On arrival in London, Thomas had £5 in his pocket, debts to meet in London as well as the mountain of the mat the Cape, and four mouths to feed, with the Owen manuscript his only prospective source of income. The publishing trade was in a ‘shocking state’, he told Fairbairn in his first letter, just six days after landing, having heard all the bad news at dinner at Longman's in Paternoster Row just before writing.

There had been ‘great failures in London and Edinburgh. Hurst and Robinson here for half a million. Constable also for not much less. Constable's fall has brought down James Ballantyne and Ballantyne has involved Sir Walter Scott for about £40,000.’ With his sterling capacity for sympathy for the plight of others when himself in a dire state, he added: ‘Scott is said to be quite reduced – his estate, library, everything sold. This is hard after a laborious life – and he seems to be generally pitied.’ We know now that Scott's mighty cash demands from his publisher Ballantyne, which, in secret, he partly owned, contributed to their, and his, financial ruin. Ruin it was, nonetheless, and his recovery from it heroic indeed.

Pringle borrowed £10, probably from his agents, Underwoods, though his debt to them had reached £380 and they ‘seem somewhat vexed that I have no more cash for them’. The lodgings he found in Arundel Street, then a rather squalid lane running from the Strand to the river, cost only a guinea a week and he and Margaret said good-bye to her sister Janet, who returned to Scotland.