This chapter examines Thomas Pringle’s and Susanna Strickland’s literary relationship and their contributions to anti-slavery print culture in the years surrounding their work on The History of Mary Prince. Each brought a different set of interests and strengths to the production of The History. Pringle was an established voice in abolitionist writing, having published anti-slavery poems and essays in venues ranging from the Oriental Herald to the Penny Magazine. Strickland had not previously written about slavery, but she was practiced in writing for the fashionable and ornamental publications that targeted one of the anti-slavery movement’s primary audiences, middle-class white women. In the years immediately surrounding the publication of Prince’s History, Pringle and Strickland brought anti-slavery discourse into ornamental and ostensibly apolitical forms of print culture such as literary annuals; conversely, by foregrounding the first-person testimony of enslaved people, they brought novelistic discourse into overtly political and polemical publications such as the Anti-Slavery Reporter.

This chapter focusses on the rise of humanitarian literature relating to the southern hemisphere settler colonies of Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa in the 1830s, when humanitarian concerns about the treatment of Indigenous peoples coincided with the abolition of chattel slavery and the proliferation of coerced and indentured labour. It examines how travel writing and poetry of witness encouraged humanitarian intervention on colonial frontiers, often by ventriloquising the voices of Indigenous peoples in the aftermath of violent massacres. It considers the wider networks and print media in which humanitarian literatures originated, such as open letters, religious tracts, treaties, and petitions. The chapter argues for the importance of a sentimentalised aesthetics of eyewitness immediatism drawn from abolitionist literature in shaping (and distorting) attitudes towards Indigenous peoples. It considers what the framework of humanitarianism can tell us about the literary culture of the 1830s and about the period’s cultural politics of emotion, as metropolitan social commentators sought to redirect sympathetic norms away from distant suffering and towards white poverty at home.