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  • Published: 21 November 2023
  • ISBN: 9781784701079
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 528
  • RRP: $29.99

Dinner with Joseph Johnson

Books and Friendship in a Revolutionary Age




A portrait of a radical age via the writers who gather around a publisher's dining table - from William Wordsworth to Mary Wollstonecraft

*Longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize*

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

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

Johnson's years as a maker of books saw profound change in Britain and abroad. In this remarkable portrait of a revolutionary age, Daisy Hay captures a changing nation through the stories of the men and women who wrote it into being, and whose ideas still influence us today.

'Rich in period and personal detail' Guardian

'Hugely engrossing' Sunday Times

  • Published: 21 November 2023
  • ISBN: 9781784701079
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 528
  • RRP: $29.99

About the author

Daisy Hay

DAISY HAY FRSL is an award-winning biographer whose previous works include Young Romantics (2010), Mr and Mrs Disraeli (2015) and Dinner with Joseph Johnson (2022). In 2020 she had an accident which caused a head injury. That injury, and the slow and difficult recovery that followed, prompted herto research and write The Book of Falling Women.She is currently Professor of English Literature and Life Writing at the University of Exeter and lives in Devon with her family.

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