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John Edward Taylor
John Edward Taylor (11 September 1791 – 6 January 1844) was an English business tycoon, editor, publisher and member of The Portico Library, who was the founder of the Manchester Guardian newspaper in 1821. It was renamed in 1959 The Guardian.
Taylor was born at Ilminster, Somerset, England, to Mary Scott, the poet, and John Taylor, a Unitarian minister who moved after his wife's death to Manchester with his son to run a school there. John Edward was educated at his father's school and at Daventry Academy. He was apprenticed to a cotton manufacturer in Manchester and later became a successful merchant; Taylor "derived much of his wealth from Manchester’s cotton industry, an industry that relied on firms such as Taylor’s trading with cotton plantations in the Americas that had enslaved millions of Black people".
He was elected to membership of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society on 18 April 1828.
His children by his first wife and first cousin Sophia Russell Taylor (née Scott) included a son named after himself and a daughter, Harriet Ann Taylor, who in 1867 married the economist and logician Stanley Jevons.
A moderate supporter of reform, from 1815 Taylor was a member of a group of Nonconformist Liberals, meeting in the Manchester home of John Potter, termed the Little Circle. Other members of the group included: Joseph Brotherton (preacher); Archibald Prentice (later editor of the Manchester Times); John Shuttleworth (industrialist and municipal reformer); Absalom Watkin (parliamentary reformer and anti corn law campaigner); William Cowdray Jnr (editor of the Manchester Gazette); Thomas Potter (later first mayor of Manchester) and Richard Potter (later MP for Wigan).
After the death of John Potter, the Potter brothers formed a second Little Circle group, to begin a campaign for parliamentary reform. This called for the better proportional representation in the Houses of Parliament from the rotten boroughs towards the fast-growing industrialised towns of Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester and Salford. After the petition raised on behalf of the group by Absalom Watkin, Parliament passed the Reform Act 1832.
Taylor witnessed the Peterloo massacre in 1819, but was unimpressed by its leaders, writing:
They have appealed not to the reason but to the passions and the suffering of their abused and credulous fellow-countrymen, from whose ill-requited industry they extort for themselves the means of a plentiful and comfortable existence
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John Edward Taylor
John Edward Taylor (11 September 1791 – 6 January 1844) was an English business tycoon, editor, publisher and member of The Portico Library, who was the founder of the Manchester Guardian newspaper in 1821. It was renamed in 1959 The Guardian.
Taylor was born at Ilminster, Somerset, England, to Mary Scott, the poet, and John Taylor, a Unitarian minister who moved after his wife's death to Manchester with his son to run a school there. John Edward was educated at his father's school and at Daventry Academy. He was apprenticed to a cotton manufacturer in Manchester and later became a successful merchant; Taylor "derived much of his wealth from Manchester’s cotton industry, an industry that relied on firms such as Taylor’s trading with cotton plantations in the Americas that had enslaved millions of Black people".
He was elected to membership of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society on 18 April 1828.
His children by his first wife and first cousin Sophia Russell Taylor (née Scott) included a son named after himself and a daughter, Harriet Ann Taylor, who in 1867 married the economist and logician Stanley Jevons.
A moderate supporter of reform, from 1815 Taylor was a member of a group of Nonconformist Liberals, meeting in the Manchester home of John Potter, termed the Little Circle. Other members of the group included: Joseph Brotherton (preacher); Archibald Prentice (later editor of the Manchester Times); John Shuttleworth (industrialist and municipal reformer); Absalom Watkin (parliamentary reformer and anti corn law campaigner); William Cowdray Jnr (editor of the Manchester Gazette); Thomas Potter (later first mayor of Manchester) and Richard Potter (later MP for Wigan).
After the death of John Potter, the Potter brothers formed a second Little Circle group, to begin a campaign for parliamentary reform. This called for the better proportional representation in the Houses of Parliament from the rotten boroughs towards the fast-growing industrialised towns of Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester and Salford. After the petition raised on behalf of the group by Absalom Watkin, Parliament passed the Reform Act 1832.
Taylor witnessed the Peterloo massacre in 1819, but was unimpressed by its leaders, writing:
They have appealed not to the reason but to the passions and the suffering of their abused and credulous fellow-countrymen, from whose ill-requited industry they extort for themselves the means of a plentiful and comfortable existence