Martha Gurney (1733-1816) was the daughter of Thomas Gurney (1705-70), a clockmaker by trade, who came to London from Bedfordshire in 1738 and soon began working as a shorthand writer at the Old Bailey.  A Baptist from birth, Gurney attended the ministries of John Gill and George Whitefield, and was, like Gill, a “High Calvinist,” taking a great interest in Whitefield’s controversy with John Wesley, as evidenced by Gurney’s published poems from this period. Thomas Gurney had three children who lived to maturity:  Martha (1733-1816), Thomas (1736-1775), and Joseph (1744-1815). Martha Gurney may have learned the printing/bookselling trade from Joseph Gurney, who, after completing his articles in 1766 with George Keith (the same Baptist bookseller who apprenticed Joseph Johnson), opened his own bookshop, first at 39 Bread Street and then at 54 Holborn. Martha Gurney joined the Baptist congregation Carter Lane under John Gill in 1748 (Carter Lane Church Book, Metropolitan Tabernacle, London, f. 13). The Gurneys later joined at Thomas Craner’s congregation at Red Cross Street before moving their memberships to the Baptist church at Maze Pond, Southwark, under the ministry of James Dore (1763/64-1825) in the mid-1780s after Joseph Gurney moved his family from Stamford-Hill, north of the Thames, to a house in Keene’s Row, Walworth. According to the Maze Pond Church Book, vol. 2 (1784-1821, Angus Library, Regent's Park College, Oxford), on 18 April 1785, ‘Martha Gurney, (formerly a member of the late Mr Craner’s church)  [at Red-cross Street]. . . and Miss Elizabeth Gurney [Joseph Gurney’s daughter] were proposed for communion . . . their moral characters being well attested to the satisfaction of the Church’. They were received into communion on 5 June 1785 (ff. 43, 45).  Mrs. Rebecca Gurney (1747-1814), Joseph’s wife, also a former member at Red-cross Street, joined the congregation on 5 March 1786 (f. 52), with Joseph joining on 5 August 1787 (f. 58). W. B. Gurney, their son, would later write, “The interests of the Church and the happiness of their Pastor were . . . dear to their hearts, and their co-operation was cheerfully given in any plan of usefulness in which the Church and congregation engaged.  He [Joseph Gurney] bore a high character, both for talent and integrity, and was highly esteemed by those who knew him best” (William H. Gurney Salter, Some Particulars in the Lives of William Brodie Gurney and his Immediate Ancestors (London: Unwin, 1902), p. 45). For the next three decades they would be one of Maze Pond’s leading families.

Martha Gurney never married, maintaining herself quite comfortably as a bookseller from 1770 to 1813.  During her career, her name (generally designated as “M. Gurney” on her title pages) appeared on over one hundred publications, including thirty-seven religious works by such figures as Augustus Toplady, Samuel How, James Dore, Benjamin Kingsbury, Maria de Fleury, Samuel Bradburn, Joseph Swain, Samuel Fisher, and Abraham Booth; twenty-five editions of state trials and other court proceedings between 1781 and 1813, all of which were transcribed by Joseph Gurney; thirty-three political pamphlets between 1789 and 1802, including fourteen anti-slave trade pamphlets; and, along with her brother, Joseph, eight editions of her father’s famous stenographic work, Brachygraphy. Although some historians have noted the work of Joseph Gurney as a shorthand writer, Martha Gurney’s role as a Dissenting printer and bookseller has been completely ignored.  "Martha Gurney" appeared on only two imprints; "Mrs. Gurney on at least one, but all the rest are "M. Gurney," but a few that appear only as "Gurney." Thus her identity as a woman seller was only evident on two or her imprints, a paucity that has enabled historians to take little notice of her gender or her identity as a female member of a prominent Baptist congregation in Southwark.  In 1782 Martha Gurney moved her bookshop from 34 Bell-yard, near Temple-Bar, into William Fox’s quarters at 128 Holborn Hill.  The two booksellers jointly operated there until 1785, at which time Martha Gurney became the sole proprietor, maintaining her shop and private residence at that location until a few years before her death in 1816. Between 1791 and 1794, she collaborated with Fox, a radical political pamphleteer and abolitionist, on sixteen highly charged political pamphlets, ten of which were sold (and many printed as well) exclusively by Gurney, including his first and most widely distributed pamphlet, An Address to the people of Great Britain, on the Propriety of Abstaining from West India Sugar and Rum (1791).

Martha Gurney sold (and in some cases published) fourteen anti-slave trade pamphlets between 1787 and 1794, second only to the Quaker James Phillips of Lombard Street, the Abolition Society’s official printer. In fact, of all the London printers and booksellers who published or sold more than five pamphlets on the slave trade, only Phillips, Gurney, and James Ridgway could boast of never affixing their name to a work that advocated its continuance. Even more importantly, of the approximately sixty-five printers and booksellers in London who printed or sold at least one work related to the slave-trade controversy in the 1780s and ’90s, Martha Gurney was the only woman. Though a number of women writers would play a significant role in fostering public support for the abolition of the slave trade through their poems and pamphlets, Martha Gurney was the only bookseller to have a significant impact on the movement. Caroline Ridgway, wife of James Ridgway, sold Philip Francis’s Proceedings in the House of Commons on the Slave Trade, and State of the Negroes in the West India Islands (1796), and Ann Smith of Liverpool, who operated a ‘navigation’ bookshop in Pool Lane, Liverpool, sold two pamphlets in favor of the slave trade: An Address to the Inhabitants in General of Great Britain, and Ireland; Relating to a Few of the Consequences which must naturally result from the Abolition of the Slave Trade (1788), and A Short Account of the African Slave Trade, collected from Local Knowledge, from the Evidence given at the Bar of both Houses of Parliament, and from Tracts written upon that Subject (1788).  Neither woman, however, comes close to the stature of Gurney. Though she never appeared in the subscription lists of any abolitionist society, Martha Gurney's efforts as a publisher and bookseller were instrumental in raising the consciousness of the English people against the slave trade, joining that select group of women, as described by Clare Midgeley, whose “contributions [to the abolitionist movement] were more diverse and more important than has hitherto been recognised.” 

Approximately 200 works were printed and/or sold by Martha Gurney, first at No. 34 Bell-yard, near Temple-Bar, 1772-82; then at No. 128, Holborn-hill, London, opposite Fetter Lane, 1782-1813.  She sold eight editions, with her brother Joseph Gurney, of Brachygraphy, a work composed by their father, Thomas Gurney; 50 religious works, nearly all by dissenting authors; 36 political pamphlets between 1789-1802; 31 trials, many being political and state trials, between 1774-1806, including 7 treason trials between 1793-98, all transcribed by Joseph Gurney and sold by Martha Gurney, a rare brother and sister collaboration on such a large number of titles; and nine literary works of varying genres. She appeared alone on many imprints during the first decade or so of her business career, but she also worked closely during that time with her brother Joseph as well as the Moravian printer/seller Mary Lewis and George Kearsley, most likely a Baptist bookseller. Once she moved to 128 Holborn Hill and shared the same premises as the radical dissenting bookseller and pamphleteer William Fox, Gurney accordingly expanded her contacts within the print trade, appearing on more imprints as part of small congers of primarily dissenting printers, sellers, and, for that matter, writers, even selling a 1783 title by the 17th century nonconformist divine, Samuel How, with James Lackington, future proprietor of the famed "Temple of the Muses" in Finsbury Square. By the late 1780s and through the 1790s she would seel with the Huntingtonian printers and sellers, Thomas Bensley and Garnet Terry; the Independents Charles Dilly, James Buckland, and Thomas Conder; the Baptists Joseph Johnson and Benjamin Flower of Cambridge, both of whom had become a Unitarians by that time, and Daniel Isaac Eaton, most likely another Unitarian; Particular Baptist printers and sellers such as William Button, Lewis Wayland, Thomas Gardiner, John Knott, George Offor, J. W. Morris of Clipston, Joseph Belcher of Birmingham, and Isaac James of Bristol, as well as William Ash, Thomas Wilkins, and Thomas Whieldon, who were most likely Baptists; Thomas Wills, a Calvinistic Methodist seller and minister; the Quaker James Phillips; the Moravians Henry Trapp and James Ridgway; the Baptist turned Methodist printer and seller (primarily of law books) Joseph Butterworth; and many others who were most likely dissenters, such as James Annereau of Southwark. Only Mary Lewis compares to Martha Gurney in the breadth of her dissenting connections within London's book trade in the last quarter of the eighteenth century.

For more on Martha Gurney, see Timothy Whelan, “Martha Gurney and the Anti-Slave Trade Movement, 1788–94,” Women, Dissent and Anti-Slavery in Britain and America, 1790–1865, ed. by Elizabeth J. Clapp and Julie Roy Jeffrey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 44–65; Timothy Whelan, “Martha Gurney and William Fox: Baptist Printer and Radical Reformer, 1791–1794,” in Pulpit and People: Studies in Eighteenth-Century Baptist Life and Thought, ed. by John H.Y. Briggs (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2009), 165–201; Clare Midgeley, Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780-1870 (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 16.