biography perfectly well executed, it is not where the book comes to life. What truly matters, and makes Super-Infinite emphatically worth reading, is that Rundell is a writer. Her evangelical urges are expressed not in explicit exhortations to read Donne, but via the forms of responsive expression that he has inspired in – wrung from – her. Rather than telling us why Donne is worth reading and absorbing into one’s way of thinking, her writing shows us. Everyone knows that Donne is witty; Rundell wonderfully tells us that ‘he wanted to wear his wit like a knife in his shoe; he wanted it to flash out at unexpected moments’. She can brilliantly capture the elusive posture of knowing ennui that Donne often adopts, ‘caught somewhere between the suggestive eyebrow and the yawn’. She selects sequences of adjectives that ask the reader’s mind to move quickly in unexpected directions, like Donne’s own notoriously far-fetched metaphors: Donne wanted death ‘to be explosive, multicoloured, transmogrifying’. She calls the deanship of St Paul’s, a staid vocation if ever there was one, ‘a fantastic piñata of a job: hit it, and perks and favours and new connections came pouring out’. Without ever claiming to think like Donne, she shows in every paragraph how Donne has enabled her to think.

Rundell is best known as an author of books for young people, and those who have read those books, as I have, to their children will know that she is particularly adept at capturing childhood as a condition of movement – of dynamism and fluidity not yet co-opted by the systems of the adult world. I didn’t know before reading Super-Infinite that she had a background as a scholar of John Donne’s work, but I did know from reading interviews with her that she had spent some of her time as a student in Oxford climbing by night across the rooftops of colleges, a pastime that she bequeaths to the young protagonists of books like Rooftoppers and The Good Thieves, miniature daredevils pirouetting across the darkened skylines of Paris and New York. It makes perfect sense, however, that an author with a taste for this activity – which combines daring, virtuosity and a predilection for secrecy and for genuine peril – should be drawn to Donne, whose writing features these very qualities in abundance.

freya johnston

Radical Yet Reasonable Dinner with Joseph Johnson: Books and Friendship in a Revolutionary Age

By Daisy Hay (Chatto & Windus 518pp £25)

How, asked David Perkins in his 1992 book Is Literary History Possible?, can we reconcile a reader’s desire for coherence with the ‘real heterogeneity’ of the past? His answer: it is both impossible and imperative to do so. ‘We must perceive a past age as relatively unified if we are to write literary history; we must perceive it as highly diverse if what we write is to represent it plausibly.’

Perhaps the group biography offers a somewhat more satisfactory response to this perpetual, irresolvable dilemma than the study of one great man or woman in isolation might. Indeed, it makes little sense to approach a character of such extensive and various connections as the bookseller and publisher Joseph Johnson other than via the clubbable sort of method at which Daisy Hay has already proven herself adept. Her first book, Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives (2010), set out to overturn any lingering conceptions of Romantic writers as isolated geniuses; instead, Hay set their short lives and experimental works in the context of their sustaining friendships, connections, intersections and collaborations. Her second study, Mr and Mrs Disraeli: A Strange Romance (2015), homed in on the domestic life of one famously unlikely couple; now, in Dinner with Joseph Johnson, she has again broadened her scope.

Born into a Baptist family in Liverpool in 1738, Johnson set up shop in London in the 1760s. In the course of a career spanning almost half a century, he forged a group, network, web or circle – take your pick of the many available metaphors – of unparalleled intellectual, linguistic and geographical range. ‘The Father of the Book Trade’, as the surgeon and writer John Aikin styled Johnson after his death, valued books that would improve their readers as well as books that would sell. He published and marketed more than fifty texts a year, which added up to a total of nearly 2,700 separate titles in English, Latin, French, German, Italian and Spanish across his lifespan. They included works of literature and science as well as volumes addressing education, religion and politics. Johnson commissioned William Blake to make about a hundred engravings to illustrate these books, thereby doing more than any other publisher to galvanise and sustain his career.

Much of Johnson’s time appears to have been spent tending to his needy band of authors and dependants; while he may not have fed and housed all of them, he took a close personal interest in their wellbeing and development that went far beyond the expression of a solely commercial instinct. He found lodgings for Mary Wollstonecraft, dealt with her debts, gave her an advance for her first book and made possible her vision of becoming a professional female author. She relied on what she called his ‘uncommon kindness’, ‘sensible conversation’ and ‘humanity’, and produced for him in return works of pedagogy and fiction, anthologies, stories and fables for children, substantial translations from French and German, and about two hundred articles for his periodical the Analytical Review. It was at one of Johnson’s gatherings that she first encountered her future husband, William Godwin.

In an attempt to make his life appear unified, literary historians have often presented Johnson as a dissenting radical, single-mindedly committed to progressive causes and political reform. Yet his

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