Edward Baines

Sir Edward Baines (28 May 1800 – 2 March 1890), also known as Edward Baines Jr, was a nonconformist English newspaper editor and Member of Parliament (MP), and ancestor of author Jilly Cooper.

Biography Edward Baines, of St Ann's Hill, Leeds, was the second son (and biographer) of Edward Baines (1774–1848), proprietor of the Leeds Mercury and MP for Leeds in the 1830s, and his wife Charlotte Talbot. His elder brother, Matthew Talbot Baines, was also a politician.

Edward Baines junior was educated at a Leeds private school and then at a dissenting academy – the Leaf Square grammar school at Pendleton, near Manchester, alongside his lifelong friend John Peele Clapham. From 1815 he worked as a journalist on the Leeds Mercury (in which capacity he was an eye-witness of the Peterloo massacre), becoming a junior editor c 1820 and a partner in the business in 1827. He became sole editor when his father was elected to Parliament in 1834, and, after his father's death in 1848, proprietor of the Leeds Mercury. He served as Liberal MP for Leeds from 1859 to 1874. He was knighted in 1880.

A political Liberal, he supported the Reform Act 1832 (2 & 3 Will. 4. c. 45) and the Poor Law Amendment Act 1834; he was an advocate of repeal of the corn laws and of the separation of church and state. He was an opponent of the factory reform movement and responsible for the Mercurys rejection of Richard Oastler's letters to it on the subject. A staunch Dissenter, he opposed state-sponsored education (because it was unthinkable that education should be purely secular, but also unconscionable that the state should have any involvement with religious instruction).

In 1843 he wrote in the Mercury that education was something individuals could do for themselves "under the guidance of natural instinct and self-interest, infinitely better than Government could do for them". Hence "All Government interference to COMPEL Education is wrong" and had unacceptable implications: "If Government has a right to compel Education, it has right to compel RELIGION !"

Baines also wrote a number of more polemical works; e.g. criticisms of Owenism. In 1840 he attended the World's Anti-Slavery Convention where he was captured in a group painting.

He married Martha Blackburn in 1829.

Baines died on 2 March 1890 in Leeds, and was interred in the family vault at Woodhouse Cemetery.

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