ABSTRACT
Jeremiah Joyce's contact with Unitarian and radical Joseph Johnson began in the early 1780s when he attended Lindsey's Essex Street Unitarian Chapel, which Johnson had partly sponsored. William Enfield had published The Institutes of Natural Philosophy Theoretical and Experimental through Johnson. Johnson was the most prolific publisher on the subject of factitious airs and the addition of such a section, reflecting the work of Thomas Beddoes and Humphry Davy in the Bristol Pneumatic Institution, may have been Johnson's rather than Joyce's idea. Joyce's Dialogues in Chemistry was one of a plethora of chemistry manuals and textbooks aimed at middle class children that also appeared. The book of nature, rather than the Bible, was positioned as the source of wonder, learning and witness to God's creation. The Dialogues continued the lineage of commercial science books aimed at children that began with John Newbery's The Newtonian System of Philosophy.
