Dinner with joseph johns.., p.7
Dinner with Joseph Johnson, page 7
While Lindsey initially tried to exercise freedom of conscience from within the Church of England, Priestley wanted the Dissenters to be free from the constraints under which they lived and worshipped. He believed his cause to be unarguable, but in both 1772 and 1773 parliamentary campaigns for Dissenting freedoms failed. After extensive discussions during the winter evenings at St Paul’s Churchyard Johnson insisted that Priestley’s Theological Repository should be halted. Johnson bore much of the cost of the Repository and he continued to pay for it even in the aftermath of the Paternoster Row fire, but in early 1771 he withdrew his support as it became clear that the Repository stood no chance of ever recouping its costs. Deprived of this platform for his work Priestley turned his attention back to a project begun in the 1760s, his four-volume Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religion, which Johnson published between 1772 and 1774. In the Institutes Priestley argued that the only possible pure religious beliefs were those that tallied with the evidence of the natural world: everything else was the result of human superstition and corruption. The Institutes was a powerful articulation of the Unitarian position and the work established Priestley as one of the most important exponents of a refashioned faith. At stake in the work of Priestley and Lindsey were fundamental questions about what kind of country Britain wanted and needed to be. ‘Religious and civil liberty are exquisitely connected’, insisted one of Lindsey’s anonymous defenders. ‘No man can be obsequious to religious thraldom, and at the same time genuine in his feeling of political independence.’4
In September 1772 an argument broke out between Priestley and Johnson when Priestley was offered the post of companion to the Earl of Shelburne. The offer was tempting. The post came with a house on Shelburne’s Wiltshire estate and a salary. The duties were light. Shelburne wanted someone to catalogue his books and keep his library up to date, with whom he could freely discuss politics. He was a prominent opposition politician, sympathetic to the complaints of both the American Colonists and the Dissenters, and he offered the position to Priestley at the suggestion of the Dissenting minister Richard Price.
Johnson was fiercely opposed to the idea of his friend compromising his independence for an aristocratic paymaster. The letter in which he remonstrated with Priestley has been lost, but from Priestley’s account it is clear that Johnson objected to Shelburne’s character and argued that employment in his household would prevent Priestley from being master of his own conduct. Yet Johnson was also blunt about the chances of any of Priestley’s publications making either of them any money. ‘As to the History of Experimental Philosophy, it does not appear, from Mr Johnson’s last account of the sale of my History of Vision, &c, that it will be worth my while to prosecute it any farther.’5 Prosperous friends might insist on the importance of remaining independent but none of them, Priestley complained, had any idea of the reality of his situation. He had a wife and growing family to support, and running his experimental workshop was an expensive business. Shelburne offered to take on those costs and thus enable Priestley to continue with work he knew to be important. In November 1772, as he prepared to journey from Leeds to London (sharing a coach with Lindsey and another Feathers Tavern petitioner in order to reduce the cost), he wrote to Price that he was minded to accept Shelburne’s offer. ‘Those who are acquainted with Lord Shelburne encourage me to accept of his proposal; but most of those who know the world in general, but not Lord Shelburne in particular, dissuade me from it.’6 To be blind to the virtues of those whose lives were different from one’s own was not, Priestley suggested, a vice from which his own friends were free. In June 1773 the Priestleys moved to a house in Calne, on Shelburne’s estate. In his library Priestley resumed work on essays on the Dissenters’ campaign, and in the workshop Shelburne built for him he began a series of experiments on air.
As news of his impending resignation spread in the autumn of 1773, Lindsey was offered the ministry of a Dissenting chapel in Leeds. He refused. His intention was to try to gather together a group of Unitarians drawn from the Church of England, rather than to lead the worship of those who had already dissented. He planned to open a new church, where he would conduct services using a rewritten version of the Anglican liturgy. It was an enterprise which presented more of a threat to the unity of the Established Church than did the existence of disparate groups of grudgingly tolerated Dissenters. In the inaugural sermon he drafted for his church he chose as his text a verse from Ephesians: ‘Endeavouring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.’ No text, protested one of his detractors, could be less appropriate. ‘And how does he himself endeavour it? why, by endeavouring to draw the good People from their national Church, the proper Place of Worship, to hear his vain Babbling in an unconsecrated Auction-room.’7
The ‘unconsecrated Auction-room’ was in Essex House on Essex Street, just off the Strand. Lindsey was offered a lease on the room thanks to the efforts of one old friend – Priestley – and two new friends in London – Franklin and Johnson. Franklin sent encouraging news of distinguished people who stood ready to support the foundation of a new chapel through their presence in the congregation, and Johnson went to work to bring the project to fruition. Essex House was in the possession of Johnson’s friend Samuel Paterson, who was sympathetic to the Unitarian cause and had celebrated the figure of the Freethinker in Joineriana. Paterson’s auction business was doing badly and Johnson knew him to be urgently in need of money. Sympathetic Unitarians in London and beyond donated funds to support Lindsey and raised £200 to rent the room for two years. Much of the money came from strangers and, Lindsey reported, ‘most of them dissenters.’ But he continued, ‘I am now a dissenter myself.’ He was, he concluded, ‘happy in it. Nay, I would say to you, I glory in it.’8
As Lindsey moved steadily further away from the Established Church, he experienced some of the insidious ways in which the State constrained the activities of Dissenters. Two MPs summoned him for meetings in which they warned him that any remaining public sympathy would turn to hostility if he pressed ahead with his plans. Johnson went forth to do battle with the authorities for a licence for the chapel but at every stage legal obstacles were thrown in his way. At the beginning of April building work in Essex Street was finished and the liturgy worked on by Priestley, Johnson and Lindsey at St Paul’s Churchyard was printed and ready, but the licence all Dissenters needed to worship legally had not been granted. Johnson ran all over Westminster and the City, pushed from pillar to post by magistrates who found a multitude of reasons to withhold permission for the chapel to open. Eventually Johnson and Lindsey managed to talk their way into the chambers of the Chief Justice Lord Mansfield, who was outraged that petty functionaries were subverting the legal framework of religious toleration because of their own prejudices. ‘He came like a lion’, Lindsey told a supporter. ‘But we have not succeeded without striking with the great hammer.’9
On Sunday April 17th 1774, Lindsey preached his first sermon at Essex Street. Johnson was in the congregation, along with Priestley and Franklin. For all four men, as well as for Lindsey and Hannah, it was a defining moment in the battle for Dissenting rights. For the first time the Unitarians had a church of their own. John Lee, a lawyer who had advised Johnson during his battle to get the chapel licenced, reported that there were ten coaches at the door, and that somewhere between two and three hundred well-to-do strangers had appeared to hear Lindsey preach. The Dukes of Norfolk and Richmond were among the crowd; so were three clergyman, a handful of barristers and a government spy. ‘Everything passed very well’, Lindsey wrote the day afterwards. ‘Some disturbance was apprehended, and foreboded to me by great names, – but not the least movement of the kind.’ Many of those present commented on the difference between the experience of being in Essex Street and being in an Anglican church. ‘I should have blushed’, Lindsey wrote robustly, ‘to have appeared in a white garment.’10 After a few weeks the government spy melted away, rather to the amusement of those in the congregation who had been unconvinced by his professed religiosity. Within a week of the first service Johnson had rushed Lindsey’s inaugural sermon into print and the ability to read the words preached at Essex Street inspired some of Lindsey’s more outspoken opponents to take up their own pens once more. The author of one pamphlet termed his sermon ‘poison’; another implied that a little persecution might be just what Lindsey and his fellow Dissenters required. Too much toleration, he argued, put true Christians at risk. ‘If these Unitarians should ever gain an Establishment (which I trust they never will) I very much doubt whether we should meet with the like Indulgence.’11
When Lindsey stood in his frock coat at his auction-room pulpit on Sunday April 17th, in front of a congregation comprised of friends and strangers, the devout and the curious, he largely kept clear of political matters. Only in one respect was the subject unavoidable. ‘In later times’, he acknowledged, ‘great benefits have been derived to true religion, from those who have refused to submit to the impositions of civil and ecclesiastical authority in matters of faith; and who, on that principle, have had the virtue and courage to depart from the established forms in their several countries, to worship God in the way they believed most acceptable to him.’12 The country that most completely embodied freedom of belief was America. Its first citizens crossed an ocean in pursuit of a space where they could worship freely, and its inhabitants held fast to their right to practise their faith away from the mechanisms of State control.
For the men and women sitting in Essex House, the import of Lindsey’s generalisation was unavoidable. Six weeks after he preached his sermon the British government passed a set of laws known as the ‘Intolerable Acts’: a package of legislation designed to punish the citizens of Massachusetts for the Boston Tea Party. The Intolerable Acts closed the port of Boston, brought Massachusetts’s State affairs and the administration of justice directly under the control of the British government, and required the colony to house British soldiers. A furious Benjamin Franklin responded by publishing his satirical ‘Act to Enforce Obedience’ in the New England newspapers, but he also offered to repay the duty on the tea damaged in Boston harbour himself in order to avert the outbreak of war.
Franklin continued to talk and write of the importance of Britain reconciling herself with her colony, even as he found himself viewed with mounting distrust by the authorities who dealt with him not as a loyal subject of the King but as a representative of a hostile enemy nation. In the spring and summer of 1774 Essex Street became a haven for Franklin in a city where he had once felt completely at home. He had friends in the congregation, and from Lindsey’s pulpit he heard the Colonists praised for their bravery. ‘He dreaded the war’, Priestley recalled. But, ‘that the issue would be favourable to America, he never doubted. The English, he used to say, may take all our great towns, but that will not give them possession of the country.’13
Priestley himself was in little doubt about the cause of government hostility towards the Colonists. In 1774 Johnson published his Address to the Protestant Dissenters, written in advance of the general election of 1774. In the first part of the Address Priestley urged his fellow Dissenters to vote against those MPs who had failed to support repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts; in the second part he attacked the government for its treatment of America. ‘Religious liberty’, he insisted in his opening, ‘cannot be maintained except on the basis of civil liberty.’ The government opposed religious liberty because the example of America made them fear for their own power should they allow it to spread. ‘Can you suppose that those who are so violently hostile to the offspring of the English dissenters, should be friendly to the remains of the parent stock?’ Priestley’s imagery allied the Dissenters of the mother country with the freedom fighters of the colony and he was uncompromising in his own allegiances:
Do you imagine, my fellow-citizens, that we can sit still, and be the idle spectators of the chains which are forging for our brethren in America, with safety to ourselves? Let us suppose America to be completely enslaved, in consequence of which the English court can command all the money, and all the force of that country; will they like to be so arbitrary abroad, and have their power confined at home?14
In the second part of the Address Priestley distilled many of his conversations with Franklin. His identification of such close connections between the Dissenters and the Colonists reflected the extent to which the two men believed the political fortunes of their causes to be linked. At stake for both was the question of how to be free in a country whose government feared freedom. One solution was to create places in which it might be possible to practise freedom, and to model it for a citizenry who could then claim it for themselves. The Essex Street chapel was one such place: a hard-won refuge against prejudice where friends and fellow believers could gather to worship as they pleased. Johnson’s shop in St Paul’s Churchyard was another.
Essex Street offered a geographical, intellectual and spiritual contrast to St Paul’s Cathedral at the other end of the Strand. The Cathedral was visible for miles around; the hierarchies of the Anglican Church were represented in stone within its walls. The centrality of the Church of England to the political and religious life of the capital and the nation was mirrored by the way the Cathedral’s scale dominated the surrounding streets. St Paul’s represented centuries of tradition and stability, as well as the demand that its congregation should acquiesce in the structures of belief represented in its services and architecture. Essex Street, by contrast, was a hastily fitted-out room; barely tolerated by those with the power to rule on its legality. Lindsey presented himself not as the father of his congregation, marked out as different in clerical robes, but as a fellow enquirer, who read in the Scriptures that to believe was to ask questions of power. Only a handful of the thousands who passed along the Strand each day were aware of Essex Street’s existence, while the presence of St Paul’s on the streetscape of the thoroughfare was inescapable. The conflict between Cathedral and chapel was asymmetric from the outset, and Johnson saw the truth of this every week as he walked from east to west to worship. But the print pulpit he offered Lindsey went some way to redressing this balance, as sermons taking place in an overlooked London auction house reverberated on paper across the country. Essex Street became a second fixed point on Johnson’s compass; the spiritual counterpoint to his domestic and commercial moorings at home. He worshipped in the chapel for the rest of his life and the journey down the Strand on a Sunday morning was a central beat in the rhythm of his existence. Lindsey and Hannah became staunch supporters of both Johnson and his business, and the three remained friends all their lives.
At the end of the 1770s Johnson brought out the first collected edition of Franklin’s works in England. The collection was edited by Franklin’s friend Benjamin Vaughan, who during production lost faith in the undertaking, swamped by a morass of errors and the extent of Franklin’s work. ‘These circumstances’, he confessed, ‘had so much affected my mind, that upon a review of the printed pages, I had determined to destroy the whole impression’. Johnson, however, ‘told me that he could with the utmost care cancel the exceptionable pages, and laughed at me for low spirits.’15 The edition appeared and Franklin’s words reached a British readership. But Franklin himself had gone. On March 20th 1775 he set sail for America. Shortly after he left a warrant was issued in London for his arrest. He spent his last day in England with Priestley and together they read American newspaper reports of local towns issuing statements in support of the beleaguered citizens of Boston. ‘Dr Franklin has left us’, wrote Priestley a day later. ‘I do not know that he has any thing particular in view. He told me in general that he thought he did no good here, and might do some in America.’16
7
Essays Medical and Experimental
In the dining room at St Paul’s Churchyard the conversation had a tendency to turn bloody. Between 1770 and 1780 Johnson and his guests turned their attention to dentistry, uterine haemorrhage, inoculation, experimental drugs, asthma, geometry, combustion, gases, rheumatism, material science, electricity, astronomy and surgery. A few of Johnson’s scientific visitors during his early years in the Churchyard were well-off men pursuing scholarly preoccupations. More were practising doctors who saw daily in their working lives the desperate consequences of ignorance and incuriousness. As a young man trading on Fish Street Hill, Johnson had sold books to the trainee doctors who passed his shop. During his first decade at St Paul’s Churchyard he drew around him men of science who, like him, understood the pursuit of knowledge that alleviated suffering as an act of political kindness. The scientific books he published as he rebuilt his business reflected that understanding, offering guidance on specific subjects as well as a model of how to be a person of faith in a changing world.
In 1767, when Johnson was just six years free of his apprenticeship and still in partnership with Benjamin Davenport, he published Thomas Percival’s Essays Medical and Experimental. Percival was one of the first pupils at the Warrington Academy and an early and devoted follower of Unitarianism. From Warrington he travelled north to Edinburgh for his medical training, following a path taken by many aspiring doctors in the eighteenth century. Dissenting students had to go to Scotland for all forms of university education because of their exclusion from Oxford and Cambridge, and Edinburgh was home to the only medical school in Britain where students were taught along the proto-clinical lines pioneered at the medical school in Leiden. Leiden and Edinburgh-trained doctors learnt their trade through anatomy classes, intensive lecturing and years of hospital ward-rounds; a model of medical education that remains largely unchanged today. During the second half of the eighteenth century Scottish-trained doctors effected a revolution in British medicine, and Johnson was one of several London publishers to provide a platform for their thinking. Percival and his contemporaries were taught to view themselves simultaneously as practitioners and scientists, engaged both in healing the sick and in battling pain and disease through research and experimentation. ‘There are two methods of acquiring experience in the art of medicine; one by reading, the other by practice’, Percival wrote in the volume he published with Johnson. ‘Both are necessary to form the skilful and expert physician; but without the concurring assistance of our judgement and understanding, neither of them will be found of any other avail, than to perplex us with uncertainty and to lead us into error.’1
