THERE IS DEATH IN THE POT - The University of Texas at Arlington

The partnership of Gurney and Fox transformed their printing and bookselling
business into one of the most important voices in the slave trade debate. In 1782, Gurney
moved her printing and bookselling business into Fox’s bookshop on Holborn Hill.
Gurney was the only daughter of Thomas Gurney, a high Calvinist Baptist and a
shorthand writer at the Old Bailey, and the sister of Joseph Gurney, who became the
leading court stenographer in the late eighteenth century. Joseph operated a bookshop on
Holborn Hill near Fox; indeed, the younger Gurney may have introduced Fox to his
sister. In 1785, Fox published the dramatic version of Aphra Behn’s Oronooko; three
years later, Gurney published James Dore’s A Sermon on the African Slave Trade. 27
These two publications marked the partnership’s public affirmation of their abolitionist
sympathies. Over the course of their partnership, Gurney and Fox published sixteen
political pamphlets on various topics including abstention, the abolition of the slave trade,
and Britain’s war with France. In addition to publishing and selling anti-slave trade
pamphlets, Gurney displayed in her shop an engraving of the slave ship Brookes. 28 Fox
and the Gurneys also supported the American abolitionist movement. In 1794, Fox as
well as seven English Baptist ministers, including the Gurneys’ pastor, James Dore,
joined the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. A year later, Joseph Gurney and his eldest
27 Ibid., 398-401. See also Ian Maxted, The London Book Trades, 1775-1800: A Preliminary
Checklist of Members (Kent, England: Dawson, 1977), 84, 97.
28 Ibid., 401. Whelan notes, “Of all the London printers and booksellers involved in publishing or
distributing more than five works during the slave trade controversy, only Gurney, Phillips, and James
Ridgway could boast of never issuing any work that advocated its continuance.” For more on the history of
the engraving the Brookes, see Cheryl Finley, “Committed to Memory: The Slave Ship Icon in the Black
Atlantic Imagination,” Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2002; Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual
Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780-1865 (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2000).
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