Joseph Johnson was a successful London publisher / bookseller. He had strong connections with dissenters and with the growing centres of urbanisation in Northern England.
Johnson published the Analytical from 1788 to 1798, together with Thomas Christie,, presenting a whole variety of articles and reviews on scientific, medical, biographical, political, topical, legal, literary, poetical and other subjects. The Analytical had a circulation of some 1500 copies per edition and appeared monthly. William Pitt's government made strenuous efforts to silence it, introducing the Royal Proclamation against seditious writings and publications in 1792, and bringing a prosecution in 1798, at the conclusion of which Johnson received a six month jail sentence.
The Analytical was billed as follows:
The Analytical Review, or History of Literature, Domestic and Foreign, on an Enlarged Plan. Containing Scientific Abstracts of Important and Interesting Works, Published in English; A General Account of Such as are of Less Consequence with Short Characters; Notices, or Reviews of Valuable Foreign Books; Criticisms on New Pieces of Music and Works of Art; and the Literary Intelligence of Europe
The publication had a large number of contributors and editors including Mary Wollstonecroft, William Godwin, Joseph Priestley, Gilbert Wakefield, Thomas Holcroft, Joel Barlow, Thomas Malthus, Erasmus Darwin, and Anna Laetitia Barbauld. Chard notes, 'the group was held together less by political liberalism than by a common interest in ideas, free enquiry, and creative expression in various fields.'