30 April] 1740 – 23 July 1815) of Taunton, England was a noted theologian and a serial Dissenting minister of Presbyterian (1761–1764), Baptist (1765–1803), and then Unitarian (1804–1815) congregations.

Toulmin's sympathy for both the American (1775–1783) and French (1787–1799) revolutions led the Englishman to be associated with the United States and gained the prolific historian the reputation of a religious radical.

Because Toulmin refused to conform to the Church of England, he next was educated under David Jennings[3] at the dissenting academy in Wellclose Square, of the Coward Trust, located on The Highway in the East End of London.

For the next thirty-nine years, Toulmin lived in Taunton and had charge of the Taunton Baptist congregation at Mary Street Unitarian Chapel,[6] where he also taught school and published most of his sixty-plus works through which he expressed his anti-England sympathy with both the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783) and the French Revolution (1787–1799).

Because Toulmin favored the United States and France, then-enemies of England, he "could seldom pass through the streets without insult, while to keep company with him was deemed contagious and impossible.

"[4] For example, during the French Revolution, an effigy of Thomas Paine was burned before Toulmin's door and his windows were broken.

[8] In 1790, Toulmin carried out a census of Taunton and "counted nearly five and a half thousand people living within the area ringed by the turnpike gates.

I suppose you must have heard that his daughter, (Jane, on 15 April 1798) in a melancholy derangement, suffered herself to be swallowed up by the tide on the sea-coast between Sidmouth and Bere (sic.

[4] Dr. Toulmin was a prolific writer, and is known to have written over sixty publications in the areas of (i) religion and spirituality, history, parenting and families, reference, and nonfiction.