Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations and Maps
- Preface
- Author's Note
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Part I Scotland: Border Farm to Literary Edinburgh (1789–1820)
- Part II The Cape Frontier: Pioneer, Settler Leader (1820–1821)
- Part III Cape Town and Genadendal: The Stand Against Power (1822–1825)
- Part IV The Frontier, Karroo: Rural Retreat and the ‘Great Cause’ (1825–1826)
- Part V London Literary Life and The Anti-Slavery Campaign (1826–1833)
- Part VI Scotland and Highgate A Poet Returns to his Roots and Last Works (1830–1834)
- 19 ‘A Little Doctoring’
- 20 African Sketches: Responses
- 21 On Scottish Ground
- 22 Journey's End
- Bibliography
- Index
20 - African Sketches: Responses
from Part VI - Scotland and Highgate A Poet Returns to his Roots and Last Works (1830–1834)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations and Maps
- Preface
- Author's Note
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Part I Scotland: Border Farm to Literary Edinburgh (1789–1820)
- Part II The Cape Frontier: Pioneer, Settler Leader (1820–1821)
- Part III Cape Town and Genadendal: The Stand Against Power (1822–1825)
- Part IV The Frontier, Karroo: Rural Retreat and the ‘Great Cause’ (1825–1826)
- Part V London Literary Life and The Anti-Slavery Campaign (1826–1833)
- Part VI Scotland and Highgate A Poet Returns to his Roots and Last Works (1830–1834)
- 19 ‘A Little Doctoring’
- 20 African Sketches: Responses
- 21 On Scottish Ground
- 22 Journey's End
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Overshadowing all Pringle's prose writings in these and earlier years is his Narrative of a Residence in South Africa, first published as Part 2 of African Sketches in May 1834, seven months before his death. His publisher Edward Moxon reissued the Narrative, posthumously, the following year as a separate volume, with Josiah Conder's ‘biographical sketch’. Pringle wrote to Fairbairn on 22 May 1834:
The little book of which I now send you a copy was published two days ago. You will find that I have spoken out. … I am sure you will suffer for it by the excited rage of the vermin around you, who will no doubt pour forth their puny malice on you along with myself and the Dr in consequence of what I have said of them. But what signifies their enmity. They cannot harm you, I think, more than they have already – and our names and what is better our deeds will survive when they and all that belongs to them will be swept into the gulf of oblivion.
Was this Thomas Pringle in the conceited mode observed by Scott and hard to find elsewhere in his words or deeds? The Narrative has survived, though a book of such quality deserves to be better known and appreciated in South Africa. Unlike Philip's Researches in South Africa, it has been reissued in our time, in an edition limited to 750 copies in 1966, and there was a much abbreviated school edition in the 1920s.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Thomas PringleSouth African pioneer, poet and abolitionist, pp. 226 - 232Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2012