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On the opening page of Imagining the King's Death, John Barrell pays a fitting tribute to William Fox, radical pamphleteer of the 1790s, recognizing him not only as "a veteran of the campaign to abolish the slave trade" but also as "the wittiest of the reforming pamphleteers." Barrell even praises Fox's Thoughts on the Death of the King of France (1793) as "perhaps the most intelligent commentary on the attempt to define public policy in the language of private sentiment."1 Between 1791 and 1794, Fox, a Dissenter, collaborated with the Baptist bookseller Martha Gurney in publishing sixteen political pamphlets on topics ranging from the abolition of the slave trade to the perversion of national fast days, from Pitt's provocative war with France to his administration's selective redefining of the word "Jacobin."2 Fox's first pamphlet, An Address to the People of Great Britain, on the Propriety of Abstaining from the Use of West India Sugar and Rum (1791), became the most widely distributed pamphlet of the eighteenth century, eclipsing Paine's Rights of Man. It unified the abolitionist forces in Great Britain and America by focusing their energies on a boycott of West Indian produce. The boycott not only served as a viable economic solution to ending the slave trade; as Charlotte Sussman convincingly argues, it also advocated, through the power of consumerism, a kind of universal suffrage for its advocates, resulting in a political campaign that bypassed parliament and granted power directly to the people, many of whom were of the lower and middle classes.3
Though An Address to the People of Great Britain has been recognized by scholars for the significant role it played in the history of the abolitionist movement in England and America in the late eighteenth century, its author has yet to receive the recognition he deserves.4 To make matters worse, Fox has also been misidenti- fied by every major library and database, resulting in all sixteen of his works being attributed by archivists and historians to one of three other individuals by the same name. The chief distributor of his pamphlets, Martha Gurney, remains an even more obscure figure. She, too, has never been recognized for her achievement as London's leading female Dissenting printer/bookseller during the 1780s and '90s, printing and/or...