At 30 Pringle was back where he had been at 20, after an experience of literary life that had been unhappy and financially unrewarding. He wrote to a friend:

Along with extricating himself he held to his great hope, that the family of Robert Pringle could be held together as economic decline shattered the unity he had treasured in the Blaiklaw days. They had begun to scatter when the lease of Blaiklaw was coming to an end, before 1812.

Thomas's letter to his father of 17 January 1812 shows him to have been, even then, the leader among his full and half- brothers and sisters. It shows also that John, 21, and Alexander, 19, were already employed away from home, John, we know, was living with a cousin, John Riddell, son of Robert Pringle’s eldest sister Isabella, a corn miller, before moving on to the management of ‘a Gentleman’s estate for several years’, according to Robert Hart, who was to employ him in the Cape Colony in 1821. Alexander already wanted to emigrate to the United States, to ‘the settlement on the Ohio river where his uncle and cousin William are’ (These two are unidentified. Thomas wrote in an account of the family the previous year that his maternal grandfather’s family had all died, ‘except for one cousin, if still alive’).William, Robert’s eldest son, who seems to have stayed on to wind up affairs at Blaiklaw in 1812, married Anne Scott of Coldstream, Berwickshire, before joining his father in Co Durham.