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Aldermanbury — Anti-Slavery Society & Mary Prince

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Aldermanbury — Anti-Slavery Society & Mary Prince

In November 1828 Mary Prince walked into the Anti-Slavery Society’s office on Aldermanbury and met its secretary, Thomas Pringle — the encounter that produced the 1831 ‘History of Mary Prince’, the first slave narrative by a Black woman published in Britain. Aldermanbury, a quiet City street running north from Gresham Street, was in the 1820s and 1830s the address of the Anti-Slavery Society — the umbrella organisation that drove the parliamentary campaign culminating in the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833.

Near the end of November 1828, Mary Prince (b. c. 1788, Bermuda) presented herself at the Society’s office. Born into slavery and brought to London by her owners earlier that year, she had walked out of their house and now sought help. The Society’s secretary, the Scottish writer and abolitionist Thomas Pringle, took her in and arranged for the writer Susanna Strickland to record her testimony.

The resulting book, The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, Related by Herself, was published in February 1831. It went through three printings in its first year and was the first slave narrative by a Black woman to be published in Britain. Mary Prince’s testimony — and the legal aftermath, including a libel trial — was central to the final push for abolition.

(The original Anti-Slavery Society house at Aldermanbury was lost to later redevelopment and the Blitz; the street layout remains.)

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