Isaac Taylor (Independent)

Isaac Taylor (1759-1829) was an engraver and an Independent minister. He was the younger brother of Charles Taylor. He was originally an engraver in London, where his father, Isaac Taylor (1730-1807) had been a successful engraver. The younger Taylor worshiped at the Independent congregation in Fetter Lane. He prepared the plates for Abraham Rees’s revised edition of Ephraim Chamber’s Cyclopedia, illustrated Robert Smirke’s The Picturesque Beauties of Shakespeare (1784-7), and the printer John Boydell, receiving 250 guineas for his engraving of The Assassination of Rizzio by John Opie in 1790. Between 1813 and 1815 Taylor and son Isaac worked on Josiah Boydell’s Illustrations of Holy Writ, one of his last large projects for commercial printers. He left London in 1786 for Lavenham, Suffolk, and in 1796 moved to Colchester, where he began a dual career as minister to the Independent congregations while continuing to operate a successful engraving business. In 1811 he moved to Ongar, also ministering to the Independent congregation there and continuing his engraving (as well as writing) career. He soon his children, Ann (1782-1866), her sister Jane (1783-1824), and brother Isaac (1787-1865), all of whom became successful writers in their own right.  In 1798 Ann began to perform contract work for the London publisher, Darton & Harvey, contributing regularly to the Minor’s Pocket Book (using the noms de plume ‘Clara’ and ‘Maria’), eventually becoming the editor.  She and Jane were also employed in doing small prints for juvenile works. Isaac Taylor began supplying monthly portraits to the Theological Magazine in 1800, requiring assistance from both his daughters. The two sisters composed many hymns and some of the most important writings for children in the early decades of the nineteenth century (Jane was the author of ‘Twinkle, twinkle, little star’). For more on the Taylors, see Doris Mary Armitage, The Taylors of Ongar (Cambridge: W. Heffer, 1939), 47, 56, 204-05; Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).