ABSTRACT
Richard Taylor, the founder of Taylor & Francis, was a member of the talented Taylor family of Norwich concerning whom it has been said that if all their works were collected together, ‘it would form a respectable library’. The Norwich Taylors formed part of the ‘intellectual aristocracy’ of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century England. John Taylor’s introduction to national politics had come in 1786 when Norfolk yarn manufacturers, in common with those from Yorkshire and Gloucestershire, protested at the proposal by landed farmers to export the long wool which they traditionally processed. Taylor was one of the Norwich spokesmen deputed to lobby the cause in London with the Prime Minister, William Pitt. The Taylors of Norwich were, apart from their Galtonian persistence of talent, typical of the middle-class dissenting families to emerge in the eighteenth century and from whom the bankers, traders, manufacturers, engineers and scientists, men and women of the arts and letters, sprang in the nineteenth century.
