Wanderers Without a Home: Houses and houselessness in the Johnson Circle

Abstract

This article explores the ways in which individual experiences and representations of houselessness shaped the communal identity of the circle who gathered around the publisher Joseph Johnson. It proposes that in the 1790s the presence at Johnson’s house of Lindsey, Priestley and other “wanderers without … home[s]” endowed the building in which the publisher lived and worked with particular significance for the writers who gravitated towards him; and it suggests that a focus on houses alters the stories scholars have told about the Johnson circle, Dissenting identity and a Burkean aesthetic of ruins and terror. It demonstrates that there are conceptual ramifications of this approach, particularly for the linked genres of biography and life-writing and it concludes that the authors who gathered around Johnson reenvisaged their shared past around spaces and places until the spatial contours of their world came to match the connections made through print for complexity and richness.