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Joseph Gurney (1744–1815) was an English shorthand-writer and evangelical activist. ==Life== The son of Thomas Gurney, he was his assistant and successor as a shorthand-writer in law courts and parliament. Before that, he spent a period as a bookseller, and he was in business with his sister Martha Gurney. Martha Gurney was a Baptist and abolitionist, active in the production of pamphlet literature.〔http://www.brycchancarey.com/abolition/gurney.htm〕 Gurney also associated with the radical William Fox, and was a friend of William Hawes.〔http://www.brycchancarey.com/abolition/williamfox.htm〕 Gurney was employed officially after 1790 to report civil cases in courts of law. In 1786 he attended as a reporter some slave-trade inquiries in the House of Lords.〔 Recognised as a leading figure in his field, Gurney once commented that, of all speakers, he had most difficulty in transcribing the words of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The reason was that it was difficult to anticipate how sentences would come to an end. At the Warren Hastings trial, Gurney acted as shorthand writer for the government; William Isaac Blanchard did so for the defence. The stenographic world was small, and Blanchard had previously been Gurney's assistant. Indeed, by the 1780s newspaper reporting was undermining the business model of commercial court reporters. In May 1789 the House of Commons called on Gurney to read, from his notes Edmund Burke's words accusing Sir Elijah Impey of murder; and a vote of censure on Burke was then passed. According to Thompson Cooper, writing in the ''Dictionary of National Biography'', this incident was the first public acknowledgment of the verbal accuracy of shorthand.〔 In 1791 the House of Commons first used shorthand for reporting the proceedings of one of its committees on the Eau-Brink Drainage Bill. In the same year Gurney took notes of six election petition committees. In 1802 an act was passed authorising the regular use of shorthand in election committees; and in the following year, a select committee of the House of Commons having reported positively, it was generally applied to other committees.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Joseph Gurney (1744–1815)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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