Thomas Pringle

A fine biography. [It] is a most satisfying book and an important contribution to South African scholarship. CAPE TIMES Scottish poet, fighter for human rights in the Cape Colony, and abolitionist, reveals the role this key Enlightenment figure played in Africa and Britain. This biography of Thomas Pringle (1789-1834), poet, fighter for human rights in the Cape Colony, and abolitionist, reveals the role this key Enlightenment figure played in Africa and Britain. Honoured in South Africa as 'the father of South African English poetry', for his part in achieving a free press, for his fight for the settlers' rights in the colony, in Scotland as the founding editor of Blackwood's Magazine, and in England as instrumental inbringing in abolition, Thomas Pringle has not yet had the attention he deserves. Born on the Scottish Borders, Pringle entered literary life in late Englightenment Edinburgh, but in 1820 led a party of settlers to theCape Colony. After running a school, launching a literary journal and co-editing the Cape's first independent newspaper, he formed a group to fight for democratic rights for both the settlers and the dispossessed indigenous people. His biography reveals the important part he played in the literary and political world across two continents, and in championing the Khoisan and the increasingly dispossessed Nguni people. On returning to England he became Secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society, and on 15 June 1834 announced the implementation of abolition. After actively opposing the apartheid government in South Africa Randolph Vigne worked in exile as a London publisher andlatterly, in Britain and South Africa, as author and editor of European and African historical studies. Southern Africa (South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, Lesotho, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe): UCT Press

When the Scottish poet Thomas Pringle emigrated to the Cape Colony in 1820 he voyaged also into a new creative life and an art responsive to his colonial home, “sterner verse” for “darker scenes”. Accompanying him to the Cape, the sonnet became his most consistent choice for capturing his experiences and convictions, his personal crises and the greater trauma of colonial appropriation and racial oppression. In this study his unique contribution to the Romantic-era sonnet is for the first time given its full due, through readings that are as attentive to form and formal agency as to the cultural, social and historical conditions in which they are enmeshed. Moving beyond colonial theory to consider issues of literary migration, this illuminating work shows how Pringle effectively opened up a radical conversation between the habitual modes of perception and response of British Romanticism and his new, southern world.