"I Will Say the Truth to the English People": The History of Mary Prince and the Meaning of English History

Perhaps due to the contemporary critical concern with authorship, the first reprint of The History of Mary Prince in 1987, ¹ more than a century and a half after the initial publication of the book, has occasioned articles that concentrate exclusively on the question of voice. Mary Prince arrived in London as a slave in 1828 and, bullied by her owners, Mr. and Mrs. Wood of Antigua, left them to seek refuge in the Anti-Slavery Society in London in November of the same year. In December 1829 she was employed as a domestic servant by Thomas Pringle, secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society in London, who edited and published her memoirs in 1831. The story of the illiterate West Indian woman was written down by Susana Strickland, a recent convert to Methodism and guest in the Pringles' household at the time. Since as a former slave Prince lacked public authority, Pringle inserted numerous testimonies by White Englishmen in the supplement to her History. Thus, even the very first and shortest of all editions of the book included a letter by John Wood, Prince's last owner, who testified against her moral character in the public debate following the narrative, and the collective voice of the "Birmingham Ladies' Society for Relief of Negro Slaves," who stepped in to absolve of allegations of fraud Joseph Phillips--another witness to Prince's trials.

Most of the History's contemporary critics focus on the ex-slave's agency in the proliferation of voices in her narrative. "A delightful book that should be widely used in schools etc as well as women's history classes," announces Joan Grant (1988) who hails Mary Prince unconditionally as "a 'spokeswoman' for Black people in Britain and the Caribbean" (9). "The heteroglot voices compete with but do not dominate Mary Prince's fully integrated sense of self," declares Sandra Paquet in her 1992 article (134), emphasizing the connection critics usually draw between the authenticity of the ex-slave's voice and the success of the book as an anti-colonialist piece of writing. Moira Ferguson calls her introduction to the 1987 and 1997 reprints of the book "The Voice of Freedom: Mary Prince," even though she is not quite as straightforward in her praise of Prince's autonomous voice as Grant. In her book Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670-1834, Ferguson distinguishes between Prince's voice and the voices that participated in the official anti-colonial discourse, which "played a significant role in generating and consolidating nineteenth-century British imperialist and 'domestic-racist' ideology" (6). Ultimately, Ferguson, too, welcomes the History as "the definitive counter to the conventional abolitionist position" (5).

While it is important to recognize Prince's role in publicly condemning the institution of slavery, it seems to me that we cannot fully appreciate her achievement unless we take into consideration the entire publication history of her narrative. With his emphasis on literary production as a social and institutional event, Jerome McGann suggests a way to consider all the implications of the West Indian's story:

From any contemporary point of view, then, each poem [literary text] we read has--when read as work which comes to us from the past--two interlocking histories, one that derives from the author's expressed decisions and purposes, and the other that derives from the critical reactions of the poem's various readers. When we say that every poem is a social event, we mean to call attention to the dialectical relation which plays itself out historically among these various human beings. (17)

Similarly, Prince's expressed purposes in the History are complicated by the reactions of the various readers of the first three editions of the book. Thus, the public debate occasioned by...