LOCAL historian Andrew Phillips asks: Name two sisters, daughters of a clergyman, who transformed literary England in the early 19th century. Is your answer Brontë? If so, read on.

It is official: night skies all over Essex and Suffolk suffer light pollution.

It was not always so. The first copy of the Gazette’s sister paper, the Essex County Standard (January 7 1831) describes a magical display of the Northern Lights, watched by many in Colchester High Street. No need to go to Iceland then.

Earlier still, a young girl sat at her bedroom window, still there today in West Stockwell Street, where, she wrote, ‘I used to roam and revel ‘mid the stars, when in my attic with untold delight, I watched the changing splendours of the night.’

She was, of course, Jane Taylor, who, with her elder sister Ann, became, for a while, the best known children’s writers in Britain, celebrated by literary figures both here and in America. How come?

Theirs was a family of literary achievers.

Their father, Isaac Taylor, did copper engravings for book illustration, a task in which his five children joined him from eight in the morning till eight at night, stopping only for meals when books were read out aloud, so that the time could be used for learning.

Isaac had come to Colchester to be minister of one of Colchester’s leading chapels. He also gave science lectures in his house which young people from the town attended.

Once, for fun, Ann Taylor, anonymously entered a competition to be answered with a poem. To her amazement she won. Before long both sisters were sending in poems celebrating, but also sending up, the moralistic world which engulfed their childhood.

Then, one day, a sum of money arrived by post. Their address had been traced. ‘I do not’ said Isaac Taylor, himself an author, ‘wish my daughters to become authors.’

But they did; as did two of their brothers.

Gazette:

Father of Ann and Jane, the Rev Isaac Taylor 

There followed an extraordinary literary career as a London publisher, intrigued by the anonymous poems, published in 1804-5 ‘Original Poems for Infant Minds by Several Young Persons.’ The authors were Ann, Jane and their brother Isaac. The volume sold out and soon ran to several editions.

A second volume was commissioned, and the money rolled in.

Years before, when Jane was 15, the Rev Isaac Taylor, himself a keen star gazer, took her to a course of lectures near the Moot Hall by ‘an astronomer of repute.’

The Romantic Age was dawning: she caught the bug. So it was that the girls’ second volume in 1806 included a poem called ‘The Star’. You all know the first verse, now set to music with an old French tune. Largely unknown are the other 4 verses, but ‘Twinkle, twinkle little star’ is known the world over.

The Moon also shone in the Taylor world.

In an age of tallow candles, moonlight really was an illumination. In a letter Jane describes how she would sit on Colchester’s Roman Wall reading poems to her friends by moonlight.

Years later with his family grown up and scattered, Rev Isaac Taylor, at every full moon, required all his children to leave their houses at night and gaze up at the moon for several minutes, thinking of one another.

There are obvious parallels between the Taylor and Brontë daughters.

Both were Romantics, anonymous authors with a clergyman father, amazed by their success. What Colchester has never realised is that they were nearly neighbours too.

The Rev Patrick Brontë, a remarkable man, was born Patrick Brunty, son of an Irish farm labourer. Yet he actually won a scholarship to St John’s College Cambridge. It was here he changed his name to Brontë to hide his humble origins. He studied for the church, going initially as a curate to Wethersfield near Braintree.

Gazette:

Father of famous writer sisters Patrick Brontë

But in the summer of 1807, shortly before his full ordination, he moved to Colchester to visit St Peter’s, the civic church on North Hill, which was reserved from Cambridge for an Evangelical minister like Brontë.

Nothing came of this visit, Brontë fell in love with a farmer’s daughter, and his life moved on.

We shall never know if, in his brief stay, he crossed the path of the famous Taylor authors. What we do know however is that two streets away in George Street was another bedroom window facing west, where a young Grammar School pupil also studied the stars, scratching his name with a diamond on the window pane.

He too went to Cambridge, became a professor, and in 1835 became Astronomer Royal, a post he held for 46 years. Thus did the skies of Colchester inspire both Science and Art.

The Taylor girls’ careers ended as suddenly as they began.

Ann received, by letter, a proposal of marriage from a young minister and college tutor who had read about her and her merits. She accepted and settled down to the busy life of a minister’s wife and a mother, only going into to print over social issues like anti-slavery, prison reform and ethics.

Jane continued to write, but was increasingly destroyed by the scourge of breast cancer, which eventually proved fatal. She died, as she put it, ‘her mind still teeming with ideas’, aged just 40.

  • Do you have photographs of events throughout Colchester’s history you would like to share ? Contact us on 01206 508186.