If Dickens, improbably, had suffered from writer's block in old age and found himself in need of inspiration for one of his seriously larger-than-life characters, he could have done no better than hop on the GWR to Oxford and look up the young photographer and Thames explorer Henry Taunt.

"He was born in a thunderstorm in June 1842, in Pensons Gardens, St. Ebbes - a little street of terraced houses which has disappeared under the multi-storey car park," said Dr Malcolm Graham, author of a book on Taunt, and head of Oxfordshire County Council's Centre for Oxfordshire Studies, where 7,000 of Taunt's prints, and many of his manuscripts and publications, are kept.

"His father was a plumber and glazier and his mother had been a domestic servant,"

Dr Graham added. "From the first he was obsessed with the Thames. As a child he used to boat on the Trill Mill stream, which starts near Oxford Castle - it runs underground nowadays, popping out in Christchurch Memorial Gardens, but it was open to the elements then, and probably full of sewage. He used it as a way of avoiding the toll at Folly Lock.

"Aged 17, he set off up the river at Christmas, while it was in flood. This was at a time when much of the upper Thames was derelict and few people forced their way through. It was a bit like going up the Amazon."

The teenage Taunt already had several careers behind him - as a ten-year-old plumber's assistant working for his dad (he fell out with the boss), and then in various retail positions, including employment in a bookshop, where he is thought to have picked up much of his education.

"He had a pretty impressive intelligence," said Dr Graham "and went on learning from other people throughout life."

At the grand old age of 14 he discovered his vocation in the High Street shop of pioneer photographer Edward Bracher. After two years of mundane tasks, Bracher let him loose with a camera to take his first photograph - a rowing eight in Exeter College quad.

In 1868 Taunt went into business on his own. Having trained on daguerreotypes, he was soon using the wet collodion process, which had its complications.

"You literally had to carry your darkroom around with you - that demanded some organisational skills, particularly when you were up the river! The plates were coated and then had to be developed immediately."

The invention of a dry process made things easier, but when film photography came in Taunt was unimpressed, remaining a glass plate man to the last. In one respect though, his technique seems extraordinarily modern.

"He often doctored his photographs," Dr Graham revealed. "He was always taking the sun out or putting it in. There's a picture of brewery drays on Magdalen Bridge where he put two images together so the bridge is about the width of the M4, with two columns of carts!"

In 1872 Taunt produced the first edition of his fantastically popular New Map of the River Thames. This is the basis of a then and now' exhibition of Thames photographs, currently at the River and Rowing Museum, which the Oxfordshire Studies team has helped contemporary photographers Graham Diprose and Jeff Robins to put together.

"Taunt surveyed the river from London to Oxford, and in subsequent editions also above Oxford," said Dr Graham. "In winter he went around Oxfordshire with a magic lantern lecture to accompany the book."

Taunt's bread-and-butter work was portrait photography for cartes de visite, advertisements, and, when they became fashionable around 1910, picture postcards - his Thames photos were sold everywhere along the river. He supplied slides and projectors, did jobbing printing, and published a range of guide books and maps. He also accepted more unusual commissions.

"He was asked to photograph a farmer's sheep, but when the prints were developed the farmer complained that the sheep were blurred. Taunt took him to court, saying He couldn't keep his damned sheep still!' and the farmer had to pay up."

"Taunt had enormous enthusiasms but he was also enormously irascible," Dr Graham revealed. "He didn't suffer fools gladly."

He threw one apprentice out of the window because he had damaged a negative, and sued another for refusing to go out three days running, pedalling a huge quadricycle loaded with the proprietor and all his equipment.

"There are wonderful letters surviving in his business files, including a correspondence with the Ancient Order of Druids. He'd taken pictures of Stonehenge and the head man, the Noble Arch, maintained he hadn't had permission."

Taunt wrote back to him on a scrappy little bit of paper, to which the Noble Arch replied sarcastically that he'd been sent a note purporting to be from yourself!' "Taunt was a great campaigner. He was deeply offended that people had such a bad water supply - in the 1870s and 1880s they received lots of crustaceans through the tap. Taunt said he'd captured these beasts in muslin and photographed them."

Partly as a result of his efforts, filter beds were installed off Abingdon Road.

He produced an irregular publication, Notes and News from Oxford's Famous City, which appeared whenever he had an axe to grind, such as the occasion when city councillors proposed to give their town clerk an expensive pay-off.

Taunt lived in Oxford all his life - 20 years in Broad Street, then in the High, and, from 1906 until his death in 1922, at a country pad, called Rivera, in the Cowley Road, where he built extensive facilities for his business.

Here he installed a long-term employee, Fanny Miles, alongside his wife Miriam. "Fanny may have been something more than general factotum" said Dr Graham.

"Taunt certainly got up to mischief at times - there was at least one successful paternity suit against him."

And indeed, a mystery lady appears in a photograph of him posing on his horse-drawn houseboat - a big punt with a room on top, which incorporated the functions of studio, hotel and darkroom. A camera could stand on the roof, and the sides operated as travelling billboards.

Taunt's Rivera is currently in use as the site office for a housing development next door. Dr Graham hopes that it will be retained and a Blue Plaque put up to commemorate the life and work of this gifted, energetic and colourful Oxford citizen.

Taunt Collection online: www.oxfordshire.gov.uk/heritagesearch Exhibition at the River and Rowing Museum, Henley until January 20.

The book, River Thames Revisited - In the footsteps of Henry Taunt by Graham Diprose and Jeff Robins, is published by Frances Lincoln at £25 Henry Taunt of Oxford - A Victorian Photographer by Malcolm Graham, 1973, out of print but accessible at Oxfordshire Studies, Central Library, Westgate, Oxford.