Martha Gurney

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Martha Gurney (1733–1816) was an English printer, bookseller and publisher who played an important role in the abolitionist movement. She came from a printing family; her brother Joseph Gurney was a shorthand writer, and details of Martha’s life are mainly known from the memoirs of Joseph’s son, William Brodie Gurney.

In 1785 she joined the Maze Pond Particular Baptist congregation. Beginning in 1773, she and her brother published a long series of trial transcripts, building a successful business first in Temple Bar and later in Holborn. She also published sermons, including those of her Maze Pond minister, James Dore. From 1788 to 1794 she was especially active in producing pamphlets.

In 1794, Gurney joined a group of radical publishers—Daniel Isaac Eaton, Joseph Johnson, James Ridgway and Robert Westley—to issue a new edition of Benjamin Franklin’s Information to Those who would Remove to America. This 1784 pamphlet urged Britons to emigrate to the United States and remained seen as subversive by authorities into the 1790s.

Within Baptist abolitionist publishing, Gurney collaborated with William Fox, and also worked with William Button and John Marsom. She published and promoted Fox’s influential anti-sugar-and-rum pamphlet about the triangular trade, which eventually sold hundreds of thousands of copies in 26 editions.

Scholars have highlighted her significance in the abolition movement; Michael F. Suarez discussed her contributions in his Rosenbach Lectures on Bibliography, Printing Abolition: How the Fight to Ban the British Slave Trade Was Won, 1783–1807.