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Chapter 2 - The Ornamental, the Polemical, and the Testimonial

Pringle, Strickland, and Anti-slavery Print Culture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 April 2025

Nicole N. Aljoe
Affiliation:
Northeastern University, Boston
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Summary

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.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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References

Works Cited

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Further Reading

Allen, Jessica L.Pringle’s Pruning of Prince: The History of Mary Prince and the Question of Repetition.” Callaloo, vol. 35, no. 2, 2012, pp. 509–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boulukos, George. The Grateful Slave: The Emergence of Race in Eighteenth-Century British and American Culture. Cambridge University Press, 2008.Google Scholar
Harris, Katherine D.Feminizing the Textual Body: Female Readers Consuming the Literary Annual.” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, vol. 99, no. 4, 2005, pp. 573622.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Medovarski, Andrea. “Roughing It in Bermuda: Mary Prince, Susanna Strickland Moodie, Dionne Brand, and the Black Diaspora.” Canadian Literature/Litterature Canadienne, vol. 220, 2014, pp. 94115.Google Scholar
Shum, Matthew. “The Prehistory of The History of Mary Prince: Thomas Pringle’s ‘The Bechuana Boy.’” Nineteenth-Century Literature, vol. 64, no. 3, 2009, pp. 291322.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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