Thomas Pringle (1789–1834) was a Scottish poet and journalist who arrived in the Cape Colony in 1820 and departed in 1826 following a run-in with the autocratic Tory governor, Charles Somerset, a British aristocrat with a military background. Pringle's brief stay in South Africa was extraordinarily productive. Together with his collaborator and fellow Scot John Fairbairn, he was instrumental, among other things, in setting up the colony's first independent newspaper as well as a journal, both cut short by the irascible Somerset. After leaving the colony and settling in London, Pringle was best known for his activities as secretary to the Anti-Slavery Society and editor of the fashionable ‘annual’, Friendship's Offering, in which he published many of the leading poets of the day. He was also associated with the humanitarian movement for colonial reform led in parliament by Charles Buxton and was a prominent metropolitan commentator on the politics of the Cape Colony, particularly as related to the treatment of indigenous people. Pringle is chiefly remembered, however, for his writing, especially his poetry, which negotiates a fascinating intersection of British, specifically Scottish, romanticism, and the abrasive realities of colonial settlement. Unfortunately, Randolph Vigne has little (and little of interest) to say about this poetry, leaving what for many is the most important part of Pringle's legacy to what he describes, rather bafflingly, as ‘esoteric literary fields’ (p. 231).
Thomas Pringle: South African Poet, Pioneer & Abolitionist offers by far the most richly detailed account we have of Pringle's life and each of its three major phases (in Scotland, the Cape Colony, and London) is very thoroughly researched. Despite this wealth of circumstantial detail, however, the book disappoints on a number of levels. First among these is its extreme narrowness of focus and excessive attention to superfluous detail. Vigne concentrates his attention on the minutiae of Pringle's life, relying largely on his correspondence, both personal and official, the various memoirs of Pringle produced by his contemporaries, and, to a lesser extent, his published writings. Completely absent from this reconstruction is any larger contextual sense, either historical or cultural, of the era in which Pringle lived. We hear nothing, for example, of the Scottish Enlightenment whose conjectural histories are so obviously central to Pringle's understanding of indigenous colonial people, and indeed of the colonial enterprise itself.
The chapters on the Scottish background offer a great deal of antiquarian detail on matters such as family genealogy, but next to nothing on the climate of ideas Pringle would have been exposed to in early nineteenth-century Edinburgh. We are offered a digression on the disputed authorship of Pringle's most important pre-emigration journalism, the ‘Notes on the Scottish Gypsies’, but Vigne fails to comment on its content – a strange omission, given the contemporary status of the gypsies as figures of racial otherness and Pringle's disparaging treatment of them. Similarly, the South African section is devoid of any considerations of the charged historical context in which Pringle acted; not once does Vigne allude to or engage with the more recent body of historical writing on this period, some of which is deeply critical of the role played by the humanitarians. To repeatedly claim, as Vigne does, that Pringle and others like him were committed to an unqualified ‘racially egalitarian rule’ (p. 70) and ‘full freedom’ of ‘indigenous people … and the imported slaves’ (p. 136) is a patently inaccurate reflection of the historical record.
The section dealing with the London years, though admirably extensive in archival detail, is too often diverted by unnecessary detours. Vigne takes great exception, for example, to the young Ruskin's disapproving remarks about Pringle and devotes some time to defending him. He caps his argument by quoting a panegyric to empire from a lecture delivered by the older Ruskin in 1870 which is said to have inspired Cecil John Rhodes’s imperial ambitions. Pringle, the lowland Scot, would have been, Vigne tells us, ‘revolted by such English vainglorious jingoism’ (p. 189). This is a curious claim: while Pringle could be a bitter critic of colonial policy and practice, he was also a loyal and sometimes fervent imperialist. Pringle was a man of his times and he had the limitations of his times just as we no doubt have the limitations of ours. In attempting to present Pringle as something like a post-1994 liberal democrat avant la lettre, Vigne's hagiographic biography strains the limits of historical credulity.
In addition, the editing of the book is poor throughout. I found repeated mismatches between chapter endnotes and the numbered references in the text; in Chapter Two (p. 28) a section of the endnotes disappeared altogether.
