Joseph Gurney 

Joseph Gurney (1744-1815) complete his articles in 1766 with George Keith (the same Baptist bookseller who apprenticed Joseph Johnson). Gurney then opened his own bookshop, first at 39 Bread Street and then at 54 Holborn. He moved his family from Stamford-Hill, north of the Thames, to a house in Keene’s Row, Walworth, in the mid-1780s, leaving Thomas Craner’s congregation at Red Cross Street for the Baptist church at Maze Pond, Southwark, under the ministry of James Dore (1763/64-1825). Although he continued to operate as a bookseller until around 1780, Joseph Gurney had also been tutored by his father in the art of shorthand writing, and after Thomas Gurney’s death in 1770, he took his place as shorthand writer for the Old Bailey.  He would later perform the same services for both houses of Parliament, becoming the best-known shorthand writer of his day, eventually serving in a similar capacity for both houses of Parliament, transcribing and publishing more than eighty state trials between 1770 and 1813. Edward Starr’s Baptist Bibliography (25 vols; Rochester, NY: American Baptist Historical Society, 1947-76) attributes only ten works to Joseph Gurney, but he was considerably more active than that. During his lengthy career (1766-1813), Gurney appears as a bookseller, printer, or transcriber on over 125 publications, including thirty-five religious works by Dissenters and Anglican evangelicals (printed between 1768 and 1780), eighty state trials and court session reports (of which he was the principal shorthand writer), and three works written or edited by himself. In 1788 he became the shorthand writer for the seven-year trial of Warren Hastings in the House of Commons, achieving considerable acclaim for his transcriptions of the speeches of Burke. He was also a devoted abolitionist, serving as the short-hand recorder during the numerous slave-trade debates in Parliament during the 1790s. In 1795 he joined the ‘Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, the Relief of Free Negroes unlawfully held in Bondage, and for Improving the Condition of the African Race’ (ibid.,  43, 44). Joseph’s two sons, John  (later Sir John) Gurney (1768-1845) and William Brodie Gurney (1777-1855), became prominent Baptist laymen in their own right (see their entries in this Index). For more on John Gurney, see Act of Incorporation and Constitution of the Pennsylvania Society, for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery: and for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage, and for Improving the Condition of the African Race: Also, a List of Those who have been Elected Members of the Society (Philadelphia: Merrihew & Thompson, 1860), 43, 44; William Henry Gurney Salter, Some Particulars of the Lives of William Brodie Gurney and his Immediate Ancestors. Written Chiefly by Himself (London: Unwin, 1902), 42-43; 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.