John Taylor (1781 - 1864)

RA Collection: People and Organisations

English publisher, essayist, and writer. He is noted as the publisher of the poets John Keats and John Clare. He was born in East Retford, Nottinghamshire, the son of James Taylor and Sarah Drury. His father was a printer and bookseller. He was originally apprenticed to his father, but eventually he moved to London and worked for James Lackington in 1803. He formed a partnership with James Augustus Hessey (1785–1870), as Taylor & Hessey, at 93 Fleet Street, London. In 1819, through his cousin Edward Drury, a bookseller in Stamford, he was introduced to John Clare of Helpston in Northamptonshire. He polished Clare’s grammar and spelling for publication. He was also Keats’s publisher, and published works by Lamb, Coleridge and Hazlitt. In 1821 John Taylor became involved in publishing the London Magazine. In later years he became Bookseller and Publisher to the then new University of London and, now in formal partnership with James Walton, moved to Upper Gower Street and developed a line in what was then the new and developing field of standard academic text books.