Thomas Pringle in South Africa 1820-1826 by Wahl, John Robert (editor)

(Cape Town: Longman South Africa, 1970) 0582609216. Oblong 4to; original white boards; pictorial dustwrapper; pictorial endpapers; pp. xii + 124; full-colour plates after contemporary paintings; etchings in text; map. Some foxing to reverse of dustwrapper, to boards and edges, occasional fox spot elsewhere. Very good condition. "Thomas Pringle, South Africa's first poet and the most gifted writer among the 1820 Settlers, was born on a farm in Roxburghshire on the Scottish border on January 5th, 1789, and arrived in South Africa on the brig Brilliant on the last day of April, 1820. His account of his life in South Africa, A Narrative of a Residence in South Africa, is one of the classics of frontier literature of the Nineteenth Century ... The aim of the present edition is to make Pringle's Narrative more accessible to the general reader by eliminating all extensive borrowings from other authors and other secondary material, and by concentrating throughout on what Pringle calls his 'personal' narrative. It will be of great interest for the general reader as well as those who have their roots in the settlement of the 1820's, and also for those who have an interest in this most exciting period of South African history." .