Author: Taylor, Henry
Biography:
TAYLOR, Henry (1800-1886: ODNB)
The third and youngest son of George Taylor (1772-1851), a gentleman farmer, and his wife, Eleanor Ashworth Taylor (1767-1802), he was born on 18 Oct. 1800 in the village of Bishop Middleham, Durham. Educated by his father, in 1813 he joined the navy to escape a home life he described as gloomy, dreary, and silent. By his own account an indifferent and lazy sailor, he left the service in Dec. 1815, whereupon he again resided with his father. For the next two years, he desultorily read novels, poetry, theology, philosophy, and natural history. His father then arranged a minor appointment in the Audit Office for him through a politically powerful friend, the secretary of the Treasury, Charles Arbuthnot. In London he lived with his brothers, William, then in medical school, and George, a clerk in the Treasury. All three caught typhus; his brothers died of it in 1818. Following a stint as government clerk at Barbados in 1820 and a second interregnum in his father’s library, during which time he taught himself Italian and Greek and began to write verse, in 1825 he obtained a clerkship, a patronage appointment, at the Colonial Office. In 1822 his first review, of Thomas Moore’s (q.v.) Irish Melodies, appeared in the QR (28:55, 139-44). His 1824 QR review of Walter Savage Landor’s (q.v.) Imaginary Conversations (30:60, 508-19) was notorious for its harshness. He contributed articles to ER, Nineteenth Century, Fraser’s Magazine, and London Magazine, mostly on literary subjects, including reviews of Wordsworth (q.v.) and Carlyle. Commencing with Robert Southey (q.v.), he gained the acquaintance of many of the leading poets and novelists of the age. To Tennyson (q.v.), Aubrey de Vere Hunt (q.v.), and the portrait photographer Julia Margaret Cameron he was especially close. Of his several poems and plays, his most imaginative are Isaac Comnenus (1827) and Philip van Artevelde (1834). The Statesman (1836) is a satire on his career in the civil service. His best-known work is his two-volume Autobiography (1885). On 17 Oct. 1839, he married Theodosia Spring Rice (1812-1891). Of their five children, Ida (1847-1929), a prolific author of novels and non-fiction, is the most notable. Knighted 30 Jun. 1869, he died at Bournemouth, Hampshire, 27 Mar. 1886. (Bodley, Taylor corr.; NLS John Murray Archive; ODNB 9 Mar. 2023; Correspondence of Henry Taylor, ed. E. Dowden [1888]) JC