Pringle, Thomas

(1789-1834)

   Scottish poet born at Blaiklaw, Teviotdale, Roxburghshire, he was educated at Edinburgh University. While at university, in spite of being lame and on crutches, he challenged a group who were protesting against the first night of Joanna Baillie's Family Legend (1810) (see entry). He worked as a copyist in the Register Office, Edinburgh, and devoted his leisure to poetry. The Institute (1811) is a satire of one of Edinburgh's learned societies. He was a friend of Sir Walter Scott and for a short time was editor of the Edinburgh Monthly. Between 1820 and 1826, he lived in South Africa and gained the reputation as the father of South African poetry. Many of the poems in his two verse collections Ephemerides (1828) and African Sketches (1834) deal with the people, wildlife, and landscape of Africa. In 1827 he became secretary to the Anti-Slavery Society. He died in London and was buried in the Dissenter Cemetery, Bunhill Fields, London. Some of his poems: "Afar in the Desert," "An Emigrant's Song," "Paraphrase of the Twenty-Third Psalm," "The Bechuana Boy," "The Bushman," "The Ghona Widow's Lullaby," "The Lion and Giraffe," "The Slave Dealer."

   Sources: African Poems of Thomas Pringle (Killie Campbell Africana Library Publications). Ernest Pereira and Michael Chapman, ed. University of Natal Press, 1996. Dictionary of National Biography. Electronic Edition 1.1. Oxford University Press, 1997. The National Portrait Gallery (www.npg.org.uk). Poems Illustrative of South Africa: Vol. I, by Thomas Pringle. John Robert Wahl, ed. C. Struik (Pty.) Ltd., 1970. Poems of South African History A.D. 1497-1910. A. Petrie, ed. Oxford University Press, 1918. Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources (http://library.stanford.edu). The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.columbiagrangers.org). The Home Book of Verse. Burton Egbert Stevenson, ed. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1953. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th edition. Margaret Drabble, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000. The Penguin Book of Southern African Verse. Stephen Gray, ed. Penguin Books, 1989.