J. D. Collier

John Dyer Collier (1762–1825) and his wife, Jane Payne (1768–1833), were both liberal Whig nonconformists. They befriended Crabb Robinson in 1797, and he boarded in their home from 1806 to 1813, establishing a relationship that, as Robinson writes in another section of his reminiscences, ‘changed the whole course of my life’, with the younger Collier described in the same passage as ‘one of my most respected friends’. It was through the elder Collier that Robinson first met the controversial novelist Thomas Holcroft. J. D. Collier introduced Robinson to the life of a journalist. He edited the Monthly Register (1802–3) (to which Robinson contributed a series of articles on Kant and German philosophy), was a law and parliamentary reporter for the London Times (1804-08), and a reporter for the Morning Chronicle (1808-15) before becoming publisher and editor of the Critical Review in 1816, a venture that lasted only a year and a half.