This paper is about a singular book – Missionary Travels – and its wider significance in the history of exploration, geography and travel writing. It is organised, like a miniature Victorian triple-decker, into three parts. The first portrays the exploration of Africa as a literary event: in order to understand a work like Missionary Travels, we need to grasp something of the wider culture in which knowledge about distant places was produced and consumed (Driver 1996). The second considers the text of Missionary Travels itself, focussing on its somewhat paradoxical form: for what is perhaps the nineteenth century’s best-known travel narrative is in many respects not a narrative at all, and only partly about travel. There are multiple hands and voices at work in this book, as was typically the case with published works on exploration andtravel(MacLaren 2011;Withers & Keighren 2011;Henderson 2012).Moreover, for a text sometimes supposed to epitomise the certitudes of the pre-Darwinian moral world, the authorial voice is notably ambivalent about its own claims to knowledge. The final part of the paper considers the ways in which Livingstone’s book was put to work, by missionary, explorer and imperial adventurer alike. This, its afterlife, is as much part of the story of Missionary Travels as the author and the original text themselves
sinekeu222094834 on 26 Apr 23This passage describes Dr. Livingstone, a famous Scottish explorer who undertook three expeditions into the Africa in the 19th century. He travelled an astonishing 29,000 miles, a greater distance than the circumference of the earth and did so during a time when almost nothing was known about Africa's interior. His achievements were incredible, especially considering the lack of knowledge and infrastructure during the Victorian era.
