1. At the end of November 1792, an informant at Reading reported to the government that the only people still justifying reform and Paine’s book were some Quakers (PRO HO 42/22 (1792), 270, from Lancelot Austwick, 23 November 1792). See also R. Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760–1810 (London, 1975), 277–8;
2. James Walvin, ‘The Impact of Slavery on British Radical Politics: 1787–1838’, V. Rubin and A. Tuden (eds),. Comparative Perspectives on Slavery in New World Plantation Societies; Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 292 (1977), 343–55. By early 1793 petitioning was under attack in Parliament. Edmund Burke dismissed a Parliamentary reform petition from 2500 Nottingham inhabitants in a general indictment: ‘Considering the manner in which signatures were usually procurred to Petitions, the probability was that very few Petitioners, who had subscribed to the present one had ever read it.’ A few days later, the antiabolitionists were attributing the vote of 1792 on the slave trade to the Commons’ submission to ‘clamours without doors’. In the Lords the even more vitriolic Lord Abingdon harked back to the ‘rage of petitioning that preceeded the Grand Rebellion in the year 1640’. (Diary, 22, 27 February and 11 April 1793.) Reform petitions were rejected as disrespectful of the House. See the Diary, 3, 7 May 1793. On the deepening crisis of legitimacy for petitioning see also the Parliamentary Debates of January and February 1795.
3. Ibid., 321–409;
4. J. Walvin, ‘The Public Campaign in England against Slavery, 1787–1834’, in D. Eltis and J. Walvin, The Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade (Madison, 1981), 67.
5. In the spring of 1805 the London Abolition Committee postponed calling a public meeting, but sent Clarkson on another tour among the local affiliates. Clarkson found the same enthusiasm for abolition. The Committee thought that private pressure on MPs would be more advisable than public meetings. See BL Add. Mss, 21, 254–21, 256, ‘Proceedings of the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade’, 1787–1819 (3 vols), 3, 19 March, 29 April, 9 July, 1805; 7 March, 2 June, 30 July, 1806. On the call for grass roots pressure in 1805–7, see Friends House Library, London, Box H, Antislavery Tracts, open letters of Granville Sharp, 3 June 1805 and 30 July 1806. For 1814, see ibid., printed letter of Clarkson, 21 June 1814, accompanying a resolution and the form of a petition.