John Jabez Edwin Paisley Mayall was an English photographer who in 1860 took the first carte-de-visite photographs of Queen Victoria. Perhaps his most well known image today is his 1875 portrait of Karl Marx.
Born into a Baptist family on 17 September 1813, at Chamber Hall, near Oldham in the county of Lancashire, his birth name was registered as Jabez Meal. He was the son of John and Elizabeth Meal. His father was a manufacturing chemist believed to have specialized in the production of dyes for the linen industry.
By 1817 John Meal and his family were living at Lingards, near Huddersfield in the cloth manufacturing region of West Yorkshire. In Baine's Directory of 1822, Mayall's father, John Meal, is listed as a dyer in Linthwaite.