Dr Livingstone, I presume?
Exploration changed in the middle of the nineteenth century, when Henry Morton Stanley met Dr David Livingstone.
We discover that Livingstone isn’t remembered for anything he achieved. A missionary and medical doctor from a poor Scottish background – and an indestructible traveller - he learned to make accurate geographical calculations and used them to map a small part of Africa. Amazingly he did most of his successful exploration with an African team and backed by African funds. The Africans, it turns out, had their own good reasons to back him. Once the British government was involved, he got spectacularly next to nothing done at all.
Livingstone’s story changed from a passing curiosity into an international sensation when he was abandoned by smart London society and picked up by a brand-new breed of cheap popular newspapers. Henry Morton Stanley only went looking for Dr Livingstone in 1871 (and said – or said he said – ‘Dr Livingstone I presume’) because he was being extravagantly funded by the New York Herald to write a spicy story of human interest and adventure. Plenty of people, it turns out, already knew where Livingstone was.
It set the pattern for eight decades. After Livingstone, many of the most famous explorers turn out to have been funded, written up and remembered not for anything they actually discovered (or, often tragically failed to discover) but because of what the press was willing to pay for and print.
Exploration changed in the middle of the nineteenth century, when Henry Morton Stanley met Dr David Livingstone.
We discover that Livingstone isn’t remembered for anything he achieved. A missionary and medical doctor from a poor Scottish background – and an indestructible traveller - he learned to make accurate geographical calculations and used them to map a small part of Africa. Amazingly he did most of his successful exploration with an African team and backed by African funds. So why did he become an international sensation?
Livingstone was the first European to record his visit to Smoke that Thunders on the Zambezi river. 100 metres of plummeting water, across the entire kilometre of the Zambezi’s width. He promptly named it after his queen, Victoria Falls. His ambition was to find a navigable river from the east coast of Africa inland. Although it was clear that Smoke that Thunders would put a stop to any trade boats navigating any further inland he remained undaunted. He calculated that just being able to bring a ship this far would be well worth the effort. Now he just had to hope that there was nothing else like these immense falls before the Zambezi reached the sea.
The British audience for Livingstone’s book 'Missionary Travels' can’t get enough of his ‘manly’ and ‘forcible’ style. He brings a very personal mix of far-away adventure and science to his stories. His account of being mauled by a lion – shaken like ‘a terrier dog does a rat’ and how the tartan jacket saves his life – are still vivid reading. But had he not glossed over the danger of malaria and other diseases fatal to Victorian Britons (in much the same way as he casually dismissed as an ‘inconvenience’ the arm savaged by the lion and rendered useless even before his real exploring days had begun) fewer missionaries and their families would have died trying to follow in his footsteps.
Henry Morton Stanley, the New York-born journalist who was actually born in Wales, ‘finds’ Livingstone, although everyone knows he’s not lost. Stanley’s employer Gordon Bennett Jr of the daily New York Herald has spotted a fantastic money-making enterprise, pedalling fictitious stories of the romantic failures of the British explorer, Dr Livingstone. It was time for the Americans to take over the exploration of Africa. The British had bogged themselves down with ‘too many theodolites, barometers, sextants’. Stanley and other ‘energetic… reckless Americans’ would ‘command … an expedition more numerous and better appointed than any that has ever entered Africa’ and infinitely more ruthless.
The events that followed Livingstone’s funeral are perhaps important for the light they shed on everything that Livingstone was not. Stanley, having declared that he would complete what Livingstone had begun, undertook three ‘momentous’ journeys. Whatever the cover stories he created, Stanley’s expeditions were intended to grab and occupy African lands, sometimes through fake treaties he claimed to have signed with African leaders. One result was the wholesale mapping of central Africa; the other was what we now know as the ‘scramble for Africa’, a gruesome series of invasions and seizures by European states. Stanley’s presumption earned him the lasting scorn and hatred of the British establishment. But his ability as a publicist won Livingstone a place in the nation’s affection – and that lived on much longer. FINAL EP IN SERIES
For original material on Livingstone look no further than livingstoneonline.org. It’s the product of an extraordinary and extended multi-university co-operation. The site contains an enormous number of Livingstone documents, as well as many excellent papers by authorities in the field, educational resources and a fine bibliography. You really need to look no further. But here are some thoughts to get you started.
Tim Jeal’s large Livingstone (London 1973, revised and expanded 2013) is still the go-to book to check facts. Many of Jeal’s original judgments have also held up pretty well, especially the conclusion that Livingstone’s celebrity owed much to the way he happened to fit in with many of the preoccupations of his time. Andrew Ross’s David Livingstone: Mission and Empire (London 2002) is a well-judged, thoughtful account. Meriel Buxton’s David Livingstone (NY 2001) is shorter and lighter reading. It’s a lucid, a workmanlike introduction, even if it is not always accurate. Clare Pettitt’s very straightforward Dr Livingstone I presume? Missionaries, Journalists, Explorers and Empire (London 2007) adds some colour.
To understand how the African context completely transforms this story you should start with Walima Kalusa’s analysis of Kololo, ‘Elders, Young Men, and David Livingstone's "Civilizing Mission": Revisiting the Disintegration of the Kololo Kingdom, 1851-1864’, The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 42 (2009), pp. 55-80. Also Kalusa’s ‘Strange Bedfellows: David Livingstone, Sekeletu, Imported Goods, and the 1853–1856 Trans-African Expedition’, Journal of African Cultural Studies 27 (2014), pp. 133–45.
Then read Stephen C. Volz, ‘Them Who Kill the Body: Christian Ideals and Political Realities in the Interior of Southern Africa during the 1850s’, Journal of Southern African Studies 36 (2010) pp. 41-56.
Lawrence Dritsas, Zambesi. David Livingstone and Expeditionary Science in Africa (London 2010) is a detailed and carefully balanced, but nonetheless damning analysis of Livingstone’s disastrous 1858-64 expedition.
Despite its title, Justin D. Livingstone, Livingstone’s ‘Lives’. A Metabiography of a Victorian Icon (Manchester 2014) does a good job of translating a good deal of contemporary historical-geographical scholarship on Livingstone – thought-provoking but horribly obscured in technical-sounding language – into readable prose. His chapter on the writing of Livingstone’s book, Missionary Travels, is the heart of it. Adrian Wisnicki, ‘Interstitial cartographer: David Livingstone and the invention of south central Africa’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 37 (2009), pp. 255-271 is an illuminating and not-too rebarbative example of the genre.
Revealing background to the illustrations in Missionary Travels is in Leila Koivunen, ‘Visualizing Africa – Complexities of illustrating David Livingstone’s Missionary Travels’, Ennen Ja Nyt, The Papers of the Nordic Conference on the History of Ideas, 1 (2001), pp. 1-12, which later grew into a much broader book, Visualizing Africa in Nineteenth-Century British Travel Accounts (Lonodn 2011).
To understand Victorian geography, the place to begin is Felix Driver’s outstanding Geography Militant. Cultures of Exploration and Empire (Oxford and Malden Ma. 2001). It’s also the place to get to know – insofar as you would ever want to - Henry Morton Stanley. Take a look also at T. Jack Thompson, ‘Lake Malawi, I Presume? David Livingstone, Maps and the 'Discovery' of Lake Nyassa in 1859’, The Society of Malawi Journal, 66 (2013), pp. 1-15.
Sir Roderick Murchison has one modern biographer. Robert A Stafford’s Scientist of Empire: Sir Roderick Murchison, Scientific Exploration and Victorian Imperialism (CUP 1989) is well researched and written. For the authentic Victorian experience, dip into Archibald Geikie’s readable 1878 Life of Sir Roderick Murchison, which you can find on archive.org.
Joanna Lewis, Empire of Sentiment. The death of Livingstone and the myth of Victorian Imperialism (Cambridge 2018) has a surprisingly enjoyable account of Livingstone’s death and funeral, readably peeling away the layers of myth with a good deal of black humour (at the price of some eyebrow-raising, throw-away interpretations.)
For the important changes taking place in the press, see Joel Wiener’s scholarly The Americanisation of the British Press (2011). Also Jonathan Silberstein-Loeb, ‘The Structure of the New Market in Britain, 1870-1914’, Business History Review 83 (2009), pp. 759-88. To read contemporary newspapers themselves, you need to sign up to the British Newspaper Archive here and use its powerful search engine. It’s a resource historians have not yet fully exploited. If you can track down the original transactions of the Royal Geographical Society for this period, they too are rewarding for this subject.