The Joseph Johnson Letterbook

The Joseph Johnson Letterbook is the first scholarly edition of the correspondence of the influential Romantic-era publisher Joseph Johnson (1738-1809). Though those in Romantic-era studies know who Joseph Johnson was and why he mattered, but this adventurous, influential publisher and bookseller is not as widely known outside the field. Moreover, he has tended to appear in Romantic studies chiefly as a reference point in work on other figures.The Joseph Johnson Letterbook, the first scholarly edition of his correspondence, offers a long overdue correction. Working with writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Joseph Priestly, Elizabeth Hamilton, William Blake, Charlotte Smith, and William Godwin (among many others), Johnson was the dynamic center of the London dissenting community, publishing and selling all manner of writing, all the while hosting parties and suppers that were sites of vital conversation.The Joseph Johnson Letterbook brings into print for the first time over two hundred of Johnson's letters from archives around the world.

John Bugg, Associate Professor of English, Fordham University

John Bugg is author of Five Long Winters: The Trials of British Romanticism (Stanford University Press, 2014), which examines the relations between literary culture and political repression at the end of the eighteenth century. His essays and reviews have appeared in PMLA, ELH, Eighteenth-Century Studies,TLS, Romanticism, The Huntington Library Quarterly, European Romantic Review, and Keats-Shelley Journal. He is co-founder, with Sarah Zimmerman, of the New York City Romanticism Group.