Missionary Travels: Livingstone, Africa and the Book

ABSTRACT

‘I think I would rather cross the African continent again than undertake to write another book. It is far easier to travel than to write about it’. So wrote David Livingstone in the preface to his best-selling work, Missionary Travels (1857). Yet writing was what Livingstone spent much of his time in Africa doing, and on any scrap of paper he could find. And it was not travelling but writing, or rather more precisely publishing, which made his fortune. The European exploration of Africa during the nineteenth century has so often been treated as a story of action and adventure, that it is easy to overlook the fact that it was also a literary event. Missionary Travels became one of the best known works of travel writing in the English language, and it was widely read, reproduced and translated. In order to appreciate the significance and impact of Missionary Travels within Britain and beyond, this paper sets the work in the context of contemporary cultures of exploration and empire. It also seeks to unravel the story of the making of the book and the different hands and voices at work in its composition, including those of illustrators, sponsors and publishers.

KEY WORDS:

• historical geography
• postcolonialism
• Livingstone
• exploration
• print culture

Acknowledgements

This article originated in a lecture originally delivered in the ‘Great Books on Africa’ series, organised by the Basler Afrika Bibliographien in collaboration with the University of Basel in May 2007. I would like to thank Patrick Harries for the invitation. My subsequent thinking on the subject has been significantly influenced by Louise Henderson's path-breaking PhD thesis on geographical publishing in Victorian Britain. I am very grateful to the SGJ referees for their comments.

Notes

¹ Subsequent references to the 1857 edition of Missionary Travels are cited as page numbers within the text.

² There is now a growing literature on the role of indigenous peoples and other intermediaries in the conduct of exploration. For African examples, see Simpson (1975), Rockel (2000), Chrétien (2005) and Kennedy (2013). For further useful reflections on the theme in other geographical contexts and from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, see Burnett (2002), Fogel-Chance (2002), Raj (2006), Jones (2010) and Mueggler (2011).

³ For more general discussions of nineteenth-century African travel writing, see McAleer (2010) and Youngs (1994). On the relationship between exploration narratives and adventure fiction, see White (1993); on the image of explorer as imperial celebrity, see Berenson (2011).