today enjoy, makes it yet more admirable. Its wit, lucidity and venom have not been surpassed.
Published a few decades earlier, the autobiography of another West Indian, Mary Prince, had more success than Thomas’s history book. Prince was born around 1788 at Brackish-Pond in Bermuda on the farm where her mother was a household slave. They were sold together and for the next twelve years Mary lived a blissful life, partly because her new owner’s daughter treated her as a pet, leading ‘me about by the hand, and [calling] me her little nigger’, and partly because ‘I was too young to understand rightly my condition as a slave’.39 Her happiness was soon cut short. Around 1800 she was sold again, this time to a couple who regularly abused her and flogged her with cowskins. Such mistreatment continued for many years, even after she had been bought by a new owner who took her to the Turks Islands. By 1814 she was a washerwoman for the Wood family in Antigua: during the day she was underfed and overworked so ferociously that she developed rheumatism and became lame; by night she was forced to sleep in a bug-infested and verminous outhouse. The floggings and lashings didn’t abate for years. Nonetheless, this was the period in which she began to attend the Moravian Church, members of whose congregation taught her to read; she also met her husband, a carpenter named Daniel James; and, when her master and mistress were away, sold provisions to ship captains in order to save up enough money to buy her freedom.
In 1828 the Woods came to England and brought Prince along with them to look after their son who was to be educated here. Prince was delighted. She, like later writers such as V.S. Naipaul and Fred D’Aguiar, saw the metropolis as a healing zone, a place where the torments of Caribbean servitude would cease. The capital offered the possibility of both psychological and physical release: not only had she heard that her master might free her after their ship had docked, but she also hoped to have her rheumatism cured.
Predictably no medicine was forthcoming. Instead,
the rheumatism seized all my limbs worse than ever, and my body was dreadfully swelled. When we landed at the Tower, I shewed my flesh to my mistress, but she took no great notice of it [ … ] I grew worse, and could not stand to wash. I was then forced to sit down with the tub before me, and often through pain and weakness was reduced to kneel or to sit down on the floor, to finish my task.40
Prince’s rheumatism hampered her mobility. The plenitudes and freedoms of London suddenly receded from view. It wasn’t only her aching limbs that prevented her from roustabouting through the city: Mrs Wood forced her to clean piles of clothes so mountainous that even her English colleagues complained on her behalf. Prince’s health grew worse, yet her mistress continued to scream and bawl. She was constantly threatened with expulsion from Leigh Street, but ‘I was a stranger, and did not know one door in the street from another, and was unwilling to go away’.41 After repeated humiliations she decided to leave and, with the help of Moravian missionaries based in Hatton Garden, was taken in by the family of Mr Mash, the Woods’ shoe-blacker. After a bitter winter during which her rheumatism became more acute, Prince’s fortunes improved. Charitable Quakers offered her money and warm clothing. She became a charwoman to a Mrs Forsyth who had spent time in the West Indies and was fond of blacks. Finally, following overtures to one of London’s Anti-Slavery offices, she joined the household of the Pringles, a God-fearing couple who accompanied her to church and were happy to help when she suggested that her life story should be published.
Prince, like the first black English male writer Gronniosaw, required an amanuensis to take down her autobiography. Like him, and also Equiano, most of her narrative deals with her vicissitudinal life and the assaults she suffered on foreign islands. Yet Prince’s limited record of her experiences in London also foreshadows many of the accounts written by black women over the ensuing 150 years. There are few references to specific districts or landmarks within London – the key site for Prince is domestic, that of the Wood household. Staying out of trouble there takes up most of her time. She has little energy for flexing her topographical imagination; escaping her Leigh Street imprisonment is her only goal. Her interest in geography is confined to the question of whether she is better off behind or beyond the threshold of her master’s home. Mrs Wood exploits Prince’s lack of metropolitan street wisdom in an effort to stop her leaving: if she were to go out, the story went, the people would rob her, and then turn her adrift. Prince leaves the house as an act of desperation: she does not cruise down the Thames, go sharking for men in taverns or alleyways, or savour London’s pleasure gardens. Having to make her own way through the capital’s open spaces is, for her, a source of shame. Even leaving her wicked owners she deems a kind of social failure. This is compounded by her reliance on the charity and generosity of other Londoners such as Mash, the Quakers and the Anti-Slavery Society.
Prince’s autobiography was mired in controversy almost as soon as it was published in 1831. The Methodist Thomas Pringle assured his readers that the book was not only true but that it was ‘essentially her own, without any material alteration farther than was requisite to exclude redundancies and gross grammatical errors’.42 Yet the text’s hints regarding the sexual harassment Prince’s master may have meted out to her are so coyly brief that it’s difficult not to believe that, at the very least, religious prudishness may have induced a degree of self-censorship.
The autobiography was successful and two further editions appeared within a year: the postscript to the first of these referred to Prince’s growing blindness as a way of inducing ‘the friends of humanity to promote the more zealously the sale of this publication’; an appendix to the final edition included a letter from Mrs Pringle to the Secretary of the Birmingham Ladies’ Society for Relief of Negro Slaves which confirmed that the floggings Prince had suffered as a slave had left her body scarred and lacerated.43
In November 1831 James McQueen, a prominent defender of the West India interest and editor of the Glasgow Courier, wrote an article for Blackwood’s Magazine in which he defended the Wood family whom, he claimed, had treated Prince as ‘a confidential and favourite servant’. Only when the ‘prowling anti-colonial fry in London quickly got about her’, he alleged, had she started to malign her beneficent owners.44 McQueen’s plantocratic sympathies are evidenced by his assertion that if Pringle were proved to have libelled the Woods, then the Government ‘must tell the country that the West India colonists are no longer to be persecuted as they have been by ignorance, and by zeal without knowledge’.
Pringle successfully sued the publisher of Blackwood’s for libel in February 1832. He in turn was sued a year later by Prince’s former owner, John Wood, who claimed that accounts of his cruelty had been fabricated. Pringle was unable to produce witnesses to back up his claims and Wood won the case by default. At this latter trial Prince herself was briefly called as a witness. A report described her as ‘a negress of very ordinary features’ who ‘appears to be about thirty-five years of age’.45 After this sighting, however, she disappears from view altogether.
Mary Seacole – arguably the most famous black woman in Britain before Winifred Atwell and Shirley Bassey – was also forced to rely on handouts and noblesse oblige on a number of occasions during her life. Seacole, often referred to as the black Florence Nightingale, was born around 1805 in Kingston, Jamaica. Like Robert Wedderburn, with whom in other respects she had almost nothing socially or politically in common, she had ‘good Scotch blood coursing’ in her veins and was proud to call herself a Creole.46 Her father was a soldier; her mother kept a boarding house and was ‘an admirable doctress’.47 Seacole herself soon developed an interest in nursing and in 1851 helped her brother
