page_title: Henry Taylor (dramatist)
section_title: Literary connections
hierarchical_section_title: Henry Taylor (dramatist) / Literary connections
caption_attribution_description: Henry Taylor Philip Van Artevelde. Albumen print, 270 x 209mm (10 5/8 x 8 1/4").
context_page_description: Sir Henry Taylor KCMG was an English dramatist and poet, Colonial Office official, and man of letters.
context_section_description: Taylor wrote Byronic poems and an article on Thomas Moore, which in 1822 was accepted for the Quarterly Review by William Gifford. Returning to London in October 1823, he found that Gifford had printed another article of his, on Lord John Russell. Taylor had also contributed to the London Magazine, and had an offer of the editorship.
  His father George was a friend of William Wordsworth. In 1823, on a visit to the Lake District, Henry Taylor made the acquaintance of Robert Southey, and they became friends. Jane Taylor had a first cousin, Isabella Fenwick (1783–1856), whom he introduced to the Wordsworth family. She became a close friend of Wordsworth in later life, as she had been of Taylor up to the time of his marriage. Though Fenwick was not herself a writer, her friendship left an enduring impression on the writings of Taylor and Wordsworth. In his autobiography, Henry Taylor wrote, “There is a good deal of her mind in my writings. I wish there was more; and I wish that she had left her thoughts behind her in writings of her own.” 
  Taylor's work also brought him literary friends: the circle of Thomas Hyde Villiers, and his colleague James Stephen. Through Villiers he became acquainted with Charles Austin, John Stuart Mill, and some of the Benthamites. He made speeches in opposition to their views, in the debating society documented by Mill. He also invited them to personal meetings with Wordsworth and Southey. Mill introduced Taylor to Thomas Carlyle in November 1831, initiating a long friendship. Carlyle's opinion of the "marked veracity" of Taylor was printed wrongly by the editor James Anthony Froude as "morbid vivacity". He also knew John Sterling, and made the acquaintance of Fanny Trollope whilst attending the court of Louis Philippe of France.
  Taylor aspired to become the official biographer of Southey. The family row over Southey's second marriage, to Caroline Anne Bowles, found him with the Wordsworths and others hostile to Bowles. He did become Southey's literary executor.
caption: Henry Taylor, photographed by Julia Margaret Cameron, for whom he was a regular sitter. The beard was grown after illness made him wary of shaving himself. Millais wished (in vain) to have Taylor model for him as Moses.[14]
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