Edward Baines (1800�1890), also known as Edward Baines Jr, was a nonconformist English newspaper editor and Member of Parliament. He was born at Leeds, the second son of Edward Baines Sr (proprietor of the Leeds Mercury and MP for Leeds in the 1830s) and his wife Charlotte Talbot. Edward Baines Jr was educated at a Leeds private school and then at Leaf Square grammar school at Pendleton - a dissenting academy. From 1815 he worked as a journalist on the Leeds Mercury (in which capacity he was an eye-witness of the Peterloo massacre), becoming a junior editor c1820 and a partner in the business in 1827. He became sole editor when his father was elected to Parliament in 1834, and, after his father's death in 1848, proprietor of the Leeds Mercury. He served as Liberal MP for Leeds from 1859 to 1874. Baines was a prominent advocate of working-class adult education, helping to found the Yorkshire Mechanics' Institute. A staunch Dissenter, he opposed state-sponsored education (because it was unthinkable that education should be purely secular, but also unconscionable that the state should have any involvement with religious instruction). However, he withdrew his opposition in the 1860s, when he reluctantly conceded the inadequacy of efforts for the voluntary provision of education. He was knighted in 1880.