Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dlnhk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T19:46:07.493Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Mary Prince, Slavery, and Print Culture in the Anglophone Atlantic World

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 April 2021

Juliet Shields
Affiliation:
University of Washington, Seattle

Summary

This study examines a network of writers that coalesced around the publication of The History of Mary Prince (1831), which recounts Prince's experiences as an enslaved person in the West Indies and the events that brought her to seek assistance from the Anti-Slavery Society in London. It focuses on the three writers who produced the text - Mary Prince, Thomas Pringle, and Susanna Moodie - with glances at their pro-slavery opponent, James MacQueen, and their literary friends and relatives. The History connects the Black Atlantic, a diasporic formation created through the colonial trade in enslaved people, with the Anglophone Atlantic, created through British migration and colonial settlement. It also challenges Romantic ideals of authorship as an autonomous creative act and the literary text as an aesthetically unified entity. Collaborating with Prince on the History's publication impacted Moodie's and Pringle's attitudes towards slavery and shaped their own accounts of migration and settlement.
Get access
Type
Element
Information
Online ISBN: 9781108866392
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication: 06 May 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Aljoe, Nicole N. (2014). Introduction: Remapping the Early Slave Narrative. In Aljoe, Nicole N. and Finseth, Ian, eds., Journeys of the Slave Narrative in the Early Americas. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, pp. 116.Google Scholar
Allen, Jessica L. (2012). Pringle’s Pruning of Prince: The History of Mary Prince and the Question of Repetition. Callaloo, 35(2), 509519.Google Scholar
[Anon.]. (1831). The Anti-Slavery Society and the West India Colonists. Bermuda Royal Gazette, 47(4), 1.Google Scholar
Atkin, Lara. (2018). The South African “Children of the Mist”: The Bushman, the Highlander and the Making of Colonial Identities in Thomas Pringle’s South African Poetry (1825–1834). Yearbook of English Studies, 48, 199215.Google Scholar
Atwood, Margaret. (1970). The Journals of Susanna Moodie. Toronto: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Ballantyne, Tony. (2007). What Difference Does Colonialism Make? Reassessing Print and Social Change in an Age of Global Imperialism. In Baron, Sabrina Alcorn, Lindquist, Eric N., and Shevlin, Eleanor F., eds., Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, pp. 342352.Google Scholar
Ballstadt, Carl. (1965). The Literary History of the Strickland Family. DPhilThesis, University of London.Google Scholar
Ballstadt, Carl, Hopkins, Elizabeth, and Peterman, Michael, eds. (1985). Letters of a Lifetime. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.Google Scholar
Banner, Rachel. (2013). Surface and Stasis: Re-reading Slave Narrative via The History of Mary Prince. Callaloo, 36(2), 298311.Google Scholar
Baumgartner, Barbara. (2001). The Body As Evidence: Resistance, Collaboration, and Appropriation in The History of Mary Prince. Callaloo, 24(1), 253275.Google Scholar
Belich, James. (2009). Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Bird, William Wilberforce. (1823). The State of the Cape of Good Hope in 1822, by a Civil Servant of the Colony. London: John Murray.Google Scholar
Bland, Sterling L. (1990). Voices of the Fugitives: Runaway Slave Stories and Their Fictions of Self-Creation. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.Google Scholar
Bohls, Elizabeth A. (2014). Slavery and the Politics of Place: Representing the Colonial Caribbean, 1770–1833. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Briggs, Charles Frederick. (1852). Preface. In Roughing It in the Bush, by Susanna Strickland Moodie. New York: George Putnam, pp. iiiii.Google Scholar
Bunn, David. (2002). “Our Wattled Cot”: Mercantile and Domestic Space in Thomas Pringle’s African Landscapes. In Mitchell, W. J. T., ed., Landscape and Power, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 127173.Google Scholar
Calder, Angus. (1982). Thomas Pringle (1789–1834): A Scottish Poet in South Africa. English in Africa, 9(1), 113.Google Scholar
Caretta, Vincent. (2003). Introduction. In Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Voices in the English-Speaking World of the Eighteenth Century. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, pp. 116.Google Scholar
Carey, Brycchan. (2005). British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment and Slavery, 1760–1804. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Cave, Roderick. (1978). Early Printing and the Book Trade in the West Indies. Library Quarterly, 48(2), 163192.Google Scholar
Clarke, George Elliott. (2005). This Is No Hearsay: Reading the Canadian Slave Narrative. Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada, 43(1), 732.Google Scholar
Collier, Patrick, and Conolly, James T.. (2016). Print Culture Histories beyond the Metropolis: An Introduction. In Connolly, James T., Collier, Patrick, Felsenstein, Frank, Hall, Kenneth, and Hall, Robert G., eds., Print Culture Histories beyond the Metropolis. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, pp. 325.Google Scholar
Davies, Carole Boyce. (2002). Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Dean, Misao. (1992). Concealing Her Bluestockings: Femininity and Self-Representation in Susanna Moodie’s Autobiographical Works. In Whitlock, Gillian and Tiffin, Helen, eds., Re-siting Queen’s English: Text and Tradition in Postcolonial Literature. Amsterdam: Rodopoi, pp. 2536.Google Scholar
Dean, Misao (1998). Practising Femininity: Domestic Realism and the Performance of Gender in Early Canadian Fiction. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.Google Scholar
Devine, T. M. (2011). To the Ends of the Earth: Scotland’s Global Diaspora, 1750–2010. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books.Google Scholar
Ellis, Markman. (1996). The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender, and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Eltis, David. (2002). Introduction: Migration and Agency in Global History. Eltis, In David, ed., Coerced and Free Migration: Global Perspectives. Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 132.Google Scholar
[Fairbarn, John ]. (1824). On Literary and Scientific Societies. South African Journal, 1(1), 5055.Google Scholar
Fender, Stephen. (1992). Sea Changes: British Emigration and American Literature. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Flynn, Philip. (2006). Beginning Blackwood’s: The Right Mix of Dulce and Utile. Victorian Periodicals Review, 39(2), 136157.Google Scholar
Fraser, Robert. (2008). Book History through Postcolonial Eyes: Rewriting the Script. London: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gadpaille, Michelle. (2016). Trans-colonial Collaboration and Slave Narrative: Mary Prince Revisited. ELOPE: English Language Overseas Perspectives and Enquiries, 8(2), 6377.Google Scholar
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Goodman, Kevis. (2008). Romantic Poetry and the Science of Nostalgia. In Chandler, James and McLane, Maureen N., eds., The Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 195216.Google Scholar
Hamilton, Douglas (2005). Scotland, the Caribbean and the Atlantic World, 1750–1820. Manchester: Manchester University Press.Google Scholar
Hanley, Ryan. (2019). Beyond Slavery and Abolition: Black British Writing, c. 1770–1830. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Jackson, Gale. (1992). “mary prince bermuda. turks island. antigua. 1787.” Kenyon Review, 14(1), 68.Google Scholar
Jacobs, Harriet. (2019). Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 2nd ed., ed by Foster, Frances Smith and Yarborough, Richard. New York: Norton.Google Scholar
Kitson, Peter J. (2007). Romantic Literature, Race and Colonial Encounter. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Lambert, David. (2008). The “Glasgow King of Billingsgate”: James MacQueen and the Atlantic Proslavery Network. Slavery and Abolition, 29(3), 389418.Google Scholar
Lorimer, Douglas. (1978). Colour, Class and the Victorians: English Attitudes to the Negro in the Mid-Nineteenth Century. Leicester: Leicester University Press.Google Scholar
MacKenzie, John. (2012). The Scots in South Africa: Ethnicity, Identity, Gender, and Race, 1772–1914. With Nigel Dalziel. Manchester: Manchester University Press.Google Scholar
MacQueen, James. (1831a). Letter Fourth. To His Grace the Duke of Wellington, &c. &c. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 29(176), 187213.Google Scholar
MacQueen, James (1831b). British Colonies – James Stephen. Letter to the Right Honourable Earl Grey, &c. &c. &c. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 29(178), 454466.Google Scholar
MacQueen, James (1831c). The Colonial Empire of Great Britain. Letter to Early Grey, First Lord of the Treasury, &c. &c. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 30(187), 744764.Google Scholar
MacQueen, James (1832). The Rev. Mr. Curtin and the Colonial Office. Glasgow Courier, April 21, 1.Google Scholar
McBride, Dwight A. (2001). Impossible Witnesses: Truth, Abolitionism, and Slave Testimony. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
McGann, Jerome. (1983). The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Interpretation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
McNeil, Kenneth. (2019). Diasporas: Thomas Pringle and Mary Prince. In DeLucia, JoEllen and Shields, Juliet, eds., Migration and Modernities: The State of Being Stateless, 1750–1850. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 5176.Google Scholar
Medovarski, Andrea. (2014). Roughing It in Bermuda: Mary Prince, Susanna Strickland Moodie, Dionne Brand, and the Black Diaspora. Canadian Literature, 220, 94115.Google Scholar
Midgley, Claire. (1992). Women against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780–1870. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Moodie, Susanna Strickland. (1831). Enthusiasm and Other Poems. London: Smith, Elder & Company.Google Scholar
Moodie, Susanna Strickland (1991). Voyages: Short Narratives of Susanna Moodie, ed. by Thurston, John. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press.Google Scholar
Moodie, Susanna Strickland (2007). Roughing It in the Bush, ed. by Peterman, Michael A.. New York: Norton.Google Scholar
Paquet, Sandra Pouchet. (2002). Caribbean Autobiography: Cultural Identity and Self-Representation. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Patterson, Orlando. (1982). Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Pereira, Ernest, and Chapman, Michael. (1989). Introduction. In The African Poems of Thomas Pringle, ed. by Ernest Pereira and Michael Chapman. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, pp. ixxviii.Google Scholar
Prince, Mary. (2000). The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself, ed. by Salih., Sara London: Penguin.Google Scholar
Pringle, Thomas. (1824a). Some Account of the Present State of the English Settlers of Albany, South Africa. London: T. and G. Underwood.Google Scholar
Pringle, Thomas (1824b). Verses, On seeing in a late packet of English Papers, the Surrender of Cadiz, and the Proscription of a Free Press in Germany and Switzerland,–by Order of the “Holy Alliance.South African Journal 1(1), 89.Google Scholar
Pringle, Thomas (1834). African Sketches. London: Edward Moxon.Google Scholar
Pringle, Thomas (1966). Narrative of a Residence in South Africa. Cape Town: C. Struik.Google Scholar
Pringle, Thomas, and Fairbarn, John. (1824). Prospectus. South African Journal 1(1), n.p.Google Scholar
Rauwerda, Antje M. (2001). Naming, Agency, and “A Tissue of Falsehoods” in The History of Mary Prince. Victorian Literature and Culture, 29(2), 397411.Google Scholar
Rieley, Honor. (2016). Writing Emigration: Canada in Scottish Romanticism, 1802–1840. DPhil Thesis, University of Oxford.Google Scholar
Rezek, Joseph. (2015). London and the Making of Provincial Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Robertson, James. (2014). Eighteenth-Century Jamaica’s Ambivalent Cosmopolitanism. History: The Journal of the Historical Association, 99(337), 607631.Google Scholar
Scott, Walter. (1830). Tales of My Landlord. Third Series. The Bride of Lammermoor and A Legend of Montrose. Boston: Samuel H. Parker.Google Scholar
Sharp, Sarah. (2019). Exporting “The Cotter’s Saturday Night”: Robert Burns, Scottish Romantic Nationalism, and Settler Colonial Identity. Romanticism, 25(1), 8189.Google Scholar
Sharpe, Jenny. (2002). Ghosts of Slavery: A Literary Archeology of Black Women’s Lives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Shum, Matthew. (2009). The Prehistory of The History of Mary Prince: Thomas Pringle’s “The Bechuana Boy.Nineteenth-Century Literature, 64(3), 291322.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Siemerling, Winifred. (2015). The Black Atlantic Reconsidered: Black Canadian Writing, Cultural History, and the Presence of the Past. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.Google Scholar
Simmons, Merinda K. (2009). Beyond “Authenticity”: Migration and the Epistemology of “Voice” in Mary Prince’s History of Mary Prince and Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba. College Literature, 36(4), 7599.Google Scholar
Stepto, Robert. (1991). From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative. 2nd ed. Chicago: Chicago University Press.Google Scholar
Stoler, Ann Laura. (2001). Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial studies. Journal of American History, 88(3), 829865.Google Scholar
Stouck, David. (1974). “Secrets of the Prison House”: Mrs. Moodie and the Canadian Imagination. Dalhousie Review, 54, 463472.Google Scholar
Sussman, Charlotte. (2000). Consuming Anxieties: Consumer Protest, Gender, and British Slavery, 1713–1833. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Swan, Bradford F. (1970). The Spread of Printing: The Caribbean Area. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Thomas, Christa Zeller. (2009). “I Had Never Such a Shed Called a House Before”: The Discourse of Home in Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush. Canadian Literature, 203, 105113.Google Scholar
Thomas, Helen. (2000). Romanticism and Slave Narratives: Transatlantic Testimonies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Thomas, Leah. (2019). Knowledge Networks: Contested Geographies in The History of Mary Prince. Aphra Behn Online: Interactive Journal for Women and the Arts, 1640–1830, 9(2), article 2. https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/abo/vol9/iss2/2/.Google Scholar
Thomas, Sue. (2005). Pringle v. Cadell and Wood v. Pringle: The Libel Cases over The History of Mary Prince. Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 40(1), 113135.Google Scholar
Thurston, John. (1996). The Work of Words: The Writing of Susanna Strickland Moodie. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.Google Scholar
Townsend, Mark. (2020). Home Office “Uses Racial Bias” When Detaining Immigrants. The Guardian. www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/jun/21/home-office-uses-racial-bias-when-detaining-immigrants?Google Scholar
Vigne, Randolph. (2011). The South African Letters of Thomas Pringle. Cape Town: Van Riebeck Society.Google Scholar
Vigne, Randolph (2012). Thomas Pringle: South African Pioneer, Poet and Abolitionist. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer.Google Scholar
Warner, Ashton. (1831). Negro Slavery Described by a Negro: Being the Narrative of A. W. With an Appendix Containing the Testimony of Four Christian Ministers. By S. Strickland. London: Samuel Maunder.Google Scholar
Whitlock, Gillian. (2000). The Intimate Empire: Reading Women’s Autobiography. London: Cassell.Google Scholar

Save element to Kindle

To save this element to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Mary Prince, Slavery, and Print Culture in the Anglophone Atlantic World
  • Juliet Shields, University of Washington, Seattle
  • Online ISBN: 9781108866392
Available formats
×

Save element to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Mary Prince, Slavery, and Print Culture in the Anglophone Atlantic World
  • Juliet Shields, University of Washington, Seattle
  • Online ISBN: 9781108866392
Available formats
×

Save element to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Mary Prince, Slavery, and Print Culture in the Anglophone Atlantic World
  • Juliet Shields, University of Washington, Seattle
  • Online ISBN: 9781108866392
Available formats
×