I hope to quell any argument about the location of the Taylor sisters when Twinkle Twinkle Little Star was published (Letters, January 27).

Ann was born in January 1782 and Jane in September 1783. Both girls were born in London and moved to Lavenham with their parents in 1786, where they lived for just under ten years.

The family moved to Colchester in January 1796.

By 1800, Ann had had some poems published in the Minor’s Pocket Book, a periodical for young people.

Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, attributed to Jane Taylor, appeared in Ann and Jane’s Book of Rhymes for the Nursery, published in 1806, when the family were still living in Colchester.

There had been a brief evacuation of Jane and her younger siblings back to Lavenham in 1805 for a few months, when there was a fear of a Napoleonic invasion.

The Taylor sisters, therefore, lived in Lavenham and Colchester. The family moved to Ongar in 1811.

Whether Twinkle Twinkle Little Star was composed in Lavenham or Colchester is not known, although we know Colchester was where the sisters were living when it was published.

It is fair to say the writer of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star lived in Lavenham, Colchester and Ongar. If she composed it before she was 12, she may have written it in Lavenham.

The evidence for it being written in Colchester is that she and her sister shared the attic room in the Taylors’ Stockwell Street home and Jane wrote of it: “I used to roam and revel ’mid the stars...when in my attic, with untold delight, I watched the changing splendours of the night.”

Barbara Butler
Guildford Road
Colchester