Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, William Wordsworth and Thomas Paine were amongst the guests invited to the dinner table of publisher Joseph Johnson. Daisy Hay explores the pivotal role played in the early history of English Romanticism by a maker of books who was also a maker of dreams, who invited his workers to eat alongside leading thinkers of the day, and whose publication The Analytical Review set out significant new ideas.

New Generation Thinker Daisy Hay is a Senior Lecturer in Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Archival Studies at the University of Exeter and has written about the tangled lives of the Young Romantics as well as Mr and Mrs Disraeli. New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to find academics who can turn their research into radio.

The Essay was recorded in front of an audience at the Festival of Ideas run by the University of York.

Producer: Jacqueline Smith.

Image: Daisy Hay. Credit: Ian Martindale.