Prestigious prize enables scholar to tell the story of English Romanticism

A University of Exeter academic has won a prestigious prize which will allow her to write a major cultural history of the emergence of English Romanticism.

Dr Daisy Hay will bring to life a period in which new forms of writing transformed the way we think about the world.

She is one of this year’s recipients of the Philip Leverhulme Prizes, which recognise the achievement of outstanding researchers whose work has already attracted international recognition and whose future career is exceptionally promising. Every year the prize scheme makes up to thirty awards of £100,000, across a range of academic disciplines.

Dr Hay will use the funds to write a group biography provisionally entitled Dinner with Joseph Johnson.

The book, which will be published by Chatto & Windus, tells the story of the circle surrounding the publisher Joseph Johnson. Johnson published almost all of the writers we now associate with the early Romantic period, and every week at his dinner table he brought them together, welding them into a shifting community with overlapping passions and preoccupations.

Joseph Johnson will be at the centre of the book, whose cast will include Anna Barbauld, Sarah Trimmer, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, William Cowper, Joseph Priestley, Erasmus Darwin, Henry Fuseli, Theophilus Lindsey, William Blake, Thomas Paine, Charlotte Smith and Maria Edgeworth.

Dr Hay is using memoirs, original manuscripts and letters to tell the connected stories of these individuals.

“I am honoured and delighted to receive this prestigious prize,” she said.

“Johnson is an enigmatic figure, about who little is known. He has received some limited scholarly attention, but his name is unknown outside the confines of the academy. Yet when one starts to track him he appears everywhere in the landscape of the late eighteenth century, enabling the work of novelists, scientists, philosophers, American Revolutionaries, French Revolutionaries, conservatives, and women writers of all political persuasions.

“I am interested in how focusing on Johnson changes the story of English Romanticism; in what it means to disappear from the world one makes; and in what it tells us about the versions of the past we construct. The Philip Leverhulme Prize will give me time to tell this story, and I feel very fortunate indeed to have received it.”

The Philip Leverhulme Prizes commemorate the contribution to the work of the Leverhulme Trust made by Philip Leverhulme, the Third Viscount Leverhulme and grandson of William Hesketh Lever, the founder of the Trust.