Once a week, in late eighteenth-century London, writers of contrasting politics and personalities gathered around a dining table. The veal and boiled vegetables may have been unappetizing but the company was convivial and the conversation brilliant and unpredictable.
The host was Joseph Johnson, publisher and bookseller: a man at the heart of literary life. Johnson’s years as a publisher, 1760 to 1809, witnessed profound political, social, cultural and religious changes—from the American and French revolutions to birth of the Romantic age—and many of his dinner guests and authors were at the center of events.
