Biography

William Taylor of Norwich (1765 –1836)

William Taylor was part of the non-conformist, radical group in Norwich which worshipped at the Octagon Chapel in Colegate. Taylor taught German at the King Edward VI Grammar School in the Cathedral Close and the novelist George Borrow was one of his pupils. In chapter 23 of the semi-autobiographical Lavengro, Borrow records his debt to Taylor who appears as a short elderly character in the front room of an inn sitting smoking a pipe under an old Flemish master of the Judgement of Paris.

Taylor started working as a reviewer for The Monthly Review in 1793 and, according to William Hazlitt, developed a style of philosophical criticism “eminently characteristic of the Spirit of the Age” which the Edinburgh Review later imitated and became famous for. Taylor reviewed James Field Stanfield‘s An Essay on the Study and Composition of Biography in 1813 in which he coined the term ‘Biographicon‘.

 

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