“Those who think much, for the most part, write little – those who write much, generally, think little,” offered Samuel Paterson in a collection of essays published in 1772 by his friend, Joseph Johnson. It was not a sentiment with which Johnson agreed.
Over five decades, beginning in 1760, Johnson published a heterogeneous collection of writers, united for the most part by their conviction that the written word had the power to refashion the world. “If I shall be, but in a single instance, the means of saving the life of a fellow creature, the little trouble I have had in throwing my thoughts together upon the subject will not be lost labour, nor these pages, few as they are, be written in vain,” wrote Edward Rigby in 1776.
Rigby’s particular focus was childbirth, examined in Essay on the Uterine Haemorrhage. The lifelines offered by other Johnson authors were less literal, but no less imperative: vigorous rebuttals of the status quo as it affected women, children, political radicals, and those non-conformist Protestants known as Dissenters, among whom was Johnson himself, born into a Baptist family in Liverpool in 1738, later a convert to Unitarianism.
Johnson categorised the writers he published as “respectable and scientific”, responsible for work “generally of a Moral, Philosophical and Medical Nature”; for their defenders they constituted an “aristocracy of talents”. They included poets Cowper, Coleridge, Wordsworth and Anna Barbauld, philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, scientists including Joseph Priestley, journalist and political philosopher William Godwin, early advocates of the abolition of slavery, and children’s author Sarah Trimmer, whose Fabulous Histories Designed for the Instruction of Children Respecting their Treatment of Animals later inspired the lasting dislike of fellow children’s author, Beatrix Potter.
Johnson “delighted in doing good”, wrote Godwin, his friend from the 1790s. At the weekly gatherings the publisher organised in rooms above his shop at 72 St Paul’s Churchyard, in the shadow of the cathedral, guests were nurtured on “the feast of reason and the flow of soul”. Conversation the first time he met Johnson, noted Godwin, centred on Voltaire and Cicero.
