John Bugg (ed.) The Joseph Johnson Letterbook
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. 272pp.
ISBN 978-0-19-964424-7. £65.00
At the start of his introduction to this first-ever edition of Joseph Johnson’s
Letterbook, John Bugg describes Johnson’s bookshop as a hub for some
of the most important writers and artists of the time, ‘like City Lights in
Beat-era San Francisco, or Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company
in 1920s Paris’. As an American academic at Fordham University, Bugg
has successfully made a transatlantic leap to set Johnson in the context
of the European enlightenment and the English book trade.
For anyone interested in the history of print culture in the late eighteenth
century, the chance rediscovery of one of Joseph Johnson’s business
letterbooks has been akin to finding the holy grail. Johnson was in business as
a bookseller-cum-publisher for almost fifty years. His Letterbook includes
copy letters and memos written in the fifteen-year period leading up to
1809, the year of Johnson’s death. He was the publisher of Joseph Priestley
and of Thomas Paine, of Mary Wollstonecraft and Maria Edgeworth, and
of course of John Newton and William Cowper. Leslie Chard considered
Johnson ‘the most important publisher in England from 1770 until 1810’.1
His imprints included religion, science and medicine, languages, literature,
politics, education, fiction and poetry. He was a shrewd businessman but
one who also nurtured his authors. He was known by contemporaries for
the weekly dinners that he gave at 72 St Paul’s Churchyard, where he
lived above the shop. Some of the greatest minds of the age met around
his table to eat boiled cod, veal and vegetables.
It was thought that all the records of Johnson’s business had
disappeared, apart from a few letters found in his authors’ archives.
And then, from nowhere, this one small Letterbook surfaced in 1994
at Pickering & Chatto in London. It was then bought by the New York
Public Library. An export licence was granted subject to photocopies of
the Letterbook’s pages being made available at the British Library. Until
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the appearance of this edition by John Bugg, British scholars have had to
make sense of the Letterbook via a mass of un-numbered and unwieldy
photocopies. But his excellent edition now makes this key source for
English literary history easily available.
The 217 copy letters and memos transcribed in this edition were mainly
written by Johnson, or on his behalf, between the years 1795 and 1809 to
some 130 correspondents. Most of the contents of the new edition come
from the Letterbook itself, but Bugg has also usefully included a few of
Johnson’s earlier letters found in other archives and so far unpublished.
These include five letters addressed to William Cowper.
The Letterbook brings to life the relations between a late eighteenthcentury
bookseller and his authors and printers. The letters also bear
witness to the challenging conditions in which booksellers like Johnson
had to do business. There was a constant threat of piracy from Scotland
and beyond. Books had to be parcelled up and sent by carriage to the
country or by ship, sometimes on long voyages to America and even India.
Booksellers like Johnson were just beginning to invest in the burgeoning
export business to the colonies, but payment could take years to arrive.
Liberal-minded booksellers like Johnson ran the gauntlet of government
suspicion as revolutionary ideas flooded in from abroad; one of the most
moving letters in this collection was written by Johnson from the Kings
Bench Prison where he was incarcerated in 1799 on the charge of seditious
libel. And the frequency of Johnson’s letters chasing non-payment of old
debts, even from prison, helps explain why so many bookselling businesses
foundered.
Towards the end of Johnson’s lifetime he was recognised as ‘the
Father of the Trade’. But the business disappeared within a few decades
of his death. Unlike some other prominent booksellers of the time such
as the well-documented family businesses of John Murray and the
Longmans, Joseph Johnson had no direct heirs. Gerald P. Tyson devoted
a monograph to him, Joseph Johnson, A Liberal Publisher (University
of Iowa Press, 1979), but its value was restricted by the lack of archival
sources. Now, thanks to this edition of the rediscovered letterbook, we
can document Johnson’s business practice. John Bugg has provided an
up-to-date biographical introduction and an assessment of Johnson’s
importance in the book trade. Additional sections in the introduction
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discuss Johnson and science, Johnson’s encouragement of women
writers, in particular Mary Wollstonecraft whom he knew well, his role
in the transatlantic book trade, and his trial and imprisonment.
As Bugg recognises, Joseph Johnson stands apart from most of his
contemporaries for one particular reason. Unlike some more fashionable
booksellers he was a dissenter. Johnson came from a Baptist family near
Liverpool, and retained his social and professional connections with the
nonconformists. He was apprenticed to a minor London bookseller who
had ties to the dissenting community in Liverpool, and it was probably
through these connections that he came into contact with Newton and
later with William Cowper. On 13 March 1764 Newton was in London
and wrote to his wife Polly, then in Liverpool, telling her to direct his
correspondence care of Johnson.2 This was the year that Joseph Johnson
published Newton’s anonymous Authentic Narrative of Some Remarkable
and Interesting Particulars in the Life of *******, documenting Newton’s
early career as a slave trader and his religious conversion.
The Letterbook includes no letters to Newton himself. Presumably,
once Newton moved from Olney to St Mary Woolnoth in London, a
brisk walk away from St Paul’s Churchyard, there was no need to write.
But there are letters in the Letterbook about the printing and reprinting
of Newton’s works, both to the Warrington printer William Eyres and
to Murray & Cochrane in Edinburgh. The print orders were substantial;
in 1807 Johnson ordered 2000 more copies of The Olney Hymns from
Murray & Cochrane, 750 more copies of Cardiphonia and 250 copies
of Newton’s entire Works in nine volumes.
As for the five previously unpublished letters to William Cowper, four
come from the Hannay Collection at the Firestone Library at Princeton,
and one from the Morgan Library in New York. The first dates from
1782, when Johnson was already at work on the publication of Cowper’s
first volume of poems. It is clear from Cowper’s published letters that
he was impressed by the quality of Johnson’s editing. He had written to
John Newton on 25 August 1781 to praise his new bookseller:
I forgot to mention that Johnson uses the discretion my poetship has allowed
him with much discernment. He has suggested several alterations, or rather
marked several defective passages which I have corrected much to the
advantage of the poems.3
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Thanks to Bugg’s inclusion of these extra letters we can now understand
at first hand Johnson’s reluctance to include Newton’s intended preface
to the Poems. On 18 February 1782 Johnson wrote to Cowper to warn
that the preface ‘will infallibly prejudice the critics against the work
before they have read a line, & their judgment has no small influence
on the success of poetical compositions’. He does at the same time
acknowledge ‘Mr N’s genius & worth’. Evidently, despite Johnson’s own
nonconformist background he was sensitive to contemporary Anglican
antipathy to evangelicalism.
Any letters that Johnson might have written to Cowper about the lack
of success of the 1782 Poems, or the remarkable success of the second
volume containing The Task, published by Johnson in 1786, are yet to
be found. And there are no references in the Letterbook to any payments
owing to Cowper; Johnson of course had published the Poems at his own
risk and Cowper was paid nothing for them. But, also undocumented in
the Letterbook, when in 1793 Johnson published a fifth edition of The
Task he presented Cowper with the profit.4
The second unpublished letter that Bugg provides is dated 17
September 1788. Johnson refers to Cowper’s preoccupation with his
translation of Homer and encloses an unnamed manuscript for him to
look at. The remaining three letters, all from the Hannay Collection
and dated 1791, refer to Johnson’s plan for a ‘Milton Gallery’ to rival
Boydell’s successful Shakespeare Gallery. Johnson proposed that Henry
Fuseli would provide the illustrations. Cowper subsequently agreed to
act as editor and to provide translations of Milton’s Latin and Italian
poems, a project that he continued to work on until his death in 1800.
Cowper and Johnson never met. Cowper did however invite Johnson
to visit Weston Underwood in the summer of 1791. Johnson responded
to the invitation on 22 August that year:
I thank you very much for your kindness, there is no excursion for me this
summer, my first and last officers are both ill, & I think it my duty rather to
work double tides than dismiss a servant for the visitation of God.
I am Dr Sir
Yr obedt
J. Johnson
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The Milton project was to bring Cowper into contact with his future
biographer William Hayley. The Letterbook includes several mentions
of the publication of The Life of Cowper, one of the few books that
Johnson published for which he failed to obtain copyright. According
to Hayley’s own Memoirs, in 1801 Johnson travelled to Hayley’s house
at Felpham in Sussex by post-chaise to meet him and discuss terms.
Hayley described the meeting thus:
Terms were soon adjusted with the author, when Johnson, after an ineffectual
contest, acquiesced in the positive requisition of Hayley to have his work
printed in his native city of Chichester.5
For Johnson it must have been an unsatisfactory meeting. Unusually,
Johnson’s role was restricted to distributing the book rather than editing
it and having it printed; ‘You are sensible I have not interfered in the
slightest manner in the work in which you are engaged’, he wrote to
Hayley on 4 January 1802, while offering him the benefit of his forty
years’ experience as a bookseller. Later, in January 1807, he was to
advise one of his authors, Elizabeth Hamilton of Edinburgh, that ‘A
partnership between author and bookseller I do not recommend. It rarely
turns out satisfactory’. He advised Miss Hamilton that authors should
cede control of publication to their bookseller, presumably in return for
an agreed fee.
… the Authors have nothing to do but to send their manuscript in a legible
state to the bookseller; furnishing paper and employing a printer and
corrector of the press, advertising, vending, in short, everything else will be
his business.
John Bugg’s edition of the Letterbook is, as one would hope from
Oxford University Press, elegantly produced, with generous notes and
some useful supporting appendices. There are twelve black and white
illustrations. The four appendices include business letters written after
Johnson’s death, no doubt using up some spare pages at a time when
paper was expensive. Bugg also provides a hard-to-locate account of
Johnson’s dinners by an American visitor, William Austin, taken from
Letters from London Written During the Years 1802 & 1803 (Boston,
1804). Austin found himself dining at Johnson’s house in St Paul’s
Churchyard alongside Johnson’s two great friends, the painter Fuseli
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and the mathematician John Bonnycastle. The conversation ranged far
and wide, but as Austin writes, ‘The English don’t say much till the first
course is finished. But their manner of eating soon throws them into
a gentle fever, which invites to sociability, when they have sufficient
confidence in their company’.
The mention of Johnson’s friends Fuseli and Bonnycastle is significant.
When Johnson died they were beneficiaries in Johnson’s will. Johnson
died a comparatively wealthy man, no doubt thanks in part to his
ownership of Cowper’s copyrights. His estate was valued at £60,000,
and Bugg refers to the division of the estate between friends and family,
making reference to an often-quoted article by Phyllis Mann, ‘Death of
a London Bookseller’6. The business, to be known as J. Johnson and
Co. was put into the hands of Johnson’s assistants, his great-nephews
John Miles and Rowland Hunter. But neither Mann nor Bugg were
perhaps aware of a privately-printed collection of papers put together
by Johnson’s nephew, also called Joseph Johnson, who was co-executor
of the estate with Miles and Hunter. The collection, ‘References to the
Case of Mr Fuseli’s Legacy under the will of the late Joseph Johnson’
lurks in the British Library, awaiting a full study.
Hunter and Miles did their best to exclude their co-executor from the
settlement of the estate, and he found it necessary to contest the will
in the Ecclesiastical Courts. He accused Miles and Hunter of failing
to hand over the promised legacies to Fuseli and Bonnycastle, and of
withholding information about the copyrights owned by the company.
He had their correspondence printed as a record, in readiness for the
lawsuit. The bound compilation includes sensational accounts, ‘printed
and sold by all Booksellers and Newsmen, 1817, Price One Shilling’, of
a fraud committed by Miles and brought before the Court of Chancery in
1817. Despite this, the company lingered on until it was taken over by
Simpkin, Marshall & Co, whose records were apparently destroyed in
World War II. How this one Letterbook survived remains unknown.
The only other small criticism one might have of this otherwise
excellent edition is of the index, which is underwhelming, at least in
reference to William Cowper. The Letterbook contains at least two
letters written by Johnson in 1796, to Messrs Morison of Perth who had
printed Cowper’s poems without permission, perhaps misunderstanding
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how Johnson had registered the copyright of the poems. Similarly
Johnson’s copyright dispute with Joseph Cottle, the Bristol-based
publisher of Wordsworth and Coleridge, is not indexed under Cowper’s
name. Such piracy was an important indicator of Cowper’s popularity.
Johnson’s fury at the theft is evident from his letter to Cottle, dated 6
December 1804: ‘Had you, in your collection, taken thirty or even sixty
lines from Cowper I should not have objected, but you have taken nearly
one thousand, this is insufferable…’.
But despite these minor criticisms, this edition of Joseph Johnson’s
Letterbook is a magnificent addition to our understanding of the history
of publishing in this period and a work of real scholarship. Beg, borrow,
or better still buy, a copy.
