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

itself more with the abstention movement. In the weeks following Parliament’s action,
the Committee added new members, many of them evangelicals, and issued a report
questioning, for the first time, whether goods such as sugar must only be produced by
slaves. 31 Fox and Gurney’s partnership with Phillips, most likely the work of the
informal committee, suggests the respect their work had achieved in the British
abolitionist community.
Fox’s pamphlet was reprinted widely. A note in the tenth edition indicated
50,000 copies had been printed in the first four months. Historian Timothy Whelan
suggests Martha Gurney alone may have printed 130,000 copies by the twenty-sixth
edition. In addition to the Gurney editions, approved and bootleg copies were published
throughout Great Britain and the United States in the early 1790s as well as private
printings such as the one requested by Thomas Clarkson. In his analysis of the Fox-
Gurney partnership, Whelan estimates at least 250,000 copies of the Address were printed
by Gurney and others during 1791-1792. 32 The Fox-Gurney partnership with Phillips
may have aided American distribution of Fox’s pamphlet. In 1783, the Library Company
of Philadelphia had asked Joseph Woods and William Dillwyn to serve as their
172.
31 Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 224; Jennings, “Joseph Woods,” 164,
32 Whelan, “William Fox, Martha Gurney, and Radical Discourse,” 402; William H. Gurney
Salter, ed., Some Particulars of the Lives of William Brodie Gurney and his Immediate Ancestors (London:
Unwin, 1902), 35. As Whelan argues, “When all these printings are added together, W.B. Gurney’s claim
that Fox’s Address reached a circulation of 250,000 copies is credible. See also Charlotte Sussman,
“Women and the Politics of Sugar, 1792,” Representations 48 (1994), 51. Compare these figures to
Clarkson’s estimate that in the first thirteen months of the London Committee, the group prepared 51,432
copies of books and pamphlets and 26,526 copies of brief reports. See Clarkson, History, I: 571.
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