John Edward Taylor

John Edward Taylor (11 September 1791 – 6 January 1844) was a British business tycoon, editor, publisher and member of The Portico Library, who was the founder of the Manchester Guardian newspaper in 1821, which was renamed in 1959 The Guardian. Personal life Taylor was born at Ilminster, Somerset, England, to Mary Scott, the poet, and John Taylor, a Unitarian minister who moved after his wife's death to Manchester with his son to run a school there. John Edward was educated at his father's school and at Daventry Academy. He was apprenticed to a cotton manufacturer in Manchester and later became a successful merchant; Taylor "derived much of his wealth from Manchester’s cotton industry, an industry that relied on firms such as Taylor’s trading with cotton plantations in the Americas that had enslaved millions of Black people". His children by his first wife and first cousin Sophia Russell Taylor (née Scott) included a son named after himself and a daughter, Harriet Ann Taylor, who in 1867 married the economist and logician Stanley Jevons. Membership of the Little Circle