ABSTRACT
Richard Taylor was born in Norwich on 18 May 1781. Little is recorded of his childhood and youth before he moved to London at the age of fifteen. He was educated partly by his mother, and partly at a local dissenting day school run by the Rev. John Houghton and his son. One of John Taylor’s catches, written for the annual family reunion in 1796, seems to imply that Richard’s parents were expecting him to become a tradesman in Norwich. Houghton, who had himself been educated at the Glasgow High School, and recognising the boy’s scholarly abilities, urged that he should complete his education there and become a dissenting minister. Taylor’s philological interests also found an outlet in his printing of an incomplete Glossary of Archaic and Provincial Words prepared by the Rev. Jonathan Boucher as a supplement to Johnson’s Dictionary.
