the People of Great Britain (3rd edn, [London]: sold by the author at Hackney, 1798) — The Defence of Gilbert Wakefield . . . for a Reply to the Bishop of Landaff’s Address to the People of Great Britain . . . Delivered in the Court of King’s Bench, on February 21, 1799 (London: n.p., 1799) Walker, George, A Sermon Preached to a Congregation of Protestant Dissenters, at Nottingham, February 27th, 1778 (London: J. Johnson, 1778) — The Dissenters’ Plea, or The Appeal of the Dissenters to the Justice, the Honour and the Religion of the Kingdom, Against the Test Laws (Birmingham: printed by J. Thompson and sold by J. Johnson, London, 1790) — Sermons (4 vols; London: J. Johnson, 1808) Watson, Richard, An Address to the People of Great Britain (8th edn, London: R. Faulder, 1798) Wollstonecraft, Mary, An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution; and the Effect It Has Produced in Europe (London: J. Johnson, 1794) — (anon.) A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in A Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (London: J. Johnson, 1790) — Collected Letters, ed. Ralph M. Wardle (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1979) — Political Writings, ed. Janet Todd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994) — Posthumous Works, ed. William Godwin (4 vols; London: J. Johnson and G. G. and J. Robinson, 1798) — Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (London: J. Johnson, 1792; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986) — Works, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler (7 vols; London: William Pickering, 1989) Wood, William, Two Sermons, Preached at Mill-Hill Chapel, in Leeds, on the Celebration of the Hundredth Anniversary, of the Happy Revolution (Leeds: printed by Thomas Wright and sold by J. Johnson, London, 1788) Wordsworth, William, An Evening Walk, ed. James Averill (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1984)

226 Romanticism, Publishing and Dissent — Descriptive Sketches, ed. Eric Birdsall with Paul M. Zall (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1984) — Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth I: The Early Years 1787–1805, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, rev. C. L. Shaver (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967) — Prose Works . . . Volume I, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974) — The Prelude (the 1805 Text), ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990) Wyvill, Christopher, A Defence of Dr. Price, and the Reformers of England ([York]: printed for J. Johnson and J. Stockdale, London; and York: J. Todd, 1792) — Political Papers (6 vols; York: printed for J. Johnson, J. Debrett and J. Mawman, London; and J. Todd, York, 1794–1804)

4. Literary criticism and scholarship Antal, Frederick, Fuseli Studies (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956) Bentley, Jr, G. E., Blake Records (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969) — Blake Records Supplement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988) Blockstone, Bernard, English Blake (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1949) Boulton, James T., The Language of Politics in the Age of Wilkes and Burke (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963) Butler, Marilyn, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background 1760–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) Crook, Ronald E., A Bibliography of Joseph Priestley 1733–1804 (London: Library Association, 1966) Erdman, David V., Blake: Prophet Against Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954) Graham, Jenny, ‘The Publication of Part One of the Rights of Man’, Enlightenment and Dissent, 12 (1993), 70–7 Graham, Walter, English Literary Periodicals (New York: Octagon Books, 1966) Keynes, Geoffrey, Bibliography of William Hazlitt (London: Nonesuch Press, 1931) — Blake Studies: Essays on His Life and Work (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1949) King-Hele, Desmond, Erasmus Darwin and the Romantic Poets (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press [now Palgrave], 1986) Lau, Beth, ‘William Godwin and the Joseph Johnson Circle: the Evidence of the Diaries’, unpublished paper read at the MLA Conference, 2001 Mason, Eudo C., The Mind of Henry Fuseli (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951) Mee, Jon, Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992) Pendleton, Gayle Trusdel ‘Towards a Bibliography of the Reflections and Rights of Man Controversy’, Bulletin of Research in the Humanities, 85 (1982) Philp, Mark, Godwin’s Political Justice (London: Duckworth, 1986) Reed, Mark L., Wordsworth: The Chronology of the Early Years 1770–1799 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967) Roe, Nicholas, Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990) Roper, Derek, Reviewing Before the ‘Edinburgh’ 1788–1802 (London: Methuen, 1978) Russell, Norma, A Bibliography of William Cowper to 1837 (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1963)

Bibliography 227 Smith, Olivia, The Politics of Language 1791–1819 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984) Todd, Janet, Mary Wollstonecraft: an Annotated Bibliography (London: Garland, 1976)

5. History Colley, Linda, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (London: Pimlico, 1995) Doyle, William, The Oxford History of the French Revolution (Oxford, 1992) George, M. Dorothy, London Life in the Eighteenth Century (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965) Goodwin, A., The French Revolution (London: Hutchinson, 1977) Money, John, Experience and Identity: Birmingham and the West Midlands 1760–1800 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977) Read, Donald, The English Provinces, c.1760–1960: a Study in Influence (London: Edward Arnold, 1964) Rudé, George, Hanoverian London 1714–1808 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1981) Schofield, Robert E., The Lunar Society of Birmingham: a Social History of Provincial Science and Industry in Eighteenth Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963) Watson, J. S., The Reign of George III 1760–1815 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960)

6. Politics Anstey, Roger, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition 1760–1810 (London: Macmillan, 1975) Aspinall, A., Politics and the Press c.1780–1850 (London: Home and Van Thal, 1949) Bailyn, Bernard, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967) Black, Eugene Charlton, The Association: British Extraparliamentary Political Organization 1769–1793 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963) Bonwick, Colin, ‘An English Audience for American Revolutionary Pamphlets’, Historical Journal, 19, no. 2 (1976), 355–74 — ‘English Dissenters and the American Revolution’, in Contrast and Connection: Bicentennial Essays in Anglo-American History, ed. H. C. Allen and Roger Thompson (London: G. Bell, 1976), 88–112 — English Radicals and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977) Cannon, John, Parliamentary Reform 1640–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973) Christie, Ian R., Myth and Reality in Late Eighteenth-Century British Politics (London: Macmillan, 1970) — Stress and Stability in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain: Reflections on the British Avoidance of Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984) — Wilkes, Wyvill and Reform: the Parliamentary Reform Movement in British Politics, 1760–1785 (London: Macmillan, 1962) Clark, Dora Mae, British Opinion and the American Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1930) Clark, J. C. D., English Society 1688–1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice during the Ancien Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)

228 Romanticism, Publishing and Dissent Cone, Carl B., The English Jacobins: Reformers in Late 18th Century England (New York: Scribners, 1968) Cookson, J. E., The Friends of Peace: Anti-war Liberalism in England, 1793–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982) Crane, Verner W., ‘The Club of Honest Whigs: Friends of Science and Liberty’, William and Mary Quarterly, 23 (1966), 210–33 Crossley, Ceri, and Small, Ian (ed.), The French Revolution and British Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989) Derry, John, English Politics and the American Revolution (London: J. M. Dent, 1976) Dickinson, H. T., British Radicalism and the French Revolution 1789–1815 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985) — Liberty & Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: Methuen, 1979) Dinwiddy, J. R., Christopher Wyvill and Reform 1790–1820 (York: St Antony’s Press, 1971) Emsley, Clive, ‘An Aspect of Pitt’s ‘Terror’: Prosecutions for Sedition During the 1790s’, Social History, 6, no. 2 (1981), 155–184 The Genuine Trial of Thomas Paine, for a Libel Contained in the Second Part of Rights of Man, at Guildhall, London, December 18, 1792. . . . Taken in Short-Hand by E. Hodgson (London: J. S. Jordan, 1792) Goodwin, Albert, The Friends of Liberty: the English Democratic Movement in the Age of the French Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979) Graham, Jenny, ‘Revolutionary Philosopher: the Political Ideas of Joseph Priestley (1733–1804)’, Enlightenment and Dissent, 8 (1989) and 9 (1990) Hellmuth, Eckhart (ed.), The Transformation of Political Culture: England and Germany in the Late Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990) Hone, J. Ann, For the Cause of Truth: Radicalism in London 1796–1821 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982) Howell, T. B. and T. J., A Complete Collection of State Trials (23 vols; London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown [etc.], 1816–26) Jarrett, Derek, The Begetters of Revolution: England’s Involvement with France, 1759–1789 (Harlow: Longman, 1973) Maccoby, Simon, English Radicalism 1762–1785 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1955) — English Radicalism 1786–1832 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1955) Norris, John, Shelburne and Reform (London: Macmillan, 1963) The Parliamentary History of England, From the Earliest Period to the Year 1803 (24 vols; London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown [etc.], 1812–20) Parssinen, T. M., ‘Association, Convention and Anti-Parliamentarism in British Radical Politics, 1771–1848’, English Historical Review, 88 (1973), 504–10 Prochaska, F. K., ‘English State Trials in the 1790s: a Case Study’, Journal of British Studies, 13, no. 1 (1973), 63–82 Rea, Robert, The English Press in Politics, 1760–1774 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963) Robbins, Caroline, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman: Studies in the Transmission, Development and Circumstance of English Liberal Thought from the Restoration of Charles II until the War with the Thirteen Colonies (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961) — ‘The Strenuous Whig, Thomas Hollis of Lincoln’s Inn’, William and Mary Quarterly, 7 (1950), 406–53 Royle, Edward, and Walvin, James, English Radicals and Reformers 1760–1848 (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1982)

Bibliography 229 Sainsbury, John, Disaffected Patriots: London Supporters of Revolutionary America 1769–1782 (Kingston, Ont.: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1987) Thompson, E. P., The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991) Veitch, George Stead, The Genesis of Parliamentary Reform (London: Constable & Co., 1913) Williams, Gwyn A., Artisans and Sans-Culottes: Popular Movements in France and Britain during the French Revolution (London: Edward Arnold, 1968)

7. Religion Abbey, Charles J. and Overton, John H., The English Church in the Eighteenth Century (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1878) Barlow, Richard Burgess, Citizenship and Conscience: a Study in the Theory and Practice of Religious Toleration in England During the Eighteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1962) Bradley, James E., Religion, Revolution, and English Radicalism: Nonconformity in Eighteenth-Century Politics and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) — ‘The Anglican Pulpit, the Social Order, and the Resurgence of Toryism during the American Revolution’, Albion, 21 (1989), 361–88 — ‘Whigs and Nonconformists: Slumbering Radicalism in English Politics, 1739–89’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 9 (1975), 1–27 Browne, John, History of Congregationalism, and Memorials of the Churches in Norfolk and Suffolk (London: Jarrold & Sons, 1877) Coomer, Duncan, English Dissent under the Early Hanoverians (London: Epworth Press, 1946) Cowherd, Raymond G., The Politics of English Dissent: the Religious Aspects of Liberal and Humanitarian Reform Movements from 1815 to 1848 (New York: New York University Press, 1956) Ditchfield, G. M., ‘Anti-trinitarianism and Toleration in Late Eighteenth Century British Politics: the Unitarian Petition of 1792’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 42 (1991), 39–67 — ‘The Parliamentary Struggle Over the Repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts 1787–1790’, English Historical Review, 89 (1974), 551–577 — ‘The Subscription Issue in British Parliamentary Politics, 1772–79’, Parliamentary History, 7 (1988), 45–80 Downey, James, The Eighteenth-Century Pulpit (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969) Gascoigne, John, ‘Anglican Latitudinarianism and Political Radicalism in the Late Eighteenth Century’, History, 71 (1986), 22–38 Gilbert, Alan D., Religion and Society in Industrial England: Church, Chapel and Social Change, 1740–1914 (London: Longman, 1976) Greaves, Richard L., ‘Radicals, Rights, and Revolution: British Nonconformity and Roots of the American Experience’, Church History, 61 (1992), 151–168 Haakonssen, Knud (ed.), Enlightenment and Religion: Rational Dissent in EighteenthCentury Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) Halley, Robert, Lancashire: Its Puritanism and Nonconformity (2 vols; London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1869) Henriques, Ursula, Religious Toleration in England, 1787–1833 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961)

230 Romanticism, Publishing and Dissent Hole, Robert, Pulpits, Politics and Public Order in England, 1760–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) Holt, Raymond V., The Unitarian Contribution to Social Progress in England (London: Lindsey Press, 1952) Ippel, Henry P., ‘British Sermons and the American Revolution’, Journal of Religious History, 12 (1982), 191–205 Jones, R. Tudur, Congregationalism in England 1662–1962 (London: Independent Press, 1962) Lincoln, Anthony, Some Political and Social Ideas of English Dissent 1763–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938) Lovegrove, Deryck, The Established Church, Sectarian People, Itinerancy and the Transformation of English Dissent, 1780–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) Manning, Bernard Lord, The Protestant Dissenting Deputies, ed. Ormerod Greenwood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952) McLachlan, H., English Education under the Test Acts (Manchester University Press, 1931) — The Warrington Academy: Its History and Influence (Manchester: Chetham Society, 1943) Mellone, Sydney Herbert, Liberty and Religion: the First Century of the British and Foreign Unitarian Association (London: Lindsey Press, 1925) Peaston, A. E., ‘The Revision of the Prayer Book by Dr. Samuel Clarke’, Transactions of the Unitarian Historical Society, 12 (1959–62), 27–38 Philp, Mark, ‘Rational Religion and Political Radicalism in the 1790s’, Enlightenment and Dissent, 4 (1985), 35–46 Richey, Russell E., ‘The Origins of British Radicalism: the Changing Rationale for Dissent’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 7 (1973–74), 179–192 Seed, John, ‘Gentlemen Dissenters: the Social and Political Meanings of Rational Dissent in the 1770s and 1780s’, Historical Journal, 28, (1985), 299–325 Sellers, Ian, Nineteenth-Century Nonconformity (London: Edward Arnold, 1977) Sykes, Norman, Church and State in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935) Thomas, D. O., The Honest Mind: the Thought and Work of Richard Price (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977) Thomas, Roger, ‘Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and the Test and Corporation Acts’, Transactions of the Unitarian Historical Society, 11 (1955–58), 117–127 Thompson, David M. (ed.), Nonconformity in the Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972) Turner, William, The Warrington Academy (Warrington: Library and Museum Committee, 1957) Underwood, A. C., A History of the English Baptists (London: Baptist Union Publication Dept, 1947) Watts, Michael, The Dissenters: From the Reformation to the French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978) Whitley, W. T., A History of British Baptists (London: Charles Griffin & Co., 1923) Wilbur, Earl Morse, A History of Unitarianism in Transylvania, England, and America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952) — Our Unitarian Heritage: an Introduction to the History of the Unitarian Movement (Boston: Beacon Press, 1925) Wright, Conrad, The Beginnings of Unitarianism in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966)

Bibliography 231

8. Bibliography and the book trade Almon, John, Memoirs of a Late Eminent Bookseller (London: n.p., 1790) Anon., The Cases of the Appellants and Respondents in the Cause of Literary Property, Before the House of Lords . . . 26 Feb. 1774 (London: J. Bew, W. Clarke, P. Brett and C. Wilkin, 1774) Belanger, Terry, ‘A Directory of the London Book Trade, 1766’, Publishing History, 1 (1977), 7–41 English Short Title Catalogue [CD Rom] (London: British Library, n.d.) Feather, John, A History of British Publishing (London: Routledge, 1988) — ‘British Publishing in the Eighteenth Century: a preliminary subject analysis’, Library, 8 (1986), 32–46 — ‘The English Book Trade and the Law’, Publishing History, 12 (1982), 51–74 — The Provincial Book Trade in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) — ‘The Publishers and the Pirates: British Copyright Law in Theory and Practice, 1710–1775’, Publishing History, 22 (1987), 5–47 Gerring, Charles, Notes on Printers and Booksellers (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., 1900) Hansard, Luke, The Auto-Biography of Luke Hansard Printer to the House 1752–1828, ed. Robin Myers (London: Printing Historical Society, 1991) Hanson, T. W., ‘Richard Edwards, Publisher’, Times Literary Supplement (8 August 1942), 396 Knight, Charles, Shadows of the Old Booksellers (London: Peter Davies, 1927) Korshin, Paul J. (ed.), The Widening Circle: Essays on the Circulation of Literature in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976) Lackington, James, Memoirs of the Forty-Five First Years of the Life of James Lackington (7th edn; London: printed for the author, 1794) Marston, Edward, Sketches of Some Booksellers of the Time of Dr. Samuel Johnson (London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co., 1902) Maxted, Ian, The London Book Trades 1775–1800: a Preliminary Checklist of Members (Folkestone: Dawson, 1977) Mumby, F. A. Publishing and Bookselling: a History from the Earliest Times to the Present Day (London: Jonathan Cape, 1949) Myers, Robin, and Harris, Michael (ed.), Development of the English Book Trade 1700–1899 (Oxford: Oxford Polytechnic Press, 1981) — Sale and Distribution of Books from 1700 (Oxford: Oxford Polytechnic Press, 1984) — Spreading the Word: the Distribution Networks of Print 1550–1850 (Winchester: St Paul’s Bibliographies, 1990) Nichols, John, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century (9 vols; London: Nichols, Son & Bentley, 1812–15) Nineteenth Century Short-Title Catalogue Series I Phase I: 1801–1815 (Newcastle: Avero, 1985) Plant, Marjorie, The English Book Trade (London: Allen & Unwin, 1965) Plomer, H. R., A Dictionary of Printers and Booksellers who were at Work in England, Scotland and Ireland from 1726 to 1775 (Oxford: Bibliographical Society, 1932) Raven, James, Judging New Wealth: Popular Publishing and Responses to Commerce in England, 1750–1800 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992) Rogers, Deborah D., Bookseller as Rogue: John Almon and the Politics of Eighteenth-Century Publishing (New York: Peter Lang, 1986)

232 Romanticism, Publishing and Dissent Timperley, C. H., A Dictionary of Printers and Printing (London: H. Johnson [etc.], 1839) Walters, Gwyn, ‘The Booksellers in 1759 and 1774: the Battle for Literary Property’, Library, 29 (1974), 287–311

9. Newspapers and Periodicals Analytical Review Anti-Jacobin Review Critical Review Edinburgh Review Examiner Gentleman’s Magazine Gospel-Magazine, or Spiritual Library Monthly Review Morning Post Oeconomist; or Englishman’s Magazine The Times

Index

abolitionism, see under slave trade Aikin, Anna Laetitia, see Anna Laetitia Barbauld Aikin, Arthur, 177, 214 n71 Aikin, Charles Rochemont, 177, 214 n71 Aikin, John Jr, 20, 30, 61, 70, 71, 73, 88, 92, 95, 96, 100–1, 137–8, 151, 159, 163, 166, 173, 175, 179, 205 n18, 211 n26, 213 n59 & n65, 214 n71 & n75, Aikin, John Sr, 30 Aikin, Lucy, 175, 214 n71 Almon, John (1737–1805), 5–7, 17, 34, 35, 36, 37, 42, 43, 52, 54, 55, 56, 57, 79, 191 n55 America émigrés to, 141, 142, 143, 144–5 pre-war relations with Britain, 32–5, 37–8, 43, 45 Unitarianism in, 43, 151, 151, 176, 190 n35 War of Independence (1776–83), 45–8, 50, 52, 55–7, 71, 74, 76, 93, 118, 129 Analytical Review (1788–98), 88–9, 92, 106, 107, 120, 129–30, 143, 157, 158, 161, 162, 165, 168, 172, 180, 181, 183 n18, 183 n27, 193 n11 & n27, 194 n32, 201 n76, 202 n83, 205 n8, 207 n42 & n50, 209 n79, 210 n23 and America, 145, 151, 209 n80 Anti-Jacobin attacks on, 159–60, 162 and anti-war sentiment, 134, 158–9, 161, 162 and Birmingham Riots (1791), 114 contributors to, 88, 114, 161, 170, 174, 201 n71 demise of, 170

and fast-day discourses, 137–8, 139, 148, 207 n39, 208 n64 and foreign news and literature, 93–4, 158, 162, 197 n13, 208 n69 and France, 94–5, 96, 105, 112, 124, 132, 134, 149, 152, 168, 198 n21, 206 n27, 208 n68 & n69 impartiality of, 87–9, 94, 168–9 and Ireland, 158, 160 and Johnson’s trial, 158, 160–1, 162 launch, 86–9 and Paine, 150, 168–9 and ‘rational’ dissent, 86, 199 n33, 200 n55 and Reflections controversy, 102–3, 104, 105, 111, 116, 117, 123, 203 n100, 204 n106 and Test and Corporation Acts, 89, 90, 97, 98, 100, 101, 198 n17 and treason trials, 147 anti-Catholicism, 15–16, 38, 59–60, 66–7, 72, 95, 173 Anti-Jacobin Review, 159–60, 161, 162, 165, 166, 168 anti-Jacobins, 141, 149, 212 n49 Arians, 10, 12, 36, 46, 52, 57, 67, 164, 187 n81 Association for Preserving Liberty and Property Against Republicans and Levellers (1793), 125 atheism, xii, 8, 18, 19, 29, 43, 52, 65–6, 94–5, 101, 139, 142, 149–50, 159, 165, 168, 180, 211 n30 Baptists, 2–3, 4, 5, 12, 114, 142, 143, 148, 177, 203 n100, 208 n63 233

234 Index

Barbauld, Anna Laetitia (née Aikin), xii, xiii, 30–2, 38, 39, 70, 71, 78, 136, 148, 151, 156, 162, 171, 173, 178, 179, 180, 208 n65, 213 n59, 214 n71 & n78 and Analytical Review, 88, 211 n25 and Monthly Magazine, 159 works: An Address to the Opposers of the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts (1790), 100–1; Poems (1773), 30–2, 71; Sins of Government, Sins of the Nation (1793), 137–9 Barlow, Joel, 116, 118, 120, 121, 128, 153, 164, 169, 201 n76, 202 n80 in France, 124, 127, 132, 133, 145, 204 n109, 209 n71 works: Advice to the Privileged Orders (1792), 116–17, 118, 124, 132, 145–6, 202 n84, 209 n77; Advice to the Privileged Orders. Part II (1793), 124–5, 205 n13; The Conspiracy of Kings (1792), 117–18, 119, 129; A Letter to the National Convention of France (1792), 123–4, 145–6 Baron, Richard, 15–16, 36 Beaufoy, Henry (MP), 80–1, 89 Becket, Thomas (bookseller), 7, 10, 40 Beddoes, Thomas, 148, 152, 161, 170, 176 Beloe, William, 160, 210 n14 Belsham, Thomas, 83, 109, 142, 170–1, 173, 175, 176, 177, 179, 180 Bentley, Thomas, 7–8, 43, 61 Bicheno, James, 148 Bigge, Thomas, 137 Binns, John (LCS deputy), 158 Birmingham, 49, 60, 61, 62, 63, 67, 68, 74, 77, 82, 84, 86, 96, 97, 98–9, 105, 147, 170, 176 Committee of Protestant Dissenters, 96, 98

Riots (1791), 98, 113–14, 117, 120, 130, 143 Blackburne, Francis, 21, 22, 63, 196 n60 Blackstone, William, 16–17 Blake, William, xii, 78, 119–20, 130, 157, 175, 198 n19 Blasphemy Act (1698), 3, 18–19, 81, 108, 122 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 160–1, 171 Bonnycastle, John, 164, 169, 173, 179, 180, 213 n58 booksellers in America, 150–1 in France, 149–50 in Germany, 149, 162, 208 n69 in London, 5, 6, 7, 39–42, 156, 165, 166, 178–9 prosecution of, 6, 155–64, 158, 172, 180, 212 n48 provincial, 5, 22, 39, 41, 42, 84, 135–7, 147–8, 155, 192 n75, 214 n75 in Scotland, 39, 41–2 see also under individual names Boswell, James, 10, 30, 32, 36, 192 n75 Bowles, William Lisle, 148 Brissot de Warville, Jacques Pierre, 126, 134, 206 n25 Bristol, 10, 11, 20, 21, 43, 44, 45, 109, 148, 161, 162, 170, 177, 189 n23, 206 n35, 208 n70, 214 n75, British Critic, 160 Buckland, James (bookseller), 4, 7, 72, 186 n72 Burgh, James, 36–7 Burke, Edmund, 23, 39, 42, 43, 44, 47, 48, 52, 94, 97, 98, 99–100, 109, 120–1, 122, 123, 133, 142, 186 n73 & n76, 200 n63, 206 n25 Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), xii, 101–2, 109, 111: literary responses to, 102–13, 115–22, 129, 167 Bute, John Stuart, 3rd Earl of, 4–6 Butterworth Bayley, Thomas, 21, 214 n71

Index 235

Cabinet, 135 Cadell, Thomas Jr (bookseller), 12, 13, 28, 35, 36, 40, 48, 55, 83, 92, 96 Cadell, Thomas Sr (bookseller), 12, 186 n72 Cambridge, 22, 26, 27, 53, 84–6, 143, 147–8, 177, 200 n62, 204 n2, 205 n10, 206 n35 Cambridge Intelligencer, 148, 212 n48 Cambridge University, 8, 17, 22, 54, 81, 83–5, 172, 187 n83, 204 n5 Canterbury, 37, 86 Cappe, Catharine, 171, 193 n27 Cappe, Newcome, 19, 46–7, 64, 125, 147, 171, 196 n60, 212 n50 Cartwright, John, 38, 46, 47, 49, 51, 53–4, 55, 74, 136, 152, 165, 169, 170, 172, 180, 192 n66, 196 n60, 203 n93 Catholics, 3, 15, 29, 38, 52, 59–60, 69, 79, 88, 100, 143, 173 see also anti-Catholicism ‘Chapter Coffee House’ booksellers, 40–1, 48, 196 n72 Charnley, William (bookseller), 137 Christie, Thomas, 86–7, 94, 102, 111–13, 117, 121, 123, 124, 127, 149, 170, 196 n60, 197 n9, 202 n86, 203 n93, 204 n2, 206 n22, 208 n59 Church of England, 52, 64, 74, 96, 100, 105, 114, 117, 124, 139, 141, 142, 156, 191 n48 dissenting attacks on, 14, 16, 17, 46, 63, 80–2, 101, 104, 105, 107, 117, 124, 139, 141, 145, 155–6 Clarke, Samuel, 10, 27, 112 ‘Club of Honest Whigs’, 32, 36, 46, 56 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 161–2, 176, 177, 178, 208 n65, 212 n49 Condorcet, Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de, 93–4, 149, 206 n25

Cooper, Thomas, 77, 120–1, 124, 132, 144, 150, 176, 203 n99 copyright, 39–42, 151, 174, 178, 207 n42 Corporation Act (1661), 3, 79–80, 89–90, 95–101, 157, 181, 182 n6, 215 n83 Cottle, Joseph (bookseller), 148, 162 County Association Movement, 53, 56, 136 Cowper, William, xii, xiii, 41, 91, 71–6, 105, 120, 127, 137, 139, 141, 174, 198 n19, 205 n15 and Analytical Review, 88, 174, 201 n76, 202 n83 works: Anti-Thelyphthora (1781), 62; Life and Posthumous Writings (1803–6), 174, 213 n64; Olney Hymns (1779), 71, 72, 151, 204 n3; Poems (1782), 72–3; Poems, in Two Volumes (1786), 174; The Task (1785), 73–6, 77, 91, 111–12, 127, 151, 205 n7 Crabb Robinson, Henry, 169, 200 n62, 214 n73 Cruttwell, Richard (bookseller), 148 Cuthell, John (bookseller), 155, 156, 157, 160, 162, 163, 211 n28 Darwin, Erasmus, 60, 61, 86, 159, 160, 174, 176, 213 n59 works: The Botanic Garden (1789–91), 92, 118, 119, 151, 202 n82 & n83; Zoonomia; or, The Laws of Organic Life (2 vols, 1794–96), 140, 151, 159, 174 Davenport, Benjamin (bookseller), 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 35, 194 n31 Davies, Thomas (bookseller), 10, 41 Davy, Humphry, 170 Debrett, John (bookseller), 79, 80, 89–90, 148, 164, 200 n49 Declaration of Rights of Man (1789), 95, 108, 111, 112, 134

236 Index

didactic literature, 9, 36, 70–1, 94, 143, 173, 174, 178, 194 n32, 207 n50, 213 n53 see also education Dilly, Charles and Edward (booksellers), 34–5, 36, 37, 41, 42, 48, 54, 57, 72, 148, 196 n60, 208 n59 Disney, John, 22, 25, 47, 53, 65, 66, 83, 92, 95, 97, 100, 108, 122, 142, 144, 150, 152, 171, 176, 180, 192 n66 dissenters, 2–3, 29 attitudes: to America, 30, 34, 45–8, 57; to Church, 29, 63, 96, 99, 100–1, 107; to France and French Revolution, 92–3, 94–5, 100–13, 115, 139, 144, 153, 161, 135, 205 n18; to Hanoverian monarchy, 2–3, 30, 45, 46–7, 85, 108, 114, 157; to State, 29, 63, 83, 85, 95, 96, 99, 107, 127; to Stuart monarchy, 3, 92, 95 and elections, 24, 44, 45, 54, 74, 173, 199 n34 and ‘Glorious’ Revolution, 68–9, 92–3, 95–6, 141, 157 political activity, 23–6, 29, 53–4, 56, 97, 23–5, 52, 57, 79–80, 89–90, 95–101, 121, 135, 181, 182 n6 dissenting academies, 8–10, 19, 46, 61, 81, 83, 152, 173, 177 see also individual names Dobson, Thomas (bookseller), 150–1 Dodsley, James (bookseller), 13, 101, 166 Dumouriez, Charles François, 149, 209 n80 Dyer, George, 114, 148, 159, 170, 200 n62, 201 n71 Dyson, George, 152, 209 n78 Eaton, Daniel Isaac (bookseller), 129, 153, 164, 165, 166, 202 n83, 204 n106, 205 n15 Edgeworth, Maria, xii, 173–4, 175, 180

Edgeworth, Richard Lovell, 173, 175 education, 8, 9, 36, 74, 84–5, 94, 114–15, 116, 124, 170 see also didactic literature Enfield, William, 20–1, 40, 42, 70, 71, 72, 88, 92, 136, 151, 159, 170, 202 n88, 213 n59 Equiano, Olaudah, 77–8 Erskine, Thomas, 109, 125, 147, 156, 163, 196 n60 Essex Street Chapel, 27–8, 43, 53, 54, 59, 65, 84, 123, 137, 142, 144, 152, 171, 173, 177, 179, 187 n2, 214 n69 Estlin, John Prior, 109, 148, 161, 177, 196 n60, 208 n65 evangelicalism, 71, 76, 143, 177, 194 n31 Exeter, 20, 142, 148, 205 n10 Eyres, William (printer), 21, 30, 76, 77 Falkner, Matthew (printer), 121, 135, 143 fast-day discourses, 45–8, 71, 125, 137–40, 141–2, 147–8, 171–2, 194 n30, 204 n3 Fawcett, Joseph, 148, 152, 161, 175, 171, 177, 208 n67 Feathers Tavern Association, 22–3, 26, 29, 53, 54, 79 Fleming, Caleb, 11, 12, 15–16, 18, 36, 185 n48 Flower, Benjamin, 147, 200 n62, 212 n48 Fordyce, George, 54, 163, 164, 193 n4 Fox, Charles James (1749–1806), 52, 74, 80, 89, 98, 99, 100, 103, 108, 109, 110, 118, 119, 122–3, 136, 152, 157, 159, 168, 172, 173, 186 n67, 194 n36, 199 n34 France, 4, 5, 30, 56–7, 74, 91, 92, 93–4, 101, 106, 108, 112, 116, 121, 123–4, 127, 128, 132, 142, 155–6, 157–9, 159, 161, 171–2, 175, 179 see also French Revolution

Index 237

Franklin, Benjamin, 32, 36, 38, 42–3, 44, 45, 48, 51, 93, 118, 136, 172, 198 n27 works: Political, Miscellaneous, and Philosophical Pieces (1779), 56–7, 60, 172, 213 n59; Some Information to Those who would Remove to America (1794), 144–5 French Revolution, xii, 90, 91–3, 95–6, 97, 99–100, 101, 103, 106, 107, 108, 111–12, 119, 120, 123–5, 127, 128, 131–2, 133–4, 142, 146–7, 149, 153, 210 n14 literary responses to, 101–8, 111–13, 115–22, 127–34, 139, 140, 143, 144, 148–50, 153, 161 Frend, William, 84–6, 95, 109, 114, 143, 165, 198 n24, 200 n54 Fuseli, Henry, xii, 7, 88, 94, 120, 124, 134, 164, 169, 170, 174, 175, 177, 179, 180, 184 n35, 195 n48, 198 n19, 201 n74, 202 n88, 211 n28 Fysshe Palmer, Thomas, 86 Gales, Joseph (printer), 135, 143 Geddes, Alexander, 78, 88, 102, 124, 143, 164 General Body of Protestant Dissenting Ministers, 3, 24, 25, 52, 96 George III, 1, 3–4, 6, 17, 38, 43, 45, 49, 118, 125, 129, 152, 155, 169, 179 George IV (as Prince of Wales), 180, 199 n34, 207 n42 Germany, 136, 149, 162, 208 n69, 209 n78 Girondins, 126, 127, 131, 134, 149 ‘Glorious’ Revolution (1688), 5, 69, 80, 92–3, 95–6, 107, 112, 120, 125, 133, 143, 165 Godwin, William, xii, 133, 134, 152–3, 154, 159, 160, 162, 164–5, 169, 174, 175, 177–8, 180

Gordon Riots (1780), 59–60, 69 Gore, John (bookseller), 7, 8, 10, 20, 71, 76, 191 n47 Gregory, George, 76, 78, 175, 213 n65 Griffiths, Ralph (bookseller), 2, 8, 64, 193 n11 Hackney, 111, 113, 115, 138, 142, 144, 150, 176, 201 n71, 213 n54 New College, 83, 177, 212 n50 Hansard, Luke, 35, 166 Hardy, Thomas, 123, 145–6 Hartley, David Jr, 148 Hartley, David Sr, 51, 63, 177, 178 Harwood, Edward, 10, 12, 185 n61 Hayley, William, 174, 180 Hays, Mary, 152, 159, 162, 169, 175 Hazlitt, William Jr, 11, 175, 177–8, 201 n69, 209 n78, 213 n58 Hazlitt, William Sr, 10–11, 12, 19, 25, 177, 178, 190 n35 Henderson, Christopher (bookseller), 2, 8 Henry, Thomas, 61, 177 Hewlett, John, 71, 163, 179, 180 Heywood, Samuel, 79–80, 89, 96, 97, 99, 105, 110, 114, 152, 196 n60, 198 n27, 208 n63, 211 n29, 215 n83 Hoadly, Benjamin, 97, 112, 198 n27 Hodgson, Solomon (bookseller), 137, 206 n34 Hoghton, Sir Henry (MP), 23, 25, 52 Holcroft, Thomas, 129, 145, 147, 164, 174 Hollis, Thomas, 36, 37 Horne Tooke, John, xii, 50–1, 52, 53, 92, 95, 101, 107, 124, 145–7, 149, 159, 161, 165, 172, 180, 192 n66, 194 n36, 202 n80, 203 n99, 208 n61 Horsley, Samuel (Bishop of St David’s), 64–5, 97, 101, 143, 180 Howard, John, 92

238 Index

Hoxton Academy, 10, 23, 152, 177 n72 Hull, 137, 143 Hunt, James Leigh, 180, 197 n4 Hunter, Rowland, 179–80, 181 Hurdis, James, 139–41, 151 Ireland, 52, 157–8, 160, 210 n15 Jacobins, 101 (Burke), 120, 121, 125, 126, 129, 134, 146, 149, 153, 164, 168, 201 n67 Jardine, David, 148, 208 n65 Jebb, John, 22, 27, 54–6, 63, 65–6, 74, 83–4, 85, 86, 136, 152, 172 Jeffries, Edward, 79, 90, 97, 196 n60 Johnson, John, 1, 2, 3, 7, 71 Johnson, Joseph and America, 32–5, 37, 42–9, 56–8, 93, 116, 143, 144–5, 150–1, 187 n6, 201 n76, 209 n71 anti-slavery publications, 75–8 anti-war publications, 134, 135–9, 148–9, 158–9, 161, 171, 179 appearance at treason trials, 145–7, 202 n84 bookseller for Society for Promoting Knowledge of the Scriptures, 65–6, 170 and campaigns for repeal of Test and Corporation Acts (1787), 79–82, (1789), 89–90, (1790) 96–101 death, 179 and dissenters’ campaigns for relief from subscription, 23–6 early life, 1–2 early relations with Priestley, 8–9 and Feathers Tavern movement, 21–3 final years, 169–81 first involvement with ‘rational’ dissenters, 10–11 first publications, 1, 3–4 and France, 91–4, 124, 126, 127, 132, 149 and Gordon Riots, 59–60

helps found Essex Street Chapel, 27–8 imprisonment, 142 n46, 157, 163, 169–70, 213 n60 launches Analytical Review (1788–98), 86–9 and Lindsey, 26–7, 42–3, 170 links with dissenting academies: 8–9, 10, 20–1, 61 links with Liverpool, 7, 61, 170 links with Priestley in America, 150–1, 170–1, 175–6, 209 n80 literary circle, xiii, 124, 126, 127, 132, 162, 164–5, 180, 210 n14, 212 n49 loyalist publications, 139–41 move to Paternoster Row, 7 move to St Paul’s Churchyard, 20–1 partnership with Benjamin Davenport, 7, 11–12, 194 n31 partnership with John Payne, 12 and politics, 50–1, 52–6, 134–8, 172–3 and Priestley’s controversial theology, 62–5, 67–9, 167, 170 publication of fast-day discourses, 45–8, 71, 125, 137–40, 141– 2, 147–8, 171–2, 204 n3 publications related to Birmingham Riots (1791), 113–14, 130 publications related to French revolution, 91, 93, 94, 95, 102–25, 127–34, 140, 148, 149–50, 153, 161, 210 n13 publishes 5 November sermons, 68–9, 92–3, 96 relations with authors, see under individual names religious views, 11–12, 28 and SCI, 54–6, 102, 117, 124, 145–6, 165, 202 n80, 203 n100, 204 n2 shop on Fish Street Hill, 1, 5, 7 and Theological Repository, (1769–73) 18–19, (1784–8) 67–8, 82, 87, 143

Index 239

Johnson, Joseph continued trial, 155–64, 172 and Wilkite movement, 5–7, 17, 164 and Unitarian Book Society, 108–9, 122, 170, 176 Jones, David (‘Welsh Freeholder’), 113, 147 Jordan, Jeremiah Samuel (bookseller), 106, 110, 111, 115, 116, 122, 125, 145, 155, 156, 157, 158, 163, 166, 206 n32, 210 n8 Joyce, Jeremiah, 171–2 ‘Junius’, 17, 25, 31 Kearsley, George (bookseller), 6–7, 34 Keats, John, 213 n58 Keith, George (bookseller), 2, 4, 35, 71 Kippis, Andrew, 10, 25, 32, 36, 57, 65, 72, 83, 92, 111, 121 n93, 152, 183 n27, 184 n35, 196 n60 Lafayette, 94, 119, 120, 205 n17 Lamb, Charles, 175, 178 Lardner, Nathaniel, 12, 25, 66, 85, 185 n48 Lavoisier, Antoine Laurent, 61, 93–4, 213 n59 Leeds, 11, 19–20, 49, 92, 136, 143, 212 n50 libel, 109–10, 118 Fox’s Libel Bill (1792), 109, 119, 122–3 prosecutions for, 13, 17, 109, 122– 3, 125–6, 129, 131–2, 142–3, 155–64, 169, 212 n48, 180 Lindsey, Theophilus, 21–3, 26–8, 36, 42–3, 48, 53, 54, 59, 60, 63, 65–6, 75, 80, 84–7, 92, 95, 96, 97, 98, 102, 105, 106, 107, 108, 110, 122, 132, 142, 144, 151, 169, 170, 176, 177, 193 n27, 194 n38, 196 n60, 199 n47, 211 n28, 213 n67 Liverpool, 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 10, 18, 20, 33, 45, 71, 76, 80, 86, 170, 177, 191 n47, 195 n48

Llandaff, Bishop of, see under Watson, Richard Locke, John, 13, 34, 35–6, 37, 85, 99, 112, 178, 198 n27 Lofft, Capel, 96, 102, 103, 104–5, 112, 121, 136, 159, 196 n60, 200 n62, 201 n66 London Corresponding Society (LCS), 123, 145–7, 151, 153, 158, 164, 165, 169, 203 n101, 210 n18 Longman, Thomas (bookseller), 7, 41, 70, 73, 143, 162, 178, 179, 212 n48, 214 n71 Louis XVI, 95, 112, 119, 120, 125, 126, 128, 130, 131 Lunar Society, 8, 60–1, 113, 114, 118 Macaulay, Catharine, 31, 37, 38, 189 n21, 196 n60 Malthus, Thomas, 165, 171, 178 Manchester, 20, 21, 33, 49, 61, 77, 86, 120–1, 135, 144, 181, 203 n99, 206 n35, 212 n51, 214 n71, 185 n56, 193 n5 March, John (printer and bookseller), 135–6, 143 medicine, 5, 21, 54, 61, 135, 148, 169, 170, 174, 193 n4, 196 n72 Millar, Andrew (bookseller), 7, 35, 36, 39 Milton, John, 35, 36, 75, 97, 99, 174, 198 n19 Mirabeau, Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, Comte de, 93, 94, 205 n17 Montgomery, James, 158 Monthly Magazine, 159, 210 n22, 213 n65 Murray, James, 16, 137 Newcastle, 80, 137 Newton, John, 71–2, 76, 77, 139, 143, 151, 174, 194 n38, 204 n3 Norwich, 21, 88, 92, 135–6, 138 Nottingham, 46, 47, 53, 99 Oxford, 8, 52, 81, 83–5, 148, 180, 185 n62

240 Index

Paine, Thomas, xii, 48, 98, 111, 112, 114, 115–16, 118, 120–8, 131–4, 136, 140–3, 145, 152, 153, 155, 157, 159, 164–6, 168–9, 179, 202 n80 works: Age of Reason (1794–5), 150, 159, 172; Atheism Refuted (1798), 159; Common Sense (1776), 48, 57, 106; ‘Letter to Henry Dundas’ (1792), 123, 145, 203 n100, 214 n72; Rights of Man (1791–2), xii, 105–10, 111–12, 115–17, 121–6, 128, 129, 130–1, 133, 145–6, 157, 164, 166 Payne, John (bookseller), 12, 16, 18, 20, 21, 34, 36 Percival, Thomas, 20, 21, 43, 61, 70, 71, 73, 121, 151, 170, 173, 174, 196 n60, 214 n71 Phillips, Richard (bookseller), 159, 175–6, 205 n15 Pitt, William, the elder (Earl of Chatham), 4, 5, 6, 13, 24, 51, 56–7 Pitt, William, the younger, 74, 79, 80–1, 89–90, 99, 105, 110, 123, 136, 152, 155–6, 157–8, 161, 168, 172, 194 n36, 210 n10 poetry, 17, 30–1, 39, 62, 71–6, 77, 78, 91–2, 117–20, 127–30, 135–6, 137, 141, 142, 147, 161–2, 170, 171, 174–5, 180, 192 n69, 201 n76, 207 n42 Price, Richard, 9, 25, 27, 32, 36, 43, 48–50, 51, 52, 55–7, 60, 65, 71, 83, 84, 92, 93, 97–8, 101, 103–5, 107, 111, 112, 113, 119, 121–2, 136, 140, 149, 165, 177, 186 n76, 192 n66 & n75, 196 n60, 198 n19, 200 n54, 204 n2 works: A Discourse on the Love of One’s Country (1789), 95–7, 100, 198 n19, 202 n82; The Evidence for a Future Period of Improvement (1787), 82–3; Facts: Addressed to . . . All the Subjects of Great Britain and Ireland (1780), 50–1;

Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty (1776), 48–50 Priestley, Joseph and America, 32–4, 42–3, 44, 51, 56, 57, 187 n6, 190 n35: emigration to, 141, 144, 150–1, 171, 175, 197 n4 and Analytical Review, 86, 88, 197 n77 & n80 attacked in Anti-Jacobin, 159, 160 and Birmingham Riots (1791), 113–14 and campaigns for repeal of Test and Corporation Acts, 80–2, 95–6, 97–100 death, 176 and dissenters’ campaigns for relief from subscription, 23–6 early relations with Johnson, 8–9 emigration, 141, 144, 150–1, 171, 175, 197 n4 and Feathers Tavern movement, 22–3 and France, 93–4, 95, 96, 124, 139, 142 and Lunar Society, 60–1 moves to Birmingham, 60 and politics, 51, 141–2, 168 and science, 42, 60–1, 75, 93–4, 102, 118, 199 n34 and Shelburne, 24–5, 27, 51–2 and Society for Promoting Knowledge of the Scriptures, 65–6 and Socinianism, 12 at Warrington, 8–9 and Wilkes, 13, 16–17, 33–4, 49 and Unitarian version of bible, 95, 113 works: An Address to Protestant Dissenters of All Denominations, on the Approaching Election of Members of Parliament (1774), 43–5, 50; An Appeal to the Serious and Candid Professors of Christianity (4th edn, 1772), 20, 29, 170, 200 n54; The Conduct to be Observed by Dissenters in order to Procure

Index 241

Priestley, Joseph continued the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts (1789), 95–6, 202 n86; Defences of Unitarianism (1787–90), 84, 97; Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit (1777), 51–2, 193 n8; An Essay on a Course of Liberal Education (1765), 9, 13, 36, 50, 187 n4, 189 n23, 213 n59; An Essay on the First Principles of Government (1768), 13–15, 16, 19, 21, 32, 35, 42, 92, 93, 187 n6; Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air (1774; rpt., 1790), 199 n34; A Familiar Illustration of Certain Passages of Scripture (1772), 24, 29, 200 n54; A Free Address to Those who have Petitioned for the Repeal of the Late Act of Parliament, in Favour of the Roman Catholics (1780), 60; A General View of the Arguments for the Unity of God (1783), 66, 170, 200 n54; An History of the Corruptions of Christianity (1782), 62–4, 67, 102, 143; An History of Early Opinions Concerning Jesus Christ (1786), 67; The Importance and Extent of Free Inquiry in Matters of Religion (1785), 68–9, 80–1, 82, 89; Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religion (1772–4), 24, 62, 170, 193 n8; Lectures on History and General Policy (1788), 204 n5; A Letter of Advice to those Dissenters who Conduct the Application to Parliament (1773), 26; A Letter to the Right Honourable William Pitt (1787), 80–2; Letters to the Philosophers and Politicians of France (1793), 142; Letters to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (1791), 103–5, 112; The

Present State of Europe Compared with Antient Prophecies (1794), 139, 141–2; The Present State of Liberty in Great Britain and Her Colonies (1769), 32–4, 44, 141; Remarks on . . . Blackstone’s Commentaries (1769), 16–17, 36; A Reply to the Animadversions on the History of the Corruptions of Christianity, in the Monthly Review (1783), 64; A Sermon on the Subject of the Slave Trade (1788), 77; Theological Repository, (1769–73) 18–19, 21, 28–9, 65, (1784–8) 67–8, 82, 87, 113, 143; A View of the Principles and Conduct of the Protestant Dissenters (1769), 17–18; The Use of Christianity, Especially in Difficult Times (1794), 144 Protestant Association, 59–60 Radcliff, Ebenezer, 25, 46, 186 n76 Rees, Abraham, 83, 152, 177, 196 n60 Rees, Owen (bookseller), 179, 212 n48, 214 n75 religious subscription, see under Thirty-Nine Articles Remnant, James and William (booksellers), 149, 162, 208 n69 republicanism, 105, 106–8, 115, 116–19, 124, 126, 128–31, 145–6, 155, 156, 165, 180 Revolution Society of London, 92, 96, 101, 109, 152 Ridgway, James (bookseller), 142, 164 Rivington, John (bookseller), 41, 70, 72, 143, 157, 166, 180 Robinson, Anthony, 114, 161, 177 Robinson, George (bookseller), 7, 70, 135, 137, 152, 164, 165, 179 Rockingham, Charles Watson Wentworth, Marquis of, 13, 25, 33, 39–40, 51–3

242 Index

Roland, Manon, 134, 149, 208 n68, 173 Roscoe, William, 76–7, 134, 177, 195 n48 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 94, 103, 112, 161 Rutt, John Towill, 172, 181 n83 Savile, Sir George (MP), 28, 34, 47, 52, 53, 59, 136 Sayers, Frank, 135–6 science, 38–9, 42, 60–1, 75, 89, 92, 93–4, 102, 118, 137, 140, 174, 199 n34, 213 n53, 214 n71 Scott, Mary, 38–9 sermons, 1, 4, 6, 11, 16, 28, 35, 57, 68–9, 71, 92–3, 113, 136, 144, 170–2, 173, 176, 179, 200 n54 see also fast-day discourses Seven Years War, 4, 32, 35, 37, 74, 78, 179 Seward, Anna, 174 Sheffield, 49, 135, 136, 143, 158 Shelburne, William Petty, 2nd Earl of, 24–5, 27, 48, 51–2, 56, 60, 74, 93, 99–100, 134, 136, 187 n79, 191 n49, 198 n27, 201 n76 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 180 Sieyès, Emmanuel Joseph Comte, Abbé, 94, 119, 149 slave trade, 71, 75–8, 91–2, 103, 139, 172, 173, 195 n48 Smith, Charlotte, 174–5 Society of the Friends of the People, 121, 123, 203 n93, 213 n54 Society for Constitutional Information (SCI), 53–4, 55, 56, 61, 65, 101, 104, 108, 109, 117, 123, 124, 125, 135, 136, 144, 145–7, 165, 169, 171, 192 n75, 202 n80, 203 n93 & n101, 213 n54 Society for Promoting Knowledge of the Scriptures, 65–6, 79, 83, 84, 87, 108, 170, 196 n63, 202 n82, 203 n100 Socinians, 10, 11, 12, 19, 24, 57, 183 n24, 187 n81

Southey, Robert, 161, 162, 176, 210 n22, 212 n49 Spence, Thomas, 164, 165 Stedman, John Gabriel, 78 Stockdale, John (bookseller), 56, 83, 90, 122 Stone, John Hurford, 150 Strahan, William (printer and bookseller), 41, 43 Sunday schools, 70, 137, 193 n27 see also Sarah Trimmer Symonds, Henry Delahoy (bookseller), 123, 142 Taunton, 23, 25, 45–6, 86, 88, 142, 148, 161 Taylor, William, 135–6 Test Act (1673), 3, 15, 24, 96, 97, 79–80, 89–90, 95–101, 107, 141, 157, 181, 182 n6, 215 n83 Thelwall, John, 145, 146, 147, 153, 161, 209 n79 Theological Repository, (1769–73) 18–19, (1784–88) 67–8, 82, 87 Thirty-Nine Articles campaigns against, 22–6, 52, 83–6, 172 subscription to, 2–3, 14, 21, 81, 83, 98 Thompson, John (printer and bookseller), 98, 114, 205 n15 tithes, 3, 50, 81, 95, 101 Todd, John (bookseller), 122, 136, 137 Toleration Act (1689), 3, 15, 16, 122, 180, 181 Toulmin, Joshua, 25–6, 45–6, 47, 65–6, 86, 88, 89, 122, 142, 144, 148, 159, 161, 170, 171, 176–7, 196 n60, 197 n80, 200 n54, 203 n100, 213 n54 Towers, Joseph, 57, 192 n75, 203 n93 Treason Trials (1794), 145–7, 152, 153, 171, 202 n84, 203 n98 & n101 Trimmer, Sarah, xiii, 70–1, 143, 151, 165, 178, 180, 194 n32, 207 n50, 210 n14 Turner, William Jr, 137

Index 243

Turner, William Sr, 19, 65, 88, 137 ‘Two Acts’ (1795), 151–2, 154 Unitarian Fund, 177 Unitarian Society, 108–9, 110, 122, 142, 170, 171, 176, 177, 178, 180, 214 n68 & n70 Unitarianism, 11, 12, 15, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23, 27, 62, 67, 68–9, 81–2, 84–6, 137, 161, 176–7, 181 in America, 43, 151, 176, 190 n35 Anglican reaction to, 64–5, 75, 96–8, 101, 122, 159, 162, 194 n32 & n38 Johnson’s connections with, 27–9, 65–6, 95, 122, 159, 170–1, 176–7, 179 Unitarians, 23, 28, 59, 68, 70, 84, 86, 113, 134, 135, 137, 142, 148, 150, 152, 170–1, 176–7, 179, 180, 181, 196 n63, 197 n77, 213 n54 United Irishmen, 158, 160, 210 n15 Vaughan, Benjamin, 52, 56, 79, 93, 100, 172, 196 n60, 198 n27 Volney, Constantin François Chasseboeuf, Comte de, 94, 149–50, 152, 209 n71 Voltaire, François Marie Arouet de, 4–5, 112, 150 Wakefield, Gilbert, 47, 66, 83, 99, 155–7, 158–9, 160–1, 162, 163, 169, 172, 193 n5 & n11, 198 n24, 201 n71, 212 n46, 214 n71 Walker, George, 46–7, 98–9, 171, 192 n66, 196 n60, 212 n51 Walker, Thomas, 144 Warrington, 7, 8, 10, 18, 20, 30, 31, 76, 77, 92 Warrington Academy, 8, 9, 10, 20–1, 23, 30, 46, 47, 61, 62, 66, 79, 80, 87, 98, 99, 136, 173, 184 n35, 185 n61, 191 n47, 192 n3, 195 n48, 208 n65, 212 n51

Watson, Richard (Bishop of Llandaff), 22, 130, 131, 155–7, 158, 212 n48 Wedgwood, Josiah, 7–8, 43, 60, 61 Wilberforce, William, 77, 78 Wilkes, John, 4, 5–6, 7, 13, 16–17, 28, 29, 32, 33, 34, 43, 49, 186 n67 William III, 69, 79, 92, 107 Williams, Helen Maria, 208 n68 Wollstonecraft, Mary, xii, xiii, 71, 94, 106, 114, 115, 117, 124, 126, 127, 132–4, 139, 141, 148, 149, 152, 159, 160, 164–5, 173, 188 n17, 204 n1, 210 n14 & n15 and Analytical Review, 88, 94, 96, 160, 170, 195 n45, 207 n42 works: An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (1794), 134, 151; ‘Letter on the Present Character of the French Nation’ (1793), 132–4; Posthumous Works (1798), 133, 160, 165, 204 n1; Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), 103, 105, 107, 112, 115; Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), xii, 114–16, 129, 130–1, 195 n45, 202 n86, 205 n13 women’s rights, 38–9, 103, 114–15, 129, 130, 173, 189 n23, 201 n66 women’s writing, 30–1, 38–9, 70–1, 103, 114–15, 169, 171, 173–5 Wood, William, 25, 47, 92, 137, 196 n60, 212 n50 Wordsworth, William, 127–32, 162, 208 n67 & n70 Wyvill, Christopher, 53, 56, 69, 74, 121–2, 136–7, 165, 169–70, 172, 196 n60 York, 19, 46, 53, 122, 136, 171, 177, 136, 137 n35 Yorkshire, 20, 21, 53, 136–7, 143, 195 n48, 212 n50 Yorkshire County Association, see under County Association Movement

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