An amusing article (a review on a new book, “Dinner with Joseph Johnson: Books and Friendship in a Revolutionary Age” by Daisy Hay, Associate Professor in English Literature and Life Writing at the University of Exeter) by Rosemary Hill about “that other side” of Regency London—post-Hogarthian, Gothic and brutal, which isn’t mentioned often enough: layers of Sentimentalism and Romanticism are thick and have to be unveiled. It also describes an exponential rise of the female writers’ literary market and the publishing upheaval in the light of upcoming French Revolution.

If Johnson was anything but idle, he was vulnerable in other ways to the turbulence and brutality of late Georgian London. A Radical in politics and a nonconformist in religion, he and his dinner guests rode the tide of events. The capital was the only place where they could properly function and where they might hope to encounter sympathetic company on a sufficient scale to generate the sociability of Johnson’s dining room. This was especially true for the women of his circle. But debt, scandal, civil disorder and disease were daily hazards and after war with France was declared in 1793 an increasingly repressive regime of censorship saw many of them pushed to the limits of the law and occasionally beyond it. In 1799 the weekly dinners had to move to King’s Bench Prison, where Johnson was serving six months for selling a pamphlet by Gilbert Wakefield attacking Pitt’s government for its suspension of habeas corpus at home and its conduct of the war abroad. ©