Helen Braithwaite. Romanticism, Publishing and Dissent: Joseph Johnson and the Cause of Liberty. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003. ISBN 0333983944. Price: £50/US$90.

On 17 July 1798, the publisher and bookseller Joseph Johnson was hauled before Guildhall and charged as a “malicious, seditious, and ill-disposed person” for selling Gilbert Wakefield’s A Reply to Some Parts of the Bishop of Landaff’s Address. Declared guilty, he was not only forced to pay £20 and provide sureties amounting to £700, but was also sentenced to six months’ imprisonment. In distinct contrast, the publisher of Wakefield’s piece, John Cuthell, was only ordered to pay £20 and court costs before being discharged. It was quite obvious, then, that Johnson was being punished not so much for publishing a work that denounced the “pestilential operations” of the then Prime Minister, William Pitt the Younger, but rather for guilt by association with those regarded as dangerous political radicals. Posterity seems to have accepted the view of the “packed” jury, even if the hostility has largely disappeared: today, Joseph Johnson is more anecdotally remembered as the publisher and bookseller who wined and dined London’s radical intelligentsia. We remember him for employing William Blake as an occasional engraver. We remember him for taking Mary Wollstonecraft under his wing and for helping to bail Thomas Paine out of prison for a debt. And so on. But beyond that, little is known of the full range of Johnson’s activities as a publisher and bookseller, let alone the scope of his long purported radicalism. In all, what kind of works did he publish? How were they perceived by an increasingly politicized reading public? These questions are addressed in Helen Braithwaite’s recent monograph, Joseph Johnson, Romanticism, Publishing and Dissent: Joseph Johnson and the Cause of Liberty. Braithwaite’s study is not only a welcome addition to Gerald P. Tyson’s earlier biography of Johnson, but also a keen and insightful study of late eighteenth-century British reform and radicalism. Here, Braithwaite demonstrates how Johnson’s publications supported the emergence of socially and politically progressive causes, particularly his tacit championing for the first modern political agitator, John Wilkes, the continued promotion of religious toleration for Dissenters, particularly Unitarians, support for American independence, the abolition of slavery, the debate over the French Revolution as well as his interest in science and educational reform. The primary strength of Braithwaite’s study is its analysis of the social dynamics behind rational Dissent, one that brings a new dimension to recent scholarship by James Bradley, John Seed, and others. Chapter 1, “Dissenting Origins,” focuses on Johnson’s receptiveness of Socinian thought in the 1760s and ‘70s, and his publication of such works as Thomas Amory’s Life of John Buncle, and Paul Cardale’s True doctrine of the New Testament Concerning Jesus Christ, Considered (1767), and the “typically combative” (11) works of Caleb Fleming. As Braithwaite points out, Johnson’s publications, even at this early stage, already “reflected a liberal appreciation of the value of theological discussion, particularly when based upon the rational, almost scientific, evaluation of scriptural and historical evidence, a growing dissatisfaction with many of the mysteries and superstitions still tolerated by orthodox believers,” not to mention a “keen ability to tap into the widening metropolitan and provincial network of contemporary dissent” (11). But even more intriguing is her discussion of Johnson’s relationships with members of the faculty at Warrington Academy, a Dissenting alternative to Oxford and Cambridge universities, through his acquaintance with Thomas Bentley, a co-founder of Warrington and a business partner of Josiah Wedgwood. It was through Warrington that Johnson came to establish a longstanding friendly business relationship with one of its most famous (or infamous) tutors, Joseph Priestley. Indeed, Brathwaite’s sketch of Priestley sheds much needed light on the public awareness of radicalized Dissent …