“[T]he origin of Charles:” Robert Semple’s Walks and Sketches at the Cape of Good Hope (1803).

This article examines Robert Semple’s Walks and Sketches at the Cape of Good Hope (1803), a largely forgotten early colonial text which intriguingly blends the genres of travel writing and the sentimental novel. My analysis seeks to place the text within the longer genealogies of South African literature in English by arguing that it anticipates a number of the central concerns this literature, among them sympathy for the suffering of others, the representation of racial and social difference, and the fracturing of metropolitan literary protocols in the colonial context. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]