Joseph Astley

Joseph Astley (c. 1777-1832) studied for the dissenting ministry at New College, Manchester, in the 1790s, then turned to journalism in London before finally becoming a chemical manufacturer in Edinburgh. He assumed control of the Analytical Review from Joseph Johnson at the end of 1798, an operation he maintained through the following June, when the Review folded. Astley was the son of Thomas Astley (1738-1817), a nonconformist minister at Preston and Chesterfield, Lancashire, and fellow classmate of Joseph Priestley at Daventry Academy. The younger Astley’s Advertisement for the new series of the Review, published in February 1799 (London: T. Hurst), described the periodical as only a Rational Dissenter would do: “untainted by the Prejudices of Party or the Dogmas of Sectarism [sic]” (ii), a periodical worthy of “the Friends of human Improvement” neither hindered “by the Spirit of Faction, nor impaired by the Menaces of Persecution” (iii). Crabb Robinson writes in his Reminiscences for 1799 that he met Astley either through Anthony Robinson or John Reid, the latter “then living with his mother & Sister[.] [H]e used to breakfast frequently with me.” Astley appears in several letters by Robinson and in his Diary (30 August 1812; 20 November 1819; and 15 December 1819, and 19 February 1822), almost always in connection with the Reids, Anthony Robinson, Mary Hays, and the Analytical Review. See Derek Roper, Reviewing Before the Edinburgh 1788-1802 (London: Methuen, 1978), 23; Crabb Robinson, Diary, 2: f. 129; 7: ff. 752, 760; 22: f. 53, Dr. Williams's Library, London; and Marilyn L. Brooks, ed., The Correspondence (1779–1843) of Mary Hays, British Novelist (Lewiston, ME: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004), 566.