Edward Baines (1774–1848) was the editor and proprietor of the Leeds Mercury (which, by his efforts, became the leading provincial paper in England), politician, and the author of historical and geographic works of reference.

[1] Of his character and physical appearance it remarked: "Mr Baines had great industry and perseverance, as well as patience and resolution; and with those he possessed pleasing manners and address, - that debonair and affable bearing, which conciliated even those who might have felt that they had reason to regard him as an enemy… In person he was of a firm well-built frame, rather above the average stature; his features were regular, his expression of countenance frank and agreeable; and he retained his personal comeliness as well as his vivacity and suavity of manners to the last".

In later years, both Baines and his political opponents would have it that he arrived in Leeds with little more than the clothes on his back,[a] but on completion of his apprenticeship he set up his own printworks with the aid of a loan of £100 from his father.

[2]: 55  He became a member of the Leeds Reasoning Society (a discussion group which eschewed religious or political issues) and of the local subscription library.

[2]: 61–62  The paper he acquired was published every Saturday, cost sixpence (including fourpence newspaper tax) for four pages, and had a circulation of 700–800.

In 1805 a new editor of the Leeds Intelligencer attacked the Mercury as "bespattered with ... sedition"; together with Baines' heated response this initiated a long-lasting state of mutual incivility between the two papers which makes each an unreliable source for the other's deeds and motives.

[b] According to counsel in an 1820 libel case "When there was a dearth of political news, nothing was more common for one Editor to attack another, and the public appeared to find amusement in their squabbles".

That reporter was Baines' second son Edward, who from 1820 onwards progressively took over the everyday running of the Mercury as his father became more involved in local politics.

[6] On 14 June 1817, the first edition of the Mercury reported that ten Yorkshire men were held in Wakefield jail accused of planning insurrection.

It noted that they had been arrested the previous week at a meeting near Dewsbury between them and a Mr Oliver, who had represented himself as a delegate from a central organising committee in London; its readers would probably infer that 'Oliver' was a spy.

The second edition made three further charges, supported by the evidence of respectable named moderate reformers: firstly that 'Oliver' had repeatedly urged one of them a Dewsbury bookseller, to attend the meeting: secondly, that 'Oliver' had been seen by another of them at Wakefield after the arrests, and with no satisfactory explanation why he was still at liberty: thirdly that he had been seen in conversation with a liveried man-servant of General Byng, the army officer responsible for internal security in the North of England, the man-servant later saying that on a previous occasion he had driven Oliver from Byng's house to Wakefield to catch a coach.

[7] "On the 16th the exposure of Oliver in the Leeds Mercury was read in both houses of parliament, by Earl Grey in the lords and Sir Francis Burdett in the commons.

A strong sensation was produced; and those members, supported by the body of the opposition condemned in the most indignant language the atrocious proceedings brought to light".

However, critics such as William Cobbett pointed out that it was the suspicions of a linen-draper, rather than any investigation by the editor of the Mercury, that had unmasked Oliver,[11] and objected to Baines's treatment of Joseph Mitchell.

No evidence (other than 'guilt by association') to support Mitchell being an informer - let alone an agent provocateur - was produced at the time, nor has any been revealed by subsequent investigation in Home Office archives.

This went beyond the selective choice of events to report, and non-neutral reporting of events covered, to the confident assertion of convenient untruths: for example on factory reform the Mercury asserted that Michael Thomas Sadler had never spoken, attended a debate or voted on Hobhouse's Bill of 1831, (a statement promptly contradicted by Hobhouse);[12] it put into the mouth of Sir George Strickland a speech in Parliament calling for Sadler's Bill of 1832 to go to a select committee, when Strickland had made no such speech and had called for the bill to be considered by a "Committee of the whole House" and not be delayed by a select committee;[13] when Strickland attended a great county meeting in York on factory reform and disowned the words put in his mouth by the Mercury the Mercury's report put into Strickland's mouth its explanation of its mistake, avoiding any mention of the Leeds Mercury.

Its account up to 1801 borrowed extensively (and sometimes verbatim) from another author's earlier work of 1803 on the same topic (A Stephens The History of the Wars Which Arose out of the French Revolution to Which is Prefixed a Review of the Causes of that Event (London 1803)).

This went unacknowledged until Baines revised, expanded and retitled the work as a History of the Reign of King George III (1820); his new preface stating "To facilitate ... progress, and at the recommendation of the publisher and proprietor of Mr Alexander Stephens' s History of the Wars published in 1803, nearly half the details of the first volume were abridged from that work."

[2]: 192 [d] In the decade before the Great Reform Act 1832 Leeds was not a parliamentary borough but was included in the Yorkshire constituency, now returning four MPs (normally two Whigs and two Tories, normally unopposed).

Baines was a leading light in reform agitation in Leeds, and was commissioned by Lord John Russell to determine whether qualification in borough constituencies could safely be set as low as £10 (rates paid a year).

for Leeds (1859–1874), and was knighted in 1880; his History of the Cotton Manufacture (1835) was long a standard authority, he also wrote a biography of his father The life of Edward Baines, late M.P.