John Jabez Edwin Mayall

John Jabez Edwin Paisley Mayall (17 September 1813 near Oldham, Lancashire – 6 March 1901 in Southwick, West Sussex) was an English photographer who in 1860 took the first carte-de-visite photographs of Queen Victoria.

Born into a Baptist family on 17 September 1813, at Chamber Hall, near Oldham in the county of Lancashire, his birth name was registered as Jabez Meal. He was the son of John and Elizabeth Meal. His father was a manufacturing chemist believed to have specialized in the production of dyes for the linen industry.

By 1817 John Meal and his family were living at Lingards, near Huddersfield in the cloth manufacturing region of West Yorkshire. In Baine's Directory of 1822, Mayall's father, John Meal, is listed as a dyer in Linthwaite.

History books which deal with the Linthwaite and Slaithwaite district report that Jabez Meal in his 20s worked in the linen thread trade of West Yorkshire. Canon Charles A. Hulbert, formerly a vicar at the church of Slaithwaite, near where Jabez Meal lived as a young man, recalls Jabez in a memoir:

"Mr Jabez E. Mayall, of Linthwaite, was one of the most eminent natives of the village. He carried on Dye Works and studied Chemistry and other sciences in general."

Young Jabez had taken over the running of his father's dye works. John Sugden in "Slaithwaite Notes of the Past and Present" (1905) adds the detail that while in West Yorkshire, Jabez built up a large fortune, and lost it "through no fault of his own, neither by dishonour, disgrace or neglect of duty." It is not clear whether Sugden was alluding to the financial collapse of the Meal's dye works or the failure of Jabez's next venture as a proprietor of an inn on the Manchester Road.

In 1834, Jabez Meal married Eliza Parkin, the 18-year-old daughter of Joseph Parkin, landlord of the Star Inn on the Manchester Road, near Linthwaite, West Yorkshire. After the death of his father-in-law, Jabez took over the Star Inn where "he taught a number of his more promising customers the three Rs, English and Latin."

Jabez and Eliza's first son Edwin was born in 1835. Their second son, Joseph Parkin, was born in 1839; a third son, John, was born on 7 January 1842.

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