Ann Taylor (1782-1866) and Jane Taylor (1783-1824) Ann Taylor and her younger sister Jane belonged to the literary family known as the Taylors of Ongar, whose members produced or made substantial con­ tributions to almost a hundred books, many of them for children. The Taylor sisters were educated at home in astronomy, anatomy, geography, geometry, mechanics, and general history. To save money, in 1786 the family moved from London, where the girls had been born, to Lavenham, in Suffolk; they stayed there until 1796, when they moved to Colchester, where their father was to be the minister of a nonconformist congregation. Beginning in 1797 the sisters worked with their parents and later with their younger siblings at the family business-engraving book illustrations on copper plates, an occu­ pation Jane, at least, did not relish. Always precocious, Jane once presented her parents with a petition for a garden in five well-crafted stanzas. She later recalled, "I know I have sometimes lived so much in a castle, as almost to forget that I lived in a house." 1 In 1798 Ann bought a copy of the Minor's Pocket Book, jotted down solu­ tions to the enigma, charade, and other puzzles, and, using the pseudonym "Juvenilia," sent them to the Quaker publisher, William Darton. In each of the following years, Ann, Jane, and their brother Isaac sent solutions in verse, and Darton published several of Ann's compositions. In 1803 Darton accepted Jane's poem "The Beggar Boy" for publication in the 1804 issue and wrote r. Letter of 24 September 1806, quoted in Isaac Taylor, Memoirs and Poetical Remains of the Late Jane Taylor, 2 vols. (London, 1825), l :6-7, also 2:152. 730 Ann Taylor and Jane Taylor 731 to their father asking for more "specimens of easy Poetry for young chil­ dren. What would be most likely to please little minds must be well known to every one of those who have written such pieces as we have already seen from thy family." He offered to pay in cash or books. The Taylors sent enough poems to fill a volume, which was published early in 1804 as Original Poems, for Infant Minds, by "Several Young Persons." Darton paid ten pounds for the poems. When the book appeared, the Taylors were displeased to find that Darton had included seventeen poems by Adelaide O'Keeffe (1776-1855) and one by Barnard Barton (1784-1849) in addition to the twenty poems by Ann, twenty by Jane, and three by their brother, Isaac Jr., who also en­ graved the volume's frontispiece. But the book was an immense success. It "awoke the nurseries of England, and those in charge of them," 2 earning en­ thusiastic praise from Walter Scott, Robert Southey, and Maria Edgeworth. These were among the first original poems in English written specifically for the enjoyment of children rather than primarily for educational or didactic purposes. Original Poems, for Infant Minds went through eighteen English editions in the first fourteen years; by r865 there had been eighty English and American editions, as well as Dutch, French, German, and Russian translations. The poems' influence was enormous. Generations of children, including many future authors, grew up reading, reciting, and singing them. Kate Greenaway illustrated them in 1883; and in 1925 Edith Sitwell introduced a selection. Their success inspired a slew of imitations, including ones by Sara Coleridge and by Charles and Mary Lamb. In November 1804 Darton solicited a second volume of Original Poems from the Taylors, for which they received £15. This volume contained sixteen poems by Adelaide O'Keeffe as well as twenty­ nine by Ann, twenty-two by Jane, and three by Isaac. The Taylors appear to have earned £440 for their contributions to the various editions of Original Poems by 1844.3 When their next volume was in preparation, Jane acquired her own room in the attic. Her brother Isaac later recalled that the window "commanded a view of the country, and a 'tract of sky' as a field for that nightly soaring of the fancy of which she was so fond." 4 Rhymes for the Nursery, published in 1806, 2 . F. J. Harvey Darton, Children's Books in England: Five Centuries ef Social Life (Cambridge, 1932), 187. 3. The authors of each of the poems in these and other Taylor volumes are identified by Christina Duff Stewart in The Taylors of Ongar: An Analytical Bio-Bibliography, 2 vols. (New York, 1975). Stewart also describes the revisions that took place from one edition to another and the sums received. 4. Isaac Taylor, Memoirs and Poetical Remains ef the Late Jane Taylor, I :86. 732 Ann Taylor and Jane Taylor included Jane's poem "The Star;' still a staple in our present-day repertoire of poetry for children. Known now by its first line, "Twinkle, twinkle, little star," its opening stanza persists as if it were folklore, the name of its creator now almost entirely forgotten. The first publication of this book brought the Taylors forty pounds; by r88r it had gone through forty-one editions. In 1807, on a visit to London, the young sisters stopped at Newington to meet the elderly Anna Letitia Barbauld and her brother, John Aikin. The sisters' Hymns for Infant Minds, for which Ann engraved the frontispiece, ap­ peared in 1810. The hymns almost immediately made their way into Sun­ day school anthologies, often without acknowledgment. Hymns had gone through more than fifty editions in England by the r88os and nearly fifty in America by the r86os. In the first year, the authors earned £150. In r8II the family moved to Ongar, in Essex, and in 1812 Ann and Jane published Original Hymns for Sunday Schools with Josiah Conder. Though the language of these hymns is highly simplified, they were not easy to write. Isaac Jr. re­ marked that "if one might judge by the appearance of the manuscript copy of these hymns-its intricate interlineations, and multiplied revisions, it would seem that, many of them cost the author more labour than any other of her writings." 5 In December 1813 Ann married the Reverend Joseph Henry Gilbert (1779- 1852), the liberal Congregationalist pastor of the Nether Chapel in Sheffield. She suspended her writing career in the early years of her marriage in order to devote herself to her family, which eventually came to include eight chil­ dren. Separated now from her older sister, Jane turned to writing a work of fiction. Isaac Jr. later rec~lled, "It was her custom, in a solitary ramble among the rocks, for half an hour after breakfast, to seek that pitch of excitement without which she never took up the pen:-this fever of thought was usually exhausted in two or three hours of writing." 6 In ~ugust 1815 Display. A Tale for Young People appeared. This was the first work Jane had authored alone and also the first work bearing her name on the title page. Her mother could no longer object to her daughter being known publicly as an author, as she had herself the previous year made her own debut in the world of letters, pub­ lishing now having displaced engraving as the more lucrative family business. Although modern readers find Display overly didactic, it was popular enough in its own time to go through three editions in the first six months. Soon after its publication, Jane began working on a book of poems for an adult audience. Isaac noted that she hesitated to express her opinions on serious 5. Ibid., II6. 6. Ibid., 137. Ann Tcrylor and Jane Taylor 733 subjects in prose, but "in verse, she felt as if sheltered. She therefore deter­ mined to write what she thought and felt, with less reserve than hitherto; but under the cover of poetry." 7 The result was Essays in Rhyme, on Morals and Manners, published by Taylor and Hessey and Josiah Conder in 1816. John Keats wrote to his fourteen-year-old sister, Fanny, "How do you like Miss Taylor's essays in Rhyme-I just look'd into the Book and it appeared to me suitable to you-especially since I remember your liking for those pleasant little things the Original Poems." 8 The next year Jane collaborated with her mother to pen the daughter's part of Correspondence Between a Mother and Her Daughter at School (1817). This was Jane's last book. Around the time of its publication she discovered the breast cancer that would eventually claim her life. Her physician forbade all writing for fear that excitement would weaken her. Nevertheless, for the next five years, under the signature "Q.Q.," she continued to contribute poems, essays, and stories to the Youth's Magazine. These pieces, including her famous story "How It Strikes a Stranger;' about a visit by a man from another planet, were collected and published shortly after her death on 13 April 1824.9 The Contributions of Q. Q. to a Periodical Work: with Some Pieces Not Before Published had gone through thirteen British editions by 1866. In 1825 Isaac Jr. published a biography of his sister and edited more works in the two-volume Memoirs and Poetical Remains of the Late Jane Taylor: with Extracts from her Correspondence, drawing the silhouette of Jane for the frontispiece to volume r. Though principally occupied with her family, Ann published in 1827 Origi­ nal Anniversary Hymns and in 1839 The Convalescent; Twelve Letters on Recovery from Sickness, occasioned by the serious illness of her daughter and several others. Isaac Jr. wrote congratulating his sister on the book's publication, ex­ pressing his "particular pleasure in finding that you have at length returned to your vocation, and left ..