page_title: Joseph Johnson (publisher)
section_title: 1798: Trial and imprisonment
hierarchical_section_title: Joseph Johnson (publisher) / 1790s: Years of radicalism / Changing political winds / 1798: Trial and imprisonment
caption_attribution_description: King's Bench Prison in London: This engraving was published as Plate 9 of Microcosm of London (1809) (see File:Microcosm of London Plate 046 - King's Bench Prison.jpg).
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: Following the publication of Paine's provocative Rights of Man in 1791, a sedition law was passed in Britain and, in 1798, Johnson and several others were put on trial for selling Gilbert Wakefield's A Reply to Some Parts of the Bishop Llandaff's Address to the People of Great Britain, a Unitarian work attacking the privileged position of the wealthy. The indictment against Johnson, written on a six-foot parchment roll, read in part:
  The said Attorney General of our said Lord the King ... giveth the Court here further to understand and be informed that Joseph Johnson late of London bookseller being a malicious, seditious, and ill-disposed person and being greatly disaffected to our said sovereign Lord the King ... wickedly maliciously and seditiously did publish and cause to be published a certain scandalous malicious and seditious libel.
  Braithwaite explains, "an English jury, in effect, was being asked to consider whether Joseph Johnson's intentions as a bookseller were really as dangerous and radical as those of Thomas Paine". An issue of the Analytical Review was even offered as evidence against Johnson. Despite having retained Thomas Erskine as his lawyer, who had successfully defended Hardy and Horne Tooke at the 1794 Treason Trials, and character references from George Fordyce, Aikin, and Hewlett, Johnson was fined £50 and sentenced to six months imprisonment at King's Bench Prison in February 1799. Braithwaite speculates:
  If the conduct of the Attorney-General and the Anti-Jacobin are to serve as any kind of barometer of government opinion, then other scores were clearly being settled and it was not merely for [Johnson's] involvement in the sale of Wakefield's pamphlet but his tenure ... as a stubbornly independent-minded publisher in St Paul's Churchyard, prominently serving the irreligious and unconstitutional interests of 'rational' dissent and dangerously sympathetic to the ideas of foreigners (most visibly through the pages of the Analytical) that Joseph Johnson was ultimately being brought to book.
  Johnson's friends accused Erskine of using the trial as a political platform and not thinking of the best interests of his client. Johnson's imprisonment was not harsh; being relatively wealthy, Johnson rented a home for himself within the prison, where he continued to hold his weekly soirées.
  Although Johnson still believed in the free exchange of ideas and was not embittered by his stay in prison, his publishing habits changed dramatically. After he was released, Johnson published very few political works and none were controversial. Other booksellers followed suit, and Johnson's friend, Unitarian minister Theophilus Lindsey, wrote that "Johnson's fate deters them all". Johnson lost authors after the trial and experienced a noticeable decline in business. Furthermore, he gained fewer new authors, his stalwarts like Priestley began to complain that he was not attending to their business, and he was forced to cease publishing the Analytical Review.
caption: King's Bench Prison, by Augustus Pugin and Thomas Rowlandson (1808–11), where Johnson served out his six-month sentence. He was able to catch up on his accounts while in prison and collected long-owed debts from authors.
exif: {"Image XResolution": "2000", "Image YResolution": "2000", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop Album 2.0", "Image DateTime": "2006:02:10 23:09:43", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Centered", "Image ExifOffset": "160", "EXIF ExifVersion": "[0, 2, 2, 0]", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "[0, 1, 0, 0]", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "837", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "609", "EXIF CustomRendered": "Custom"}