William Allen

William Allen (1770-1843) was the eldest son of a Spital-fields silk manufacturer. Inspired by the Quaker abolitionists, as a teenager Allen decided to give up sugar, a resolution he steadfastly kept until the emancipation of the slaves in 1834. He wrote in his diary on 22 February 1789:  “When I reflect upon the tyranny and oppression exercised by my countrymen towards the poor Africans, and the many thousands yearly murdered in the disgraceful Slave Trade, I can but be a zealous opposer of slavery … as sugar is, undoubtedly, one of the chief [commodities produced by slave labour], I resolve, through divine assistance, to persevere in the disuse of it until the Slave Trade shall be abolished” (Life of William Allen, with Selections from his Correspondence, 3 vols [London: Charles Gilpin, 1846)], vol. 1, 7). As the debate over the slave trade waged on in 1790 and 1791, Allen became a regular attendant in the gallery at the House of Commons. On 12 January 1792 he delivered a powerful speech in Coach-maker’s Hall that shortly thereafter appeared as a pamphlet on the shelves of Martha Gurney’s bookshop in Holborn. Taking his cue from the abolitionist bookseller and pamphleteer William Fox, the youthful Allen proclaimed to his audience that “The Consumer of West India Produce, may be considered as the Master-spring that gives motion and effect to the whole Machine of Cruelties” involved in the slave trade, which to Allen was nothing less than “a chain of Wretchedness every link of which is stained with blood! Abstaining from sugar, he argues, is the best option at the moment for ending the slave trade, and the women of England were vitally important in this cause. “As the Models of every just and virtuous sentiment,” he writes, “we naturally look up to them as Paterns [sic] in all the softer Virtues.  Their Example, therefore, in Abstaining from the use of West India Produce---must silence every murmur---must refute every objection---and render the performance of the Duty as Universal as their Influence!” Allen would eventually become a proprietor of Joseph Gurney Bevan’s pharmaceutical establishment at Plough Court, a member of the Chemical Society at Guy’s Hospital, lecturer in Chemistry and Natural Philosophy at the Royal Institution, and Treasurer of the British and Foreign School Society.  See William Allen, The Duty of Abstaining from the Use of West India Produce; a Speech, Delivered at Coach-Maker’s-Hall, Jan. 12, 1792, 2nd ed. (London: Printed for T. W. Hawkins … and sold by M. Gurney [and four others], 1792), quotations above from 7-8, 22, 23. See Irene Ashby, William Allen (London:  Edward Hicks, 1893), 14, 52, 68-77, 145.