Taylor, TOM

Taylor, TOM, journalist and playwright, was born in 1817 at Sunderland, and passed from the Grange School there in 1831 to Glasgow University, and thence in 1837 to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated as third class in 1840, and was elected to a fellowship. Professor for two years of English language and literature at University College, London, he was called to the bar of the Inner Temple in 1845, for a short time travelled the northern circuit, and from 1850 to 1872 was first assistant-secretary and secretary to the Board of Health, and then secretary to the Local Government Act Office. From 1846 onwards he wrote or adapted upwards of a hundred pieces for the stage, of which may be mentioned Our American Cousin, Still Waters Run Deep, The Ticket of Leave Man, and Twixt Axe and Crown. He also edited the autobiographies of Haydon and Leslie, completed the latter's Life and Times of Reynolds, translated Ballads and Songs of Brittany (1865), and in 1874 succeeded Shirley Brooks as editor of Punch. He died at Wandsworth, 12th July 1880.