Author: Johnson, Richard
Biography:
JOHNSON, Richard (1734-1793: ancestry.com)
Editor, proofreader, indexer, compiler, and, notably, an author of children’s books, he was baptised at St Andrew’s, Holborn, on 4 Oct. 1734. One of six children, he was the second son of coachman James Johnson of Cross Street, Hatton Garden, and his wife, Mary Airey (married, St Andrew, Holborn, 3 May 1730). At the boarding school to which his parents sent him at age seven, he gained the nickname “Michel Angelo” for his drawing skills. He was apprenticed to a printer in Jewin Street from 7 Feb. 1749 to when he obtained his freedom, 3 Aug. 1756. He then set out on a long career as a jobbing printer and as factotum to private individuals, to bookseller-publishers, and to printing firms. On 16 Sept. 1756 at St Andrew, Holborn, he married Ann Jennings of London. The eldest of their three children, Richard (1757-1795), became master of the Stationers’ Company. From 19 Nov 1763 to 8 Dec. 1764, and from 3 May 1766 to her death on 20 Feb. 1773, his wife was confined to Bethlem Hospital under the surety of Johnson’s sometime employers, the publishers of St James’s Chronicle, Henry Baldwin and Nathaniel Thomas. From about 1770 to the end of his life, he recorded his day-to-day business affairs in two notebooks. Preserved in the Osborne Collection of the Toronto Public Library, they are an invaluable window on the London publishing and printing trades. Among the more than forty printers and bookseller-publishers he worked for, his primary employers were the firms Almon, Strachan, Fielding, Scatcherd, Carnan, Debrett, Francis Newbery (q.v.), and that of his personal friend, Samuel Bladon. He died 25 Feb. 1793 at his residence, 17 Bride Lane, Fleet Street, and was buried in Hendon churchyard. Despite decades of steady labour, he died nearly impoverished, regretful, he stated in his will, that by the “narrowness of [his] circumstances” he was unable to leave anything to his brother, Lockington, or to his sister, Mary. (ancestry.com 21 Nov. 2023; findmypast.co.uk 21 Nov. 2023; PROB 11/1230; GM 73:2 [1793], 190; M. J. P. Wheedon, “Richard Johnson and the Successors to John Newbery,” The Library 5th ser. 41 (1949), 25-63; J. St John, The Osborne Collection of Early Children's Books [1975]; D. F. McKenzie, Stationers’ Company Apprentices, 1701-1800 [1978], 3:140; “Annual Inspection of Past Master Richard Johnson’s Grave” stationers.org 21 Nov. 2023) JC