page_title: Joseph Johnson (publisher)
section_title: Informative texts
hierarchical_section_title: Joseph Johnson (publisher) / 1770s: Establishment / Informative texts
caption_attribution_description: Title page form Laws Respecting Women
context_page_description: 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.
  In the 1760s, Johnson established his publishing business, which focused primarily on religious works. He also became friends with Priestley and the artist Henry Fuseli – two relationships that lasted his entire life and brought him much business. In the 1770s and 1780s, Johnson expanded his business, publishing important works in medicine and children's literature as well as the popular poetry of William Cowper and Erasmus Darwin. Throughout his career, Johnson helped shape the thought of his era not only through his publications, but also through his support of innovative writers and thinkers.
context_section_description: After 1770, Johnson began to publish a wider array of books, particularly scientific and medical texts. One of the most important was John Hunter's A Natural History of the Human Teeth, Part I (1771), which "elevated dentistry to the level of surgery". Johnson also supported doctors when they questioned the efficacy of cures, such as with John Millar in his Observations on Antimony (1774), which claimed that Dr James's Fever Powder was ineffective. This was a risky publication for Johnson, because this patent medicine was quite popular and his fellow bookseller John Newbery had made his fortune from selling it.
  In 1777 Johnson published the remarkable Laws Respecting Women, as they Regard Their Natural Rights, which is an explication, for the layperson, of exactly what its title suggests. As Tyson comments, "the ultimate value of this book lies in its arming women with the knowledge of their legal rights in situations where they had traditionally been vulnerable because of ignorance". Johnson published Laws Respecting Women anonymously, but it is sometimes credited to Elizabeth Chudleigh Bristol, known for her bigamous marriage to the 2nd Duke of Kingston-upon-Hull after having previously privately married Augustus John Hervey, afterwards 3rd Earl of Bristol. This publication foreshadowed Johnson's efforts to promote works about women's issues – such as A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) – and his support of women writers.
caption: Laws Respecting Women (1777), published by Johnson, helped Mary Wollstonecraft with the background for her feminist novel Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman(1798).[41]
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