Author: Taylor, Dan
Biography:
TAYLOR, Dan (1738-1816: ODNB)
Pseudonym Philagathus
The poem included here is an early work by a remarkable man who made his name as the founder of the New Connexion of General Baptists in England and who went on to publish many other titles (over fifty books and pamphlets according to ODNB)—none of them in verse. He was born on 21 Dec. 1738 at Sourmilk Hall, Northowram, Yorkshire, and baptised (as “Dan,” not Daniel) on 24 Dec.; his parents were Azor Taylor and his second wife, Mary Willey. Taylor had no formal education, since his father was a coalminer who took his son with him into the mines before the child was six, but he learnt to read and took books with him to work. In 1761 he joined the Methodists, who encouraged him to train as a preacher, but doubts about some of their doctrines instead led him to the Baptists, whom he joined in 1763. He was ordained as a Baptist minister and preached for nine years at the Birchcliffe chapel at Hebden Bridge, near Heptonstall, Yorkshire; he also travelled around the country to preach to other gatherings. On 13 Nov. 1764 he married Elizabeth Saltenstall (1744-93), with whom he had thirteen children, most of whom were born in Heptonstall, but five of whom died young. After the death of his wife he made three more marriages, all childless: to Elizabeth Newton in 1794, Mary (Friend) Toplis in 1811, and Sarah Saunders in 1816. Dissatisfied with a decline in spirit among the General Baptists, in 1770 Taylor proposed and carried a union of the more evangelical churches in Leicestershire and elsewhere as a New Connexion with headquarters in Church Lane, Whitechapel, London. Taylor continued to preach in Yorkshire at Birchcliffe and then at Halifax, but moved permanently to London in 1785, where his labours were “peculiarly ardent, faithful, and incessant” (Leicestershire Journal). He died in London on 26 Nov. 1816 and was buried at Bunhill Fields. An obituary in the Oxford Journal described a sudden but peaceful death “without a groan or a sigh” while Taylor was “smoking his pipe and reading.” (ODNB 3 Aug. 2024; ancestry.com 3 Aug. 2024; findmypast.com 3 Aug. 2024; Leicestershire Journal 30 Nov. 1816; Oxford Journal 7 Dec. 1816)