George Stephen (abolitionist)

Sir George Stephen QC (1794 – 20 June 1879) was a British solicitor, barrister, author and radical anti-slavery proponent.

Sir James Stephen, for many years Under-Secretary of State in the Colonial Office, whose policy he for a long period initiated and controlled.

Born in 1794 at Saint Kitts, George Stephen was originally intended for the medical profession; but after spending three years in the study of anatomy, and going through a two-years' course at Magdalene College, Cambridge.

[4] He left Cambridge without graduating, after doing brilliant work, and entered the office of Messrs. Kaye & Freshfield, solicitors to the Bank of England.

He was given funding to form the Agency Committee (as a sub-group of the Anti-Slavery Society), composed of other 'immediatists' around the country, and pursued a series of tactics designed to generate 'pressure from without.

At the next meeting of the Anti-Slavery Society, members voted to condemn the approach, increasing tensions between the established and elder abolitionists and the more radical activists.

These lectures were remarkably successful and, since the Society started in 1832, the number of local anti-slavery associations grew from two hundred to twelve thousand.

In one instance, the Agency Society organised lectures in Borough Market and Whitechapel, but were met with mobs of workers whose livelihoods depended on sugar from the colonies who were paid by slaveholders to shout down the speakers.

Sir George (who was knighted in 1837, being the first so honoured after Queen Victoria's accession) subsequently ceased to practise as a solicitor, with a view to being called to the Bar.

This was accomplished, in 1849, under the auspices of Gray's Inn; and Sir George then removed to Liverpool, where he practised at the local Bar for some years.

[12] In addition to an autobiography written for his children, Sir George published, in 1839, anonymously, Adventures of an Attorney in Search of a Practice; and was also the author of The Jesuit at Cambridge, published the same year; and of Adventures of a Gentleman in Search of a Horse, a brochure intended to illustrate in an amusing form the operation of the warranty law, which ran through half a dozen editions.