Tom Taylor 1817-1880, dramatist and editor of Punch
I was intrigued to learn that the house opposite ours, at 84 Lavender Sweep, contains a fanlight over the door which came from the the villa known as Lavender Sweep House which had been owned by Tom Taylor and his wife Laura Barker and was demolished in 1880 when the streets of terraced houses around here were built. Tom Taylor had quite a CV. He was a playwright, critic, editor of Punch, Professor of English Literature at London University, a barrister, a civil servant and friend to many writers and theatrical people who visited him in Lavender Sweep. He was a busy man.
I hope we will have a Battersea Society commemorative plaque to them on number 84 which is a double fronted house on the site of the original house which was home to Tom and his wife Laura who was a musician and composer before she met and married him in 1855.
I think they deserve to be commemorated and celebrated. Laura Barker didn’t compose very much after they married except for the occasional piece to accompany one of his plays. It was the expectation of a woman of her class that she wouldn’t have paid work after marriage. She published again after she was widowed. Laura features as one of the Notable Women of Lavender Hill on my walks. https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/laura-barker-1819-1905/
The above photo taken by Lewis Carroll is of the front of the Lavender sweep House and the fanlight at number 84 is the one that was above the main entrance to the house.
Probably the most famous play written by Tom was Our American Cousin as it was the the one that Abraham Lincoln was watching in the Ford Theatre in Washington D.C when he was assassinated by actor and Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth on April 14th 1865. He also injured our namesake Major Henry Rathbone who had accompanied the President and his wife. Lincoln who was the 16th President of the United States, was shot in the head and died of his wounds the following morning in the Petersen House opposite the theatre. He was the first U.S. president to be assassinated. His funeral and burial were were marked by an extended period of national mourning.
Taylor, who previously satirised Lincoln in PUNCH, wrote a memorial poem about the assassination in tribute to him, perhaps he had an element of guilt.
Abraham Lincoln foully assassinated
You lay a wreath on a murdered Lincoln’s bier,
You, who with mocking pencil wont to trace,
Broad for the self-complacent British sneer,
His length of shambling limb, his furrowed face,
His gaunt, gnarled hands, his unkempt, bristling hair,
His garb uncouth, his bearing ill at ease,
His lack of all we prize as debonair,
Of power or will to shine, of art to please;
You, whose smart pen backed up the pencil’s laugh,
Judging each step as though the way were plain;
Reckless, so it could point its paragraph
Of chief’s perplexity, or people’s pain:
Beside this corpse, that bears for winding-sheet
The Stars and Stripes he lived to rear anew,
Between the mourners at his head and feet,
Say, scurrile jester, is there room for you?
Yes: he had lived to shame me from my sneer,
To lame my pencil, and confute my pen; —
To make me own this hind of princes peer,
This rail-splitter a true-born king of men.
My shallow judgement I had learned to rue,
Noting how to occasion’s height he rose;
How his quaint wit made home-truth seem more true;
How, iron-like, his temper grew by blows.
How humble, yet how hopeful he could be:
How in good fortune and in ill, the same:
Nor bitter in success, nor boastful he,
Thirsty for gold, nor feverish for fame.
He went about his work, — such work as few
ever had laid on head and heart and hand, —
As one who knows, where there’s a task to do,
Man’s honest will must Heaven’s good grace command;
Who trusts the strength will with the burden grow,
That God makes instruments to work his will,
If but that will we can arrive to know,
Nor tamper with the weights of good and ill.
So he went forth to battle, on the side
That he felt clear was Liberty’s and Right’s,
As in his peasant boyhood he had plied
His warfare with rude Nature’s thwarting mights,—
The uncleared forest, the unbroken soil,
The iron-bark, that turns the lumberer’s axe,
The rapid, that o’erbears the boatman’s toil,
The prairie, hiding the mazed wanderer’s tracks,
The ambushed Indian, and the prowling bear; —
Such were the deeds that helped his youth to train:
Rough culture, — but such trees large fruit may bear,
If but their stocks be of right girth and grain.
So he grew up, a destined work to do,
And lived to do it: four long-suffering years’
Ill-fate, ill-feeling, ill-report, lived through,
And then he heard the hisses change to cheers,
The taunts to tribute, the abuse to praise,
And took both with the same unwavering mood:
Till, as he came on light, from darkling days,
And seemed to touch the goal from where he stood,
A felon hand, between the goal and him,
Reached from behind his back, a trigger prest,—
And those perplexed and patient eyes were dim,
Those gaunt, long-laboring limbs were laid to rest!
The words of mercy were upon his lips,
Forgiveness in his heart and on his pen,
When this vile murderer brought swift eclipse
To thoughts of peace on earth, good-will to men.
The Old World and the New, from sea to sea,
Utter one voice of sympathy and shame!
Sore heart, so stopped when it at last beat high;
Sad life, cut short just as its triumph came.
A deed accurst! Strokes have been struck before
By the assassin’s hand, whereof men doubt
If more of horror or disgrace they bore;
But thy foul crime, like Cain’s, stands darkly out.
Vile hand, that brandest murder on a strife,
Whate’er its grounds, stoutly and nobly striven;
And with the martyr’s crown crownest a life
With much to praise, little to be forgiven.
Tom Taylor dramatist and editor of ‘Punch,’ was born at Bishop-Wearmouth, a suburb of Sunderland, on 19 Oct. 1817. His father, Thomas was self-educated, having begun life in boyhood as a labourer on a small farm in Cumberland. By thrift, industry, and intelligence he became head partner in a flourishing brewery firm at Durham, and, when that city was incorporated, he was selected as one of first aldermen in the new municipality. Tom’s mother Maria Josephina, though born in Durham, was of German origin.
Tom was educated first at Grange school in Sunderland, and afterwards at the university of Glasgow, where he won three gold medals. In 1837, he entered Trinity College, Cambridge and graduated with a B.A. in 1840 in mathematics and in classics. In 1842 he was elected a fellow of Trinity, and proceeded to gain an M.A. in 1843. For the next two years he became a ‘coach’ at Cambridge. In the interests of his younger brothers he declined the ample annual allowance hitherto placed at his command by his father, and resolved to support himself on his fees as tutor and upon the income of his fellowship.
During 1842, Taylor, together with three Cambridge friends Frederick Ponsonby, who was the Earl of Bessborough, and Charles Taylor and William Bolland, they formed the Old Stagers, which is recognised as the oldest amateur drama society still performing. (Fred Ponsonby, a Battersea Labour Party member, was the fourth Baron but is now a life peer and sings with the Festival Chorus that Dave sings in). Tom continued to act whenever he could.
It came after a cricket festival in Kent when Frederick Ponsonby was asked to combine it with cricket and drama in the evening. He rallied around him a group of amateur actors who took to playing cricket with fervour during the day, and rehearsing any spare moment they could find on a free corner of the playing field, for their performance in the evening.https://www.oldstagers.com/os-history
Tom is seated on the right in the Old Stagers photo.
He left Cambridge in 1845 and was appointed professor of English literature and the English language in the London University. He held the post for two years after which he practiced law having been called to the bar at Middle Temple in 1846 and went on the northern circuit. In 1850 he became assistant secretary of the Board of Health. The board was reconstituted in 1854 in response to the cholera epidemic that was ravaging London, and he was made secretary, a post he held until 1858, when the board came to an end. He then was moved to a department of the Home Office, from which he retired in 1876. Apparently, he often walked from Lavender Sweep to work at Whitehall. Below is a a painting by Tom of Bamborough Castleone of Laura’s of Ellen and Kate Terry and a photo of Tom in volunteer’s uniform.
While working as a civil servant, he maintained separate careers as a playwright and a journalist most prominently as a contributor to, and eventually editor of Punch. He became best known as a playwright, with up to 100 plays staged during his career. Many were adaptations of French plays, but these and his original works cover a range from farce to melodrama.
There is a jolly appraisal of him as an art critic after he had died by John Oldcastle in The Magazine of Art in 1881. https://books.google.com/books?id=JDFGAQAAMAAJ&dq=%22Mrs+Tom+Taylor%22+%22composer%22&pg=PA68
For his holidays Tom Taylor sometimes went to Italy, where, among the vineyards, the typical Briton was a strange contrast to the peasantry, who, by the way, worshipped him, and to one of whose portionless maidens he gave a marriage dot, which made the tying of the knot possible-only one instance out of a large number that might be named of the busy littérateur’s kindness of heart.
Notwithstanding the busy life he led, Tom Taylor was an active citizen, a model husband and father, and a faithful friend. In politics he was always a Liberal, and in religion an Evangelical. Of his home-life little need be said, except that in his wife he had as true a help-mate as ever a literary man had, Mrs. Tom Taylor being one of a family of sisters whom we have heard spoken of as resembling the Brontes in the seclusion of their early life and in the gifts with which they were endowed; and like the Misses Bronte, the Misses Barker were the daughters of a Yorkshire clergyman. It was thus Tom Taylor’s fortune to have a wife-herself a handler of the brush —who aided and seconded his artistic taste, and who in music, as a composer, has great ability. She has published many of her compositions, and she contributed an original overture and entracte music to her husband’s ” Joan of Arc.”
As a friend, Tom Taylor was beloved. Naturally he knew intimately most of the ” men of the time,”
Nor need we justify the inclusion of Tom Taylor’s name on this roll by insisting that he was, indeed, an amateur artist; it will be enough to say that he played a more important part in the history of the English art and English artists of his time than did many contemporary painters of distinction, and that he was an art-lover, an art-collector, an historian of art, and an art-critic.
Notwithstanding the busy life he led, Tom Taylor was an active citizen, a model husband and father, and a faithful friend. In politics he was always a Liberal, and in religion an Evangelical. Of his home-life little need be said, except that in his wife he had as true a help-mate as ever a literary man had, Mrs. Tom Taylor being one of a family of sisters whom we have heard spoken of as resembling the Brontes in the seclusion of their early life and in the gifts with which they were endowed; and like the Misses Bronte, the Misses Barker were the daughters of a Yorkshire clergyman. It was thus Tom Taylor’s fortune to have a wife-herself a handler of the brush —who aided and seconded his artistic taste, and who in music, as a composer, has great ability. She has published many of her compositions, and she contributed an original overture and entracte music to her husband’s ” Joan of Arc.”
Tom had married, Laura, daughter of the Rev. Thomas Barker, vicar of Thirkleby in Yorkshire on 19 June 1855. She had a musical career before they met. She had played violin with Paganini and Louis Spohr and had published various compositions and contributed the original overture and entr’acte to her husband’s ‘Joan of Arc. They had two children Lucy and Wycliffe, who became an artist.
From his first settling in London he had engaged in journalism working on the ‘Morning Chronicle’ and the ‘Daily News’ as a leader-writer. He had also started his lifelong connection with ‘Punch,’ and until 1874 he was an active member of the staff becoming editor in that year he succeeded Shirley Brooks as editor, and he held that office till his death six years later.
Here is an amusing account by Leslie Ward in his memoirs Forty Years of ‘Spy’. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/35466
“Mr. and Mrs. Tom Taylor were another interesting and talented couple who were friends of my parents. Tom Taylor was the art critic of the Times, and at one time editor of Punch. He was also the author of several popular plays, of which Still Waters Run Deep and the Ticket of Leave Man, in which Henry Neville played the hero, are perhaps the most widely known. In conjunction with Charles Reade he wrote some amusing comedies; as well as writing in prose and verse for Punch he compiled some interesting biographies, of Reynolds, Constable, David Cox, and C. R. Leslie, R.A. At dinner his appearance was remarkable, for he usually wore a black velvet evening suit. A curious trait of the dramatist’s was his absent-minded manner and forgetfulness of convention. Sometimes when walking in the street with a friend he would grow interested, and, to emphasise his remarks, turned to look more directly into the face of his companion, at the same time placing his arm around his waist. In the case of a lady this habit sometimes proved rather embarrassing!
Mr. Tom Taylor was a man of unbounded kindness in helping everybody who was in need of money or in trouble; his generosity probably made him the object of attentions from all sorts and conditions of people, a fact very soon discovered by his domestics, for one day Mr. and Mrs. Taylor returned from a walk to be met by a startled parlourmaid who announced the presence of a strange-looking man who was waiting to see them. Her suspicions being aroused by his wild appearance, she had shown him into the pantry, fearing to leave him in the drawing-room. On repairing to the pantry with curiosity not unmixed with wonder, they discovered … Tennyson … quite at home and immensely tickled by his situation.
Mrs. Tom Taylor was descended from Wycliffe, and in her early youth lived with her two sisters with their father, the Rev. Mr. Barker (who was quite a personality), in the country. Laura Barker was brought up in circumstances very similar to the Brontës. She was extremely talented, and began her musical career at the age of thirteen, when her great musical gifts brought her to the notice of Paganini. Paganini, after hearing her play, was much astonished at her power in rendering—entirely from ear—his wonderful harmonies upon her violin. General Perronet Thompson, on another occasion, was so pleased with her performance that he encouraged her talent by presenting her with a “Stradivarius.” ….later became the composer of many popular songs. When she married Mr. Tom Taylor she continued to publish her talented songs under her maiden name.
For many years he was art critic for the ‘Times’ and the ‘Graphic.’ He also edited ‘Charles Robert Leslie’s Autobiographical Recollections’, completed Leslie’s ‘Life of Sir Joshua Reynolds’ and edited as ‘Pen Sketches by a Vanished Hand’ (1879) the essays of his friend Mortimer Collins. He had already translated ‘Ballads and Songs of Brittany’ from the Barsaz-Breiz of Hersart de la Villemarqué, and in 1874 he published an entertaining volume called ‘Leicester Square: its Associations and its Worthies’ .”
However, he found his true vocation as a playwright. From an early age he had written and acted plays, and as soon as he settled in London he worked assiduously for the theatre. A self-confessed populist, his intention was to create plays his audiences would enjoy, and many of his works were adaptations of existing French plays, or dramatisations of the novels of Charles Dickens or other popular novels of the time. He was also a prolific writer of dramatic works and in thirty-five years he supplied more than seventy plays to the principal theatres of London. He was fond of theatrical life in all its aspects. He played several parts as an actor, and is said to have been successful as Adam in a performance of ‘As you like it’ at Manchester.
The first piece of Taylor’s that signally attracted the public was ‘To Parents and Guardians,’ a farce at the Lyceum. ‘The Fool’s Revenge,’ an adaptation of Victor Hugo’s ‘Le Roi s’amuse,’ ‘’Twixt Axe and Crown,’ ‘Joan of Arc’ ,‘Lady Clancarty,’ and ‘Anne Boleyn,’ which was produced at the Haymarket in March 1875, and was Taylor’s penultimate piece and only complete failure. Other of his successful plays were ‘Diogenes and his Lantern’, ‘The Vicar of Wakefield’ , ‘The Philosopher’s Stone.’, ‘Our Clerks’, ‘Wittikind and his Brothers,’ ‘Plot and Passion’ ‘A Nice Firm’,‘Two Loves and a Life,’ in conjunction with Charles Reade,‘The King’s Rival.’ ‘Helping Hands’, ‘Retribution,’ from Bernard’s ‘Loi du Talion’,’Going to the Bad’ . ‘Barefaced Impostors’, ‘Nine Points of the Law,’ ‘Up at the Hills’, ‘The Babes in the Wood’ ‘Sense and Sensation’ , ‘Henry Dunbar,’ ‘The Sister’s Penance’ ‘The Hidden Hand’,‘Settling Day’ A collection of his early pieces appeared in 1854. He published a collected edition of his historical dramas in 1877.
Much of his archive material is now housed in the V and A collection in Blythe House thanks to Jack Reading (1916-2004) who was interested in theatre history. It includes original working drafts and final drafts of play-texts, notebooks, sketchbooks, images and scrapbooks and personal ephemera. Jack was a founder member of the Society for Theatre Research and became a trustee of the Theatre Museum Association.
I found his handwriting in his many letters to Laura very difficult to read. I was amused by letters his parents, especially the ones about money.
Tom and Laura Taylor’s home, one of four grand houses with a carriageway, was referred to as Lavender Sweep House. Lavender Sweep was a curved road between Lavender Hill and Battersea Rise with a lodge at either end and the shape was kept when our houses were built. We think it is the only ‘sweep’ in the country.
There had been a billiard room on its north-west side, 30ft by 20ft, built by Reading Watts of Belgravia, and joined to the conservatory by an unusual flight of steps within a glazed, sloping passageway. A magnificent detached 42ft conservatory to the north-west of the house, with semi-circular ends rather in the manner of Richard Turner’s Palm House at Kew, reached by a tiled and glazed passage were added when the Taylors moved in in 1858 when it was sold the house to its final occupants. Tom Taylor added a large study ‘to his own design’. From the Survey of London; A visitor in the 1870s found every wall in the house, even in the bathrooms, covered with pictures; a pet owl perched on a bust of Minerva; and a dining room ‘where Lambeth Faience and Venetian glass abound’.
Among his friends and visitors to Lavender Sweep were Dickens, Thackeray, Henry Irving, Lord Tennyson, Browning and Lewis Carroll, who took a number of photographs of the house. Thomas Hughes MP, who was brother of Tom’s friend and neighbour the wonderful Jeanie Senior singer, the first woman civil servant who lived at Elm House on Lavender Hill and with whom he corresponded much. Tom and Lauras’ regular Sunday soirees were legendary with visiting musicians Clara Schumann, violinist Joseph Joachim and his wife contralto Amalie and Jeanie Senior. There is an interesing anecdote about a maid reporting a fire one evening and Joachim grabbing the Strad and taking it for safety to his carriage!
The loveliest and affectionate recollections of Tom came from Ellen Terry from her memoirs. The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Story of My Life, by Ellen Terry. She was very fond of him and he was was very much a father figure to her as a mentor and critic.
She said that Lavender Sweep : clearly became the home from home for the people from all the walks of literary, artistic and theatrical life that Taylor was part of”.
Lavender Sweep was a sort of house of call for everyone of note…At Lavender Sweep, with the horse-chestnut blossoms strewing the drive and making it look like a tessellated pavement, all of us were always welcome…Such intimate friendships are seldom possible in our busy profession, and there was never another Tom Taylor in my life….The atmosphere of gaiety which pervaded Lavender Sweep arose from his kindly, generous nature, which insisted that everyone could have a good time….I have already said that the Taylor’s home was one of the most softening and cultural influences of my early life…his house was a kind of mecca for pilgrims from America and from all parts of the world….. Yet all the time occupied a position in the Home Office and often walked from Whitehall to Lavender Sweep when his day’s work was done….lavender is still associated in my mind with everything that is lovely and refined. My mother nearly always wore the colour and the Taylor’s lived at Lavender Sweep.This may not be an excellent reason for my feelings on the subject, but it is reason good enough.
Tom Taylor died at his home Lavender Sweep on 12 July 1880.
From John Oldcastle again His death took place at Lavender Sweep, Wandsworth, when the summer of 1880 was at its height. He was buried in the Brompton Cemetery, in the presence of many mourners, including his successor in the editorial chair of Punch-F. C. Burnand; his accomplished colleagues on the staff of that journal, John Tenniel and George du Maurier; his own editor at the Times office..Robert Browning, George Augustus Sala, Charles Reade, who had been Tom Taylor’s collaborator in the composition of several plays, Tom Hughes, Mr. Kinglake, and Lord Houghton; art by Millais, Stacy Marks, and Briton Rivière; and the stage by Mr. Bancroft and Mrs. Arthur Lewis, who as Kate Terry had no kinder critic than he whose pen is now idle, whose voice is stilled, who will never pronounce judgment again, and whom the judgment
When Tom died Laura quickly put the property was put up for sale in October, although the house and its well-timbered grounds were commended by the auctioneer, it was the 1,200ft of frontage to Lavender Sweep and Battersea Rise that were the pull. That was when Lavender Sweep and surrounding roads were developed.
Laura died in March 1905 and had gone to live in Porch House Coleshill Berkshire with Lucy and two servants, Barbara Nugent and Jane Blake, both of whom had worked for the Taylors in London. The cute portrait is by Millais of young Wycliffe.
Lucy Taylor died in 1940. Her brother Wycliffe died in 1925. He had been painted by Millais when he was 5 years old. Lucy left the house to her sister-in-law who sold it in 1949. Apparently, in 1962 Mary Ure, who had been married to playwright John Osborne, lived here with her second husband actor Robert Shaw where they entertained their theatrical friends. A nice bit of serendipity. In 1970, Mary Ure sold the house to the present owner, Dr Edmund Peter Wycliffe Helps, who was a consultant at Charing Cross Hospital. He was the great nephew of Lucy and had been a regular visitor to Porch House in his youth. He later bought the house where he still resides. Through blogging about the Taylors of Lavender Sweep I have been contacted by Peter who was born in 1921 and Tom and Laura’s other great, great grandson Rupert Stutchbury who is an actor living in Cork. He, too, is keen to keep the legacy of the Laura and Tom Taylor going and has inherited some of Laura’s music that he has had transcribed.
Peter Helps shared with me the interesting background of his other great great grandfather Sir Arthur Helps and and has several menu cards from the Garrick signed by both amongst others. He also mentioned an American academic, the late John de Bruyn who was very interested in Sir Arthur, Tom Taylor and Jeanie Nassau Senior and he revised their DNB entries and wrote about them in relation to the the Cholera epidemic and Sir Arthur’s Royal Connection. (Peter graciously reckoned that de Bruyn, who visited them often, would liked to have discovered me in his peregrinations)
Sir Arthur was an English writer and dean of the Dean of the Privy Council. He was a Cambridge Apostle and an early advocate of animal rights. This appointment brought him into personal communication with the Queen and Prince Albert both of whom came to regard him with confidence and respect. After the death of Prince Albert, Queen Victoria turned to Helps to prepare an appreciation of her husband’s life and character. In his introduction to the collection (1862) of the Prince Consort’s speeches and addresses Helps adequately fulfilled his task. Some years afterwards he edited and wrote a preface to the Queen’s Leaves from a Journal of our Life in the Highlands (1868). He possessed admirable tact and sagacity; his fitness for official life was unmistakable.
I have given a talk in Battersea Library Lavender Hill on four 18th Century houses around Lavender Hill which includes Lavender Sweep House, their neighbours and friend Jeanie Nassau Senior, first woman civil servant of Elm House, on the site of Battersea Town Hall/Arts Centre and Marie Spartali, Pre-Raphaelite artist of The Shrubbery Lavender Gardens and Gilmore House which was next door. It became the deaconate presided over by Deaconess Isabella Gilmore who was sister of Marie’s good friends William Morris and his wife Jane. I do like to mention our illustrious former neighbouring residents.
I am so looking forward to unveiling the plaque to Tom and Laura in Lavender Sweep in 2024 and I expect there will be some readings included. I will update.
sheelanagigcomedienne
Jeanne Rathbone 
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