Early Life
Frances Taylor was born in Stoke Rochford, the youngest of ten children of Henry Taylor (1777–1842), Anglican Rector of a rural Lincolnshire parish, and his wife Louisa Maria Jones (1793–1869). Her paternal grandfather Richard Taylor (fl.1745-1829) had been rector of parishes in Wiltshire and Hampshire. On her mother's side, her family were merchants and shopkeepers in the City of London. Her father, a graduate of Lincoln College, Oxford, had been a curate at St Mary Abbots, Kensington, where in 1816 he married. His final appointment was to Stoke Rochford in 1824, where he was instituted by his patron, the vicar of Kensington, Thomas Rennell, whose High Church sympathies he shared.
Following Henry's death, the family returned to London in reduced circumstances, but Louisa rejected a suggestion that Frances be sent to a clergy orphan school. The family shortly moved to Brompton, London, where Frances and her elder sisters encountered the Tractarian spirit and teaching at Holy Trinity Brompton Church. A few years later, the family moved to St John's Wood, and later to the vicinity of Regent's Park, possibly to be nearer to Christ Church, Albany Street, then one of London’s leading Tractarian churches. The Holy Cross (Park Village) Sisters were nearby, the first religious order to be established in the Church of England since the Protestant Reformation.
Frances developed a desire to serve the poor and vulnerable of London. In 1849 she made a failed application to become a member of St John's House, based in Fitzroy Square, a nursing school which also functioned as an Anglican religious community. In 1848 her sisters Emma and Charlotte had joined an Anglican Sisterhood, the Sisters of Mercy of the Holy Trinity (Devonport) founded by Priscilla Lydia Sellon. Frances followed suit around 1852, as a ‘visitor’, and she appears to have stayed for two years. She may have been involved in nurse training at Bristol, and she appears to have served as a nurse in Plymouth during the cholera epidemic of 1853. By that time, like her sister Charlotte, she had come to realise that her vocation lay elsewhere.
Read more about this topic: Frances Margaret Taylor
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the alms-house as brightly as from the rich man’s abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“What would life be without art? Science prolongs life. To consist of what—eating, drinking, and sleeping? What is the good of living longer if it is only a matter of satisfying the requirements that sustain life? All this is nothing without the charm of art.”
—Sarah Bernhardt (1845–1923)