Jesse Johnson

Jesse Johnson, born in 1842, is credited in library and digitized book records as the author of Testimony of the Sonnets as to the Authorship of the Shakespearean Plays and Poems, published in 1899. In that book, he took up the long-running debate over who wrote Shakespeare’s works and used the Sonnets as the center of his argument.

Open Library records also list him as the author of Glimpses of Europe and Protection; when, and for whom it is proper. Taken together, those titles suggest a writer with broad interests, from literature to travel and public questions.

Reliable biographical detail about this particular Jesse Johnson is limited in the sources found here, so it is safest to focus on the works themselves. What stands out is his willingness to tackle ambitious subjects and present them for general readers, especially at a time when literary authorship debates attracted wide attention.