Thomas Pringle was a lively, high-spirited man of many friends and engaging personality, a much published poet and an ultimately successful editor, campaigner against oppression in South Africa and slavery in the world beyond. After his death in 1834 at only 45, his fellow writers and friends Josiah Conder and Leitch Ritchie left glowing pictures of his three lives – in Scotland until 30, then South Africa and his last years in London. These were appended to Pringle's Narrative of a Residence in South Africa and Poetical Works respectively. Ritchie had had the enormous advantage of access to Pringle's papers before his widow Margaret sent them to the Cape for his great friend and chosen biographer John Fairbairn's use. Their disappearance is unexplained.

A full biography, by Jane Meiring, did not appear until 1968 and a second, by John Robert Doyle, in 1972. More than forty years after the appearance of the latter, we should look at Pringle from a standpoint different from that reached by the succession of earlier assessments of his life and work. That is the object of the book before you.

A year after his death came a review of his African Sketches by, or partly by, John Gibson Lockhart in the Quarterly Review (December 1835), which praised his work and character while mean spiritedly belittling his background and achievements. His reputation in Britain faded rapidly and by the end of the century Mrs Oliphant's William Blackwood and His Sons (1897) had set the tone for the disparagement of the founding co-editor of Blackwood's Edinburgh Monthly Magazine which has persisted right up until his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography in 2004.