How Radical was Joseph Johnson and Why Does Radicalism Matter?

The radical bookseller Joseph Johnson was willing to publish tracts that others thought too hot to handle.

—John Brewer¹

If Johnson were radical, indeed if he had any political affiliation . . . it was accidental.

—Marilyn Gaull²

My title’s first question seems an affair of the archive, a call for the collection of historical data; the second, a diagnosis of our own critical preoccupations. Taken together, these queries issue a problem that lingers at the site at which the concerns of book history subtend those of literary criticism. In modern accounts of the Romantic era, Joseph Johnson rarely appears without a kind of Homeric epithet attached to his name: he is “radical publisher Joseph Johnson.” No more explanation for the epithet is needed than that he championed Mary Wollstonecraft or hosted Thomas Paine at the Tuesday dinners he held above his bookshop at 72 St. Paul’s Churchyard. In a few recent efforts to make distinctions among the various political pulses that coursed through London in the revolutionary age, however, Johnson has been denied the label “radical,” in some cases with an attempt at precision, in others with an attempted incision that severs him from the truly radical figures in the era’s book trade (with “truly radical” itself variously defined).³ In these accounts, rather than radical, Johnson is middle-class, bourgeois, polite, and even, dare we say it, well-to-do (this last was certainly true by the time of his death).⁴ According to these competing critical narratives, radical publisher Joseph Johnson was dogged by the authorities for his daring publications, while polite publisher Joseph Johnson’s spell in King’s Bench Prison for seditious libel was a petty inconvenience for someone who could host his friends in comfortable private quarters while in jail. To say this another way, Johnson is radical for those who wish him to be, and not for those who do not: rarely is there a definition of terms.

But want of definition does not mean want of investment. Johnson’s status as a veritable Romantic-era folk hero has led to intense debates about his political allegiances. To offer a particularly high profile example, John Barrell in the London Review of Books sharply critiqued Helen Braithwaite’s portrait of Johnson as far less radical than is often assumed. Braithwaite’s Romanticism, Publishing, and Dissent: Joseph Johnson and the Cause of Liberty is well researched and well written, and certainly more accomplished than many first books. By Barrell’s lights, however, Braithwaite crossed a treacherous line when she questioned the radical credentials of a Romantic-era hero. The first half of my title is in fact borrowed from a question that Braithwaite poses in her opening pages: “How radical a publisher was Joseph Johnson?”⁵ Braithwaite eventually arrives at a nuanced answer, one that attends to Johnson’s work in different fields and in different decades, but she ultimately makes the case that, assessed against bolder figures of the era—such as Richard “Citizen” Lee, who was about as radical as a publisher could be without dissolving into E. P. Thompson’s imagination—Johnson cannot really be thought of as a radical.⁶ Set along-side bold members of the book trade such as “Citizen” Lee, Daniel Isaac Eaton, and Thomas Spence, Braithwaite argues, Johnson appears much more moderate.⁷ Barrell was not pleased, naming Braithwaite’s account “oddly strident and defensive,” and protesting, “She badly wants to believe that Johnson, though prosecuted, unfairly, for seditious libel, was not really very radical.”⁸ The sustained energy of Barrell’s reaction suggests that Braithwaite has not just erred, but offended.

These charged discrepancies in critical opinions of Johnson are the consequence of two underexamined methodological challenges that obtain in studies of Romantic-era print culture. First, despite its significance to the period’s critical history, the term “radical” has not received a scrutiny equal to the importance of its hermeneutic charge. Second, while various praxes are manifest in accounts of Romantic-era publishers, we have no coherent evidentiary protocols for assessing publishers-qua...