This thesis offers an extended study of the writing of the Scottish settler Thomas Pringle from 1820. In conclusion, this study argues for an understanding of Pringle's work as being cut through by differences in imperial location and status, as well as by a significant degree of instability and contradiction in its representation of the colonial project. In this combination of the ethical and the aesthetic, Pringle is generally considered to be a crucial, if not the decisive, actor in the events around which "the foundational myths of South African liberalism have been constructed" (Dubow 2006: 27).
I will argue that the 'wild' picturesque character of the gypsy is one of the starting points for Pringle's representation of the South African indigenous population. Two of the best-known poems, 'Afar in the Desert' and 'Evening Rambles', explore a troubled lyrical interiority in which a striking feature is the alienation between consciousness and its consciousness. My argument is that poems like these still tell us with surprising immediacy about the shocks and abrasions of the early colonial experience.
As is well known, both the Journal and the Advertiser were shut down by Governor Somerset for their alleged subversion of the colonial state. The chapter ends with an extensive analysis of Pringle's two most famous poems of this period, "The Song of the Wild Bushman" and "Makanna's Gathering".
CHAPTER ONE SCOTLAND: 1789-1820
The first version of the poem was published in The Poetic Mirror, an anthology published by James Hogg in 1816. As with the short selection of the earlier poems I looked at, my primary interest is not in the poem's formal structure and thematic focus. Schama gives the example of Paul Sandby, a draughtsman who was employed on a topographical survey of the Highlands in the 1740s.
From a South African perspective, it is certainly significant that the local landscape is resistant. Moreover, the characterization of the farmer as engaged in rustic tranquility ('Peace broods on the farm bed') is misleading: the 'farm bed' was evacuated at an unprecedented rate in the Lowlands (and razed to the ground in the Highlands). . Pringle's Shepherd functions as both a living relic and a reminder, in the present tense, of the archaic absurdity of opposition to the Hanoverian regime.
For Pringle (himself an archivist), the collection of information is the necessary prelude to the restructuring of the gypsy's life world. 34;Remarks" it is to be expected that there will be different opinions about the Gypsies. This problem appears in the introduction to the second article, when Pringle informs us that the "main settlement" of the Gypsies in Scotland and.
Clearly, it was not just the Gypsies who were immune to the soothing and calming influences of the Border landscape.
CHAPTER TWO
The omission in this article of the account of the settler camps in the Narrative suggests that Pringle may have edited these passages. There is no mention of her dress (or that of her children), no allusion to the derogation attached to the description of the Hottentots. The effect of the music was doubtless greatly increased by the reflections which the appearance of this African had.
Pringle concludes his visit with a closer inspection of the settlement the following morning; this inspection reveals numerous (unspecified) problems—"obstacles to be overcome, and defects to be remedied of no small description," but concludes that the behavior of the converts shows "little that could with propriety be called wild" (17). Even in the account itself, Pringle describes the "general aspect of the country" (he refers to the Albany settlement) as being "fresh, pleasant, and picturesque" (16). In contrastive terms, this is a veritable haven for the picturesque, rich in "variation, ornamentation, and detail" (Bermingham 1994:87) typical of painterly taste.
The chain of association here is interesting in that view of abandoned villages in houses. In the context of the settlement, the picturesque is a fragile sketch of an imagined future, "the promise of the unseen rather than something already complete in itself. It is immediately apparent that Pringle is unable to maintain the idyllicism of the previous stanzas.
These lines celebrate the memory of the Scottish Covenanters' resistance to English persecution in the seventeenth century. Until the awake bird pours out her solemn sounds. Heard through the nightly calm of the watery plains. Unfortunately, in Pringle's private correspondence, or anywhere else, there are no references to the time of the poem's composition.
Between the first version of the poem published in the South African Journal of 1824 and the last ten years later in African Sketches, Pringle made a number of revisions to the poem.
CHAPTER THREE
The general matrix of these ideas lies, as we have already seen, in the Scottish moral philosophers and political economists. A knowledge of man's real character must therefore not be obtained from history. At present, it must be admitted, they are in every sense nasty customers.
These gross deviations from the Xhosa would not have been out of place in the pages of the often viciously racist Grahamstown Journal a decade later. The occasion is an article written by the poet Southey in the Quarterly Review, in which he gives his views on the "malicious nature of evil." Debate on the petition dragged on again, while the opposition demanded a full copy of the parliamentary papers on Burnett's case.
Neither in itself, nor in terms of the development of Pringle's poetry, I think it is of great interest. When considering the subject matter of the poem – such as it is – similar disproportions are evident. How then, before we begin any analysis of this and other poems, do we understand their fundamental gesture: writing on behalf of another.
The woman is said to have been the wife of the latter; and she had a baby in the warm folds of her cloak. In this particular case, a recognizable humanitarian way of writing is irregularly inserted into a section of Pringle's Narrative otherwise written in the traveller/observer genre (the sections are preceded by observations about ostriches and followed by observations about various "aspects of the desert" (170).Furthermore, the formal framework of the poetry is more assured and generically stable than in the poetry which.
In the final publication of the poem in African Sketches in 1834, this differentiation between the poetic and the actual is evident within the textual apparatus of the poem itself. Unlike sympathetic Bushmen observers such as William Burchell (Travels in the Interior of Southern Africa (1822). He is considerably less concerned with the kind of summary judgment that Pringle often exercised, especially in the latter chapters of the Narrative, on indigenous ways of life .
This little volcano of colonial indignation erupted in the correspondence pages of the Grahamstown Journal on January 2, 1835. This review caused considerable offence, as we shall see, to the editor of the Grahamstown Journal.
