Samuel Bagster

Samuel Bagster (1772-1851) was educated at J. C. Ryland’s academy at Northampton in the early 1780s when George Dyer, the Romantic poet and antiquarian, was an usher. Bagster began his bookselling and publishing business in the Strand, London, in 1794. In 1816 he moved to Paternoster Row. Bagster (along with his sons) became best known for his publication of a Polyglot Bible as well as many other Bibles of outstanding scholarship and detail in numerous languages, both biblical and European. Several Bagsters attended the Baptist meeting in Eagle Street, but Samuel appears to have spent much of his adult life as a member of the Baptist church in Keppel Street, London. See Samuel Bagster, Samuel Bagster of London 1772-1851: An Autobiography (London: Samuel Bagster and Sons, 1972); Ernest A. Payne, “John Linnell, The World of Artists and the Baptists,” Baptist Quarterly 40 (2003), 24.