Mary Prince Biography

The first black woman in Britain to be the subject of a biographical narrative. Prince was born into slavery in Bermuda, and lived as a slave there, in the Turks and Caicos Islands (probably in Grand Turk), and in Antigua. Around Christmas 1826, while she was living in Antigua, she married in the Moravian Church a free black man called Daniel James, an action that greatly annoyed her owners, a local merchant called John Wood and his wife.

In 1828 she went to England with the Woods, and worked for them (without wages) in the house they occupied in London. Continued ill treatment led her to quarrel with the Woods, who threatened to turn her out of the house. They appear to have felt that, as she knew no one in Britain and would wish to return to her husband in Antigua, she would eventually be forced to come back to them of her own accord and cooperate with their demands. Believing that she was free in Britain, Prince left the Woods' house. She was helped for a while by a working‐class couple called Mash (the husband cleaned shoes and knives for a living, while the wife worked as a laundress), who allowed her to live with them ‘a good many months’. She subsequently found work as a domestic servant, first with a Mrs Forsyth, and later (from December 1829) in the household of Thomas Pringle, secretary of the Anti‐Slavery Society, and his wife.

Prince had earlier sought the help of the Anti‐Slavery Society, who had obtained a lawyer's opinion that, while she was free in Britain, this would not affect her legal status as a slave if she were to return to Antigua. While she wished to be reunited with her husband, she was naturally reluctant to risk a return to slavery, particularly as she had ample reason to fear the vindictiveness and ill will of the Woods. Repeated efforts were made by Pringle and the Anti‐Slavery Society to persuade John Wood to agree to sell Prince her freedom, but he persisted in his refusals. In 1829 Pringle also organized the submission of a petition from Prince to the British Parliament in an attempt to have her declared free, but this likewise had no result.

Partly to put pressure on Wood, partly to raise money for Prince's benefit, and partly because her account of her life gave a vivid picture of the cruelties to which slaves were subjected in Bermuda and the Caribbean, and therefore would serve as useful propaganda for the purposes of the Anti‐Slavery Society, in 1831 Pringle arranged for the publication of a pamphlet called The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, which went through three editions in the year of publication. This was described on the title page as ‘related by herself’. While Prince was at least to some extent literate, she had told her story to a friend of the Pringles called Susanna Strickland, who wrote it down, and it was then edited by Thomas Pringle before publication. While the History appears to have been the first biographical account of a black woman to be published as a separate work in Britain, the circumstances of its creation make it difficult to categorize it as autobiographical as we cannot be certain of the extent to which Strickland and Pringle altered Prince's account. There is no reason to doubt the general outline of Prince's life as it is given in the History, or what she says of her own sufferings as a slave and of those of other slaves. However, while Pringle's preface seeks to minimize the extent of the alterations, claiming that the History was ‘essentially her [Prince's] own, without any material alteration further than was requisite to exclude redundancies and gross grammatical errors, so as to render it clearly intelligible’, it is clear that the narrative was considerably rewritten, if only in order to present it in a form of language that is almost entirely a standardized British English, with only occasional words or turns of phrase that are Caribbean. On at least one occasion Strickland referred to herself as the ‘Biographer’ of Prince. The History's modern editors, Moira Ferguson and Sarah Salih, suggest that Pringle was also responsible for playing down references to sexual matters, partly to avoid offending the intended readership and partly to make Prince appear more of a passive victim. Nevertheless, there are certainly passages where what appears to be Prince's personal voice comes through, as, for example, where she says, ‘I have been a slave myself—I know what slaves feel … The man that says slaves be quite happy in slavery—that they don't want to be free—that man is either ignorant or a lying person. I never heard a slave say so.’

The publication of the History did nothing to persuade Wood to change his mind and, instead, involved Pringle in two lawsuits with Wood's supporters. Prince gave evidence at the court cases, in February and March 1833; she was then still living with and working for the Pringles, but no evidence has yet been discovered about her life after this. She was in poor health while in England, and a postscript by Pringle to the second edition (March 1831) of the History stated that she was affected by an eye disease that threatened her sight.

The History remains a compelling account of slavery in the Caribbean. It also offers a clear example of how, before emancipation, the life of a black person regarded as free in Britain was still restricted by the continued existence of slavery in the colonies.

Bibliography and More Information about Mary Prince

• ODNB
• Prince, Mary, The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, as Related by Herself (ed. Moira Ferguson, rev. edn., 1997);
• Prince, Mary, The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave (ed. Sarah Salih, 2000)

See also Somerset case

John Gilmore