Abstract
In early 1831, a particular conjunction of people and events encouraged and enabled Thomas Pringle, the Secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society in Britain, to publish on his own undertaking The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, Related by Herself, generally remembered today as the only slave narrative of a West Indian woman. Within months, three editions of the narrative had been published; plans for a fourth edition were dropped after Mary Prince’s owner in Antigua John Wood instigated libel action against Pringle over his handling of Wood’s response to Anti-Slavery Society interventions to secure Prince’s freedom in Antigua as well as Britain. Prince’s owners John and Margaret Wood, who lived in Antigua and had acquired Prince in c. 1817, had brought her to England in June 1828. She left their temporary home in London in 1828 in the midst of disputes over her alleged poor conduct and insubordination. By the terms of Lord Stowell’s 1827 decision in the test case of Grace Jones, Prince’s status as a slave was temporarily suspended during her continued residence in England. Knowing that “[t]o be free is very sweet” (H, 31), she chose to stay in England rather than return to slavery in Antigua (where her husband Daniel James lived). Since 1829 she had worked as a servant in the home of Thomas and Margaret Pringle. “The idea of writing Mary Prince’s history,” Pringle states in his Preface, “was first suggested by herself” (H, 3).
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Notes
See Sue Thomas, “New Information on Mary Prince in London,” Notes and Queries 58, no. 1 (March 2011): 82–85.
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Quoted in Matthew Shum, “The Prehistory of The History of Mary Prince: Thomas Pringle’s ‘The Bechuana Boy,’” Nineteenth-Century Literature 64, no. 3 (2009), 294, 299–300. The first quotation is from an 1825 letter from Pringle to John Fairbairn and the second quotation is from an 1829 letter to an unnamed correspondent.
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Henry Bleby identifies Stephen as the reputed author in his Romance without Fiction: or, Sketches font the Portfolio of an Old Missionary (London: Published for the author at the Wesleyan Conference Office, 1872), 284. Bleby was a nonconformist antislavery missionary in Jamaica during the 1830s, moving in the kinds of circles in which the authorship would be known.
David Lambert, Mastering the Niger: James MacQueen’s African Geography and the Struggle over Atlantic Slavery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 182.
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© 2014 Sue Thomas
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Thomas, S. (2014). The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, Related by Herself. In: Telling West Indian Lives. New Caribbean Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137441034_6
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