Isaac Taylor
Encyclopedia
Isaac Taylor was an English philosophical and historical writer, artist, and inventor.
of Ongar
. He was born at Lavenham
, Suffolk
, on 17 August 1787, and moved with his family to Colchester
and, at the end of 1810, to Ongar. In the family tradition, he was trained as draughtsman and engraver. After a few years' occupation as a designer of book illustrations, he turned to literature as vocation.
From 1812 to 1816 he wintered in the west of England, and he spent most of this time at Ilfracombe
and Marazion
in the company of his sister, Jane. About 1815 through the works of Sulpicius Severus
he started to collect patristic literature. Shortly afterwards Francis Bacon
's De Augmentis excited his interest in inductive philosophy. In 1818 a friend of the family, Josiah Conder
, then editor of the Eclectic Review, persuaded Taylor to join its regular staff, which already included Robert Hall, John Foster
, and Olinthus Gilbert Gregory.
In 1825 he settled at Stanford Rivers
, about two miles from Ongar, in a rambling old-fashioned farmhouse. There he married, on 17 August 1825, Elizabeth, second daughter of James Medland of Newington, the friend and correspondent of his sister Jane. In 1836 Taylor contested the chair of logic at Edinburgh University with Sir William Hamilton
, and was narrowly beaten. In March 1841, in Hanover Square
, he delivered four lectures on ‘Spiritual Christianity’. Though he joined the Anglican communion at an early stage in his career, Taylor remained on good terms with friends among the dissenters
.
Taylor was granted a civil list pension of £200 in 1862 as acknowledgment of his services to literature, and he died at Stanford Rivers three years later, on 28 June 1865.
. He executed anatomical drawings for a surgeon, and painted miniatures, one a portrait of his sister, another of himself in 1817. Some of his designs for John Boydell
's ‘Illustrations of Holy Writ’ (1820), were admired by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
, and compared by Alexander Gilchrist
with some of the plates of William Blake
(Life of Blake, 1863).
In 1822 appeared Taylor's first book, The Elements of Thought (London, 1823; 11th edit. 1867), later recast as The World of Mind (London, 1857). This was followed in 1824 by a new translation of the Characters of Theophrastus (by ‘Francis Howell,’ London). The translator added pictorial renderings of the characters drawn on wood by himself. In 1825 there followed the Memoirs, Correspondence, and Literary Remains of Jane Taylor (London, 1825, 2 vols.; 2nd edit. 1826; incorporated in The Taylors of Ongar, 1867).
History of the Transmission of Ancient Books to Modern Times (London, 1827) and The Process of Historical Proof (London, 1828) were later remodelled as a single work (1859), in which he attempted to show grounds for accepting literary documents like the Bible as a basis for history. Next appeared an expurgated translation of Herodotus
(London, 1829), work which seems to have suggested an anonymous romance, The Temple of Melekartha (London, 1831), dealing with the prehistoric migration of the Tyrians from the Persian Gulf to the Levant. Taylor is said to have depicted his wife in the heroine. His next and best-known work, The Natural History of Enthusiasm (London; Boston, 1830; 10th edit. London, 1845), appeared anonymously in May 1829. It was a sort of historico-philosophical disquisition on religious imagination, and had an instant vogue. Taylor developed the subject in his Fanaticism (London, 1833; 7th edit. 1866) and Spiritual Despotism (London, 1835, three editions). Three further volumes on scepticism, credulity, and the corruption of morals were included in the author's plan of a ‘morbid anatomy of spurious religion,’ but these complementary volumes were never completed. Those that appeared were praised by John Wilson
in Blackwood's Magazine
and the last of the three particularly by Sir James Stephen in the Edinburgh Review (April, 1840).
In the meantime Taylor had published a devotional volume, Saturday Evening (London, 1832; many editions in England and America). Subsequently he developed a part of that book into The Physical Theory of Another Life (London, 1836; 6th edit. 1866), a work of speculation, anticipating a scheme of duties in a future world, adapted to an assumed expansion of human powers after death.
His next book was Home Education (London, 1838; 7th edit. 1867), in which he insisted on the beneficial influence of a country life, the educational value of children’s pleasures, and the natural rather than the stimulated growth of a child's mental powers. He then completed and edited a translation of the Jewish Wars of Josephus
by Robert Traill (1793–1847); it appeared in two sumptuous illustrated volumes (1847 and 1851), but lost money.
In his publication during 1839–40 of Ancient Christianity and the Doctrines of the Oxford Tracts (in 8 parts, London; 4th edit. 1844, 2 vols.), Taylor argued as controversialist against the Tracts for the Times
, his contention being that the Christian Church of the fourth century had already matured into superstition and error. This view was contested. Loyola and Jesuitism in its Rudiments (London, 1849; several editions) and Wesley and Methodism (London, 1851; 1863, 1865, and New York, 1852) were followed by a popular work on the Christian argument, The Restoration of Belief (London, 1855,; several American editions), an anonymous publication. Logic in Theology and Ultimate Civilisation were volumes of essays reprinted in part from the Eclectic Review during 1859 and 1860, and were followed in turn by The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry (London, 1861; numerous editions), a volume of lectures, originally delivered at Edinburgh. After Considerations on the Pentateuch (London, 1863; two editions), in which he opposed the conclusions of John William Colenso
, and a number of short memoirs for the Imperial Dictionary of Biography, his last work was Personal Recollections (London, 1864), a series of papers, in part autobiographical, which had appeared in Good Words
.
.
, later Mrs. Gilbert (1782–1866), and Jane
(1783–1824), responsible for the well-known rhyme Twinkle Twinkle Little Star
. Josiah Gilbert, son of Ann Taylor, was an artist and author.
Taylor's children were:
Attribution
Life
He was the eldest surviving son of Isaac TaylorIsaac Taylor (1759–1829)
Isaac Taylor of Ongar was an English engraver and writer of books for the young.-Early life:The son of Isaac Taylor by his wife Sarah, daughter of Josiah Jefferys of Shenfield, Essex, he was born in London on 30 January 1759...
of Ongar
Ongar
Ongar can refer toin England*High Ongar, Essex*Chipping Ongar, Essex **Ongar , an ancient administrative unit**Ongar railway stationin Ireland*Ongar, Dublinin Pakistan...
. He was born at Lavenham
Lavenham
Lavenham is a village and civil parish in Suffolk, England. It is noted for its 15th century church, half-timbered medieval cottages and circular walk. In the medieval period it was among the 20 wealthiest settlements in England...
, Suffolk
Suffolk
Suffolk is a non-metropolitan county of historic origin in East Anglia, England. It has borders with Norfolk to the north, Cambridgeshire to the west and Essex to the south. The North Sea lies to the east...
, on 17 August 1787, and moved with his family to Colchester
Colchester
Colchester is an historic town and the largest settlement within the borough of Colchester in Essex, England.At the time of the census in 2001, it had a population of 104,390. However, the population is rapidly increasing, and has been named as one of Britain's fastest growing towns. As the...
and, at the end of 1810, to Ongar. In the family tradition, he was trained as draughtsman and engraver. After a few years' occupation as a designer of book illustrations, he turned to literature as vocation.
From 1812 to 1816 he wintered in the west of England, and he spent most of this time at Ilfracombe
Ilfracombe
Ilfracombe is a seaside resort and civil parish on the North Devon coast, England with a small harbour, surrounded by cliffs.The parish stretches along the coast from 'The Coastguard Cottages' in Hele Bay toward the east and 4 miles along The Torrs to Lee Bay toward the west...
and Marazion
Marazion
Marazion is a civil parish and town in Cornwall, United Kingdom. It is situated on the shore of Mount's Bay, two miles east of Penzance and one mile east of Long Rock.St Michael's Mount is half-a-mile offshore from Marazion...
in the company of his sister, Jane. About 1815 through the works of Sulpicius Severus
Sulpicius Severus
Sulpicius Severus was a Christian writer and native of Aquitania. He is known for his chronicle of sacred history, as well as his biography of Saint Martin of Tours.-Life:...
he started to collect patristic literature. Shortly afterwards Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Albans, KC was an English philosopher, statesman, scientist, lawyer, jurist, author and pioneer of the scientific method. He served both as Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of England...
's De Augmentis excited his interest in inductive philosophy. In 1818 a friend of the family, Josiah Conder
Josiah Conder (editor and author)
Josiah Conder, sometimes spelt Condor, , correspondent of Robert Southey and well connected to romantic authors of his day, was editor of the British literary magazine The Eclectic Review, the Nonconformist and abolitionist newspaper The Patriot, the author of romantic verses, poetry, and many...
, then editor of the Eclectic Review, persuaded Taylor to join its regular staff, which already included Robert Hall, John Foster
John Foster (essayist)
John Foster was an English essayist, son of a weaver, born in the parish of Halifax, Yorkshire, and educated for the ministry at the Baptist college in Bristol. After serving as a minister for several years, he chose to devote himself to literature. He contributed nearly 200 articles to the...
, and Olinthus Gilbert Gregory.
In 1825 he settled at Stanford Rivers
Stanford Rivers
Stanford Rivers is a village and civil parish in the Epping Forest district of Essex, England. It is located North-East of Chipping Ongar, North-West of North Weald Bassett and South-East of Kelvedon Hatch.-External links:* *...
, about two miles from Ongar, in a rambling old-fashioned farmhouse. There he married, on 17 August 1825, Elizabeth, second daughter of James Medland of Newington, the friend and correspondent of his sister Jane. In 1836 Taylor contested the chair of logic at Edinburgh University with Sir William Hamilton
Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet
Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet was a Scottish metaphysician.-Early life:He was born in Glasgow. He was from an academic family, including Robert Hamilton, the economist...
, and was narrowly beaten. In March 1841, in Hanover Square
Hanover Square, London
Hanover Square, London, is a square in Mayfair, London W1, England, situated to the south west of Oxford Circus, the major junction where Oxford Street meets Regent Street....
, he delivered four lectures on ‘Spiritual Christianity’. Though he joined the Anglican communion at an early stage in his career, Taylor remained on good terms with friends among the dissenters
English Dissenters
English Dissenters were Christians who separated from the Church of England in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries.They originally agitated for a wide reaching Protestant Reformation of the Established Church, and triumphed briefly under Oliver Cromwell....
.
Taylor was granted a civil list pension of £200 in 1862 as acknowledgment of his services to literature, and he died at Stanford Rivers three years later, on 28 June 1865.
Works
As a young man he executed designs for his father and for the books issued by his sister Jane TaylorJane Taylor (poet)
Jane Taylor , was an English poet and novelist. She wrote the words for the song Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star in 1806 at age 23, while living in Shilling Street, Lavenham, Suffolk....
. He executed anatomical drawings for a surgeon, and painted miniatures, one a portrait of his sister, another of himself in 1817. Some of his designs for John Boydell
John Boydell
John Boydell was an 18th-century British publisher noted for his reproductions of engravings. He helped alter the trade imbalance between Britain and France in engravings and initiated a British tradition in the art form...
's ‘Illustrations of Holy Writ’ (1820), were admired by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Dante Gabriel Rossetti was an English poet, illustrator, painter and translator. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, and was later to be the main inspiration for a second generation of artists and writers influenced by the movement,...
, and compared by Alexander Gilchrist
Alexander Gilchrist
Alexander Gilchrist was the biographer of William Blake. Gilchrist's biography is still a standard reference work on the poet....
with some of the plates of William Blake
William Blake
William Blake was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age...
(Life of Blake, 1863).
In 1822 appeared Taylor's first book, The Elements of Thought (London, 1823; 11th edit. 1867), later recast as The World of Mind (London, 1857). This was followed in 1824 by a new translation of the Characters of Theophrastus (by ‘Francis Howell,’ London). The translator added pictorial renderings of the characters drawn on wood by himself. In 1825 there followed the Memoirs, Correspondence, and Literary Remains of Jane Taylor (London, 1825, 2 vols.; 2nd edit. 1826; incorporated in The Taylors of Ongar, 1867).
History of the Transmission of Ancient Books to Modern Times (London, 1827) and The Process of Historical Proof (London, 1828) were later remodelled as a single work (1859), in which he attempted to show grounds for accepting literary documents like the Bible as a basis for history. Next appeared an expurgated translation of Herodotus
Herodotus
Herodotus was an ancient Greek historian who was born in Halicarnassus, Caria and lived in the 5th century BC . He has been called the "Father of History", and was the first historian known to collect his materials systematically, test their accuracy to a certain extent and arrange them in a...
(London, 1829), work which seems to have suggested an anonymous romance, The Temple of Melekartha (London, 1831), dealing with the prehistoric migration of the Tyrians from the Persian Gulf to the Levant. Taylor is said to have depicted his wife in the heroine. His next and best-known work, The Natural History of Enthusiasm (London; Boston, 1830; 10th edit. London, 1845), appeared anonymously in May 1829. It was a sort of historico-philosophical disquisition on religious imagination, and had an instant vogue. Taylor developed the subject in his Fanaticism (London, 1833; 7th edit. 1866) and Spiritual Despotism (London, 1835, three editions). Three further volumes on scepticism, credulity, and the corruption of morals were included in the author's plan of a ‘morbid anatomy of spurious religion,’ but these complementary volumes were never completed. Those that appeared were praised by John Wilson
John Wilson (Scottish writer)
John Wilson of Ellerey FRSE was a Scottish advocate, literary critic and author, the writer most frequently identified with the pseudonym Christopher North of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine....
in Blackwood's Magazine
Blackwood's Magazine
Blackwood's Magazine was a British magazine and miscellany printed between 1817 and 1980. It was founded by the publisher William Blackwood and was originally called the Edinburgh Monthly Magazine. The first number appeared in April 1817 under the editorship of Thomas Pringle and James Cleghorn...
and the last of the three particularly by Sir James Stephen in the Edinburgh Review (April, 1840).
In the meantime Taylor had published a devotional volume, Saturday Evening (London, 1832; many editions in England and America). Subsequently he developed a part of that book into The Physical Theory of Another Life (London, 1836; 6th edit. 1866), a work of speculation, anticipating a scheme of duties in a future world, adapted to an assumed expansion of human powers after death.
His next book was Home Education (London, 1838; 7th edit. 1867), in which he insisted on the beneficial influence of a country life, the educational value of children’s pleasures, and the natural rather than the stimulated growth of a child's mental powers. He then completed and edited a translation of the Jewish Wars of Josephus
Josephus
Titus Flavius Josephus , also called Joseph ben Matityahu , was a 1st-century Romano-Jewish historian and hagiographer of priestly and royal ancestry who recorded Jewish history, with special emphasis on the 1st century AD and the First Jewish–Roman War, which resulted in the Destruction of...
by Robert Traill (1793–1847); it appeared in two sumptuous illustrated volumes (1847 and 1851), but lost money.
In his publication during 1839–40 of Ancient Christianity and the Doctrines of the Oxford Tracts (in 8 parts, London; 4th edit. 1844, 2 vols.), Taylor argued as controversialist against the Tracts for the Times
Tracts for the Times
The Tracts for the Times were a series of 90 theological publications, varying in length from a few pages to book-length, produced by members of the English Oxford Movement, an Anglo-Catholic revival group, from 1833 to 1841...
, his contention being that the Christian Church of the fourth century had already matured into superstition and error. This view was contested. Loyola and Jesuitism in its Rudiments (London, 1849; several editions) and Wesley and Methodism (London, 1851; 1863, 1865, and New York, 1852) were followed by a popular work on the Christian argument, The Restoration of Belief (London, 1855,; several American editions), an anonymous publication. Logic in Theology and Ultimate Civilisation were volumes of essays reprinted in part from the Eclectic Review during 1859 and 1860, and were followed in turn by The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry (London, 1861; numerous editions), a volume of lectures, originally delivered at Edinburgh. After Considerations on the Pentateuch (London, 1863; two editions), in which he opposed the conclusions of John William Colenso
John William Colenso
John William Colenso , first Anglican bishop of Natal, mathematician, theologian, Biblical scholar and social activist.-Biography:Colenso was born at St Austell, Cornwall, on 24 January 1814...
, and a number of short memoirs for the Imperial Dictionary of Biography, his last work was Personal Recollections (London, 1864), a series of papers, in part autobiographical, which had appeared in Good Words
Good Words
Good Words was a 19th-century monthly periodical in the United Kingdom. It was established in 1860 by Scottish publisher Alexander Strahan. Its first editor was Norman Macleod; after his death in 1872, it was edited by his brother, Donald Macleod....
.
Inventor
Taylor was interested in mechanical devices and inventions, and he had workshop that he fitted up at Stanford Rivers. Early in life he invented a beer-tap (patented 20 November 1824) which came into wide use, and he designed a machine for engraving on copper (pat. 12248, 21 August 1848). Though it did not profit him, the idea was eventually applied on a large scale by a syndicate to engraving patterns on copper cylinders for calico printing in ManchesterManchester
Manchester is a city and metropolitan borough in Greater Manchester, England. According to the Office for National Statistics, the 2010 mid-year population estimate for Manchester was 498,800. Manchester lies within one of the UK's largest metropolitan areas, the metropolitan county of Greater...
.
Family
Two of his sisters had a reputation as poets. Ann TaylorAnn Taylor (poet)
Ann Taylor was an English poet and literary critic. In her youth she was a writer of verse for children, for which she achieved long-lasting popularity. In the years immediately preceding her marriage, she became an astringent literary critic of growing reputation...
, later Mrs. Gilbert (1782–1866), and Jane
Jane Taylor (poet)
Jane Taylor , was an English poet and novelist. She wrote the words for the song Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star in 1806 at age 23, while living in Shilling Street, Lavenham, Suffolk....
(1783–1824), responsible for the well-known rhyme Twinkle Twinkle Little Star
Twinkle Twinkle Little Star
"Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" is a popular English nursery rhyme. The lyrics are from an early nineteenth-century English poem, "The Star" by Jane Taylor. The poem, which is in couplet form, was first published in 1806 in Rhymes for the Nursery, a collection of poems by Taylor and her sister Ann...
. Josiah Gilbert, son of Ann Taylor, was an artist and author.
Taylor's children were:
- Jane, who married, first, Dr. Harrison, and secondly, the Rev. S. D. Stubbs;
- Isaac TaylorIsaac Taylor (canon)Isaac Taylor , son of Isaac Taylor, was a philologist, toponymist, and Anglican canon of York .- Life :...
(1829–1901), churchman and author; - Phœbe;
- James Medland Taylor, architect, born 1834;
- Rosa;
- Henry Taylor, architect and author, born in 1837;
- Catherine;
- Jessie, who married Thomas Wilson; and
- Euphemia.
External links
Attribution