Joseph Johnson (publisher)
Joseph Johnson was an influential 18th-century London bookseller and publisher. His publications covered a wide variety of genres and a broad spectrum of opinions on important issues. Johnson is best known for publishing the works of radical thinkers such as Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Thomas Malthus, Erasmus Darwin and Joel Barlow, feminist economist Priscilla Wakefield, as well as religious Dissenters such as Joseph Priestley, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Gilbert Wakefield, and George Walker.
Engraving of Johnson by William Sharp, after a painting by Moses Haughton the Elder
Johnson commissioned this portrait of his close friend Joseph Priestley from his other close friend Henry Fuseli around 1783. The portrait is today in the collections of Dr Williams's Library.
Forms of Prayer (1783) by Joseph Priestley, a Unitarian liturgy published by Joseph Johnson
The second English edition of Francis Stoughton Sullivan's Lectures on the Constitution and Laws of England, published by Johnson in 1776
Mary Wollstonecraft was a British writer, philosopher, and advocate of women's rights. Until the late 20th century, Wollstonecraft's life, which encompassed several unconventional personal relationships at the time, received more attention than her writing. Today Wollstonecraft is regarded as one of the founding feminist philosophers, and feminists often cite both her life and her works as important influences.
Wollstonecraft c. 1797
Wollstonecraft in 1790–91, by John Opie
Frontispiece to the 1791 edition of Original Stories from Real Life engraved by William Blake
10 August attack on the Tuileries Palace; French revolutionary violence spreads