Hugely engrossing ... Hay’s book has its longueurs, and some of its literary judgments are mind-boggling ... For all that, Dinner with Joseph Johnson is an exciting blend of ideas and personalities.
This delightful book by the English literature professor Daisy Hay, who has also written biographies of the Romantics and the Disraelis, gives the reader the feeling of being at a rather elevated party.
Dinner With Joseph Johnson is more than a richly detailed character profile: It also comprises a sharply realized group portrait of those whom Johnson wined, dined and gave voice to ... At times Ms. Hay’s book feels episodic, jumping from one of Johnson’s writers to another. Readers might obtain a more complete portrait of some of these thinkers from a full-dress biography ... Ms. Hay excels, however, with her potted histories of less familiar figures.
Hay makes the most of a vivid period in English and especially London history. Her carefully poised study puts Johnson, today an obscure figure, back at the centre of his circle ... From certain angles, despite Hay’s best endeavours, Johnson remains opaque ... A cautiously balanced account.
Compelling and magnificent study ... Hay is a generous and engaging guide, casting personalities in a sympathetic light even as she exposes their frailties ... Hay’s absorbing and immensely attractive book is rooted in a dazzling array of author biographies and published and unpublished correspondence. Beautifully written, it wears its research lightly and is as immersive and engaging as a multi-plot Victorian novel. In leavening the historical record with imagination, her portrait of Johnson’s friendship network does not diminish the romantic gloss ... Dinner with Joseph Johnson is an admirable achievement of biography and humanistic imagination.
Descriptions of his relationships with Wollstonecraft and Cowper are perhaps the most successful parts of Daisy Hay’s book, but elsewhere it is under-researched and under-written ... Reading this book one senses that the drudgery of assembling fact after fact has been enough for Hay, without the forlorn challenge of bringing that swaying edifice to life ... To do justice to the subject would require much time, and perhaps lack of it may explain Hay’s omissions ... [Dinner with Joseph Johnson] lacks definition, licensing the kind of narrowness that precludes imaginative truth and allowing the book to wander from one episode to another – unpersuasive, hollow and fuzzy.
Illuminating account ... The real value of Hay’s account is in the small, humanizing stories she recounts ... Hay’s is a fascinating take on the intellectual and political development of the time. Fans of literary history will relish this opportunity to pull up a seat at Johnson’s table.
