Livingstone's 'lives': A metabiography of a Victorian icon

CHAPTER ONE

Bio-diversity: metabiographical method

Someone else, in my limited experience, never gets things quite right.

The exact socio-economic tone, the muddle and eddy of peculiar circumstances are almost inevitably missed.

John Updike, ‘On Literary Biography’

John Updike reportedly once remarked that biographies are nothing but ‘novels with indexes’.¹ This delightfully scathing quip epitomises a certain sense that biography is a spurious enterprise, a genre to be defined in terms of its limits, and best approached with a healthy dose of suspicion. Even where it has not been brushed aside with quite such dismissive disregard, it is notable that biography has not been the subject of serious critical examination until fairly recently. The result is that, for those now writing on the subject, it has become almost axiomatic to pass comment on its lack of theorisation. David Ellis, for instance, refers to on the surprising ‘dearth of analytic enquiry’ that the genre has inspired.² In one of the most recent discussions, by Michael Benton, the familiar complaint is sounded once again as he notes that ‘it has become something of a truism to declare that biography has failed to establish any theoretical foundations’.³ On the whole, argues the practitioner and professor of biographical studies Richard Holmes, the academy ‘has not been very keen to recognize biography’. For the most part, it has been left to itself, ‘outside the established institutes of learning, and beyond the groves of academe’.⁴ These complaints, however, while once valid, have now largely passed into obsolescence. In the last decade or so, research into biography has begun to thrive and a burgeoning, theoretically inclined literature has been produced.⁵ As the discipline has established itself, increasing attention has been directed to the changing nature of biography, across both time and space. It is no homogenous genre, but one that has adapted in order to meet different cultural needs and to serve a variety of interests. As Peter France and William St Clair put it in Mapping Lives, ‘biography is not the same, and does not perform the same tasks, at different times and in different places’. Consequently, the form of criticism they pursue is one that scrutinises ‘the functions which it can serve and has served in different societies, its uses’.⁶

The mode of enquiry that this book adopts is broadly similar in intent. Its subject is the use, function, and evolution of the biographical tradition that has drawn sustenance from the Victorian period’s foremost missionary and explorer, David Livingstone. As John M. MacKenzie has noted, since his death Livingstone ‘has become the subject of a major biographical industry’.⁷ We might add that he has sustained something of an academic industry as well, and one that appears to be far from exhausted. In examining the discursive strata that have sedimented around Livingstone, no single or essential image of the hero emerges. Instead, it becomes clear that he has been represented in diverse ways and put to work in a variety of socio-political contexts. The heterogeneity of Livingstone’s posthumous identity has of course received a certain amount of attention. MacKenzie has remarked on the way in which he appears to have ‘lent himself to any number of iconic images’.⁸ Indeed, as I will argue, Livingstone has been moulded variously by writers emerging from differing socio-cultural locations and with contrasting political purposes. His historical reputation has, in short, shown a remarkable malleability. The aim of this project then is to investigate Livingstone’s legacy, or as it is perhaps better to say, his legacies. MacKenzie has ably sketched the rough shape of Livingstone’s afterlife, but the task remains to open up more fully the plurality of identities that he has acquired since his demise. This book, then, is not another biography. Its terrain is not the chronicle of Livingstone’s life from factory ‘piecer’ to international superstar, nor an account of his missionary activity and explorations in southern and central Africa. It is, rather, a book about biography, an examination of the ways in which one subject has been used, abused, represented and remembered.

In recent decades, Livingstone scholarship has become increasingly interdisciplinary and has turned in many productive intellectual directions. Livingstone has, for instance, played an integral role in studies of nineteenth-century expeditionary science and the culture of exploration,⁹ as well as in scholarship concerned with the Victorian press and the rise of celebrity.¹⁰ Livingstone has long been considered part of the ‘prelude to imperialism’,¹¹ but he is now also discussed in the context of ‘imperial literature’ and the genesis of the ‘dark continent’ mythos.¹² Social anthropologists, moreover, particularly Isaac Schapera, have paid close attention to Livingstone’s ethnographic observations about local African life in various regions.¹³ Even in the Comaroffs’ critical study of cultural collision – a book in which missionaries are cast as agents of the ‘colonization of consciousness’ – notable credit is given to his commentaries on the cultural and linguistic particularities of the Tswana ethnic group.¹⁴ Indeed Livingstone offers one of the very few eyewitness accounts for certain areas of mid-Victorian Africa, and so his writings – from field diaries and journals to bestselling publications – have proven vital to Africanists attempting historical reconstruction.¹⁵ This same written output has likewise proven significant for work on the Victorian publishing industry and the production of travel literature and geographical knowledge.¹⁶ Mission historians have also analysed Livingstone’s theories – which were not always conventional – as well as the extent of his impact on later missionary enterprises.¹⁷ Within mission research more generally, studies on topics as varied as racial and gender politics,¹⁸ the family unit,¹⁹ missionary linguistics,²⁰ natural science,²¹ and expeditionary photography²² have all included reference to Livingstone. Medical historians have likewise anatomised his role as a practitioner, trained in the Scottish system, who produced an extensive body of epidemical commentary. Indeed, Livingstone’s perceptions regarding febrile disease and prophylactic treatment are considered important contributions in the development of tropical medicine.²³

The scholarship constituting Livingstone studies is clearly considerable and comprises diverse academic projects. Nevertheless, within the field, this book is the first extended account of Livingstone’s lengthy posthumous reputation and multiple afterlives.²⁴ While it offers the fullest study of his remembrance to date, it does so within parameters that are resolutely textual. The countless statues, exhibitions and commemorative events that he has inspired could certainly sustain their own monograph-length treatment. Here, however, such forms of memorialisation have largely been laid to one side in order to offer detailed engagement with the ways that Livingstone has been written. Indeed, in documenting Livingstone’s ‘lives’, the methodology I have employed is what might be called metabiographical analysis. This framework, essentially a biography of biographies, was developed by the historian of science Nicolaas Rupke. Surveying the reputation of Alexander von Humboldt, Rupke reflects on what he calls ‘a striking plasticity of the historical record’.²⁵ Humboldt acquired a suite of posthumous identities, and his numerous biographers, across generations of German culture, ‘offered a diversity of reasons for honouring him’: they addressed largely the same biographical material, but ‘molded it differently, developing distinct narrative lines, supported at times by specific hermeneutic and research strategies’.²⁶ In examining the diverse versions of Humboldt, Rupke stresses that his aim is not to discover some ‘essential’ identity, or to finally retrieve the ‘real’ Humboldt from historical misappropriation. Rather, he argues, the task of metabiography is ‘primarily to explore the fact and the extent of the ideological embeddedness of biographical portraits, not to settle the issue of authenticity’.²⁷ The purpose is not to offer the last word on the debate, but instead to interrogate representational difference and its underlying preoccupations. In itself, the existence of variant portrayals of the same life could seem a rather trivial observation. However, metabiography is not just interested in subjective constructions of any historical subject. Its deeper concern is their ideological and institutional ‘embeddedness’ within the ‘remembrance culture of any one period of political history’:²⁸ in other words, what is important is the way in which one life can be recreated according to contemporaneous needs. While of course each reinterpretation of an historical figure will be subjective to a degree, Rupke argues that the constructions are more often than not ‘collective’ in nature.²⁹ Political culture is frequently of greater significance than merely individual predilections. While I will argue that, with Livingstone at least, it is often possible to discern competing versions of his identity at one chronological moment, he has been perpetually constructed in dialogue with the contemporary political environment of his biographers.

In offering a metabiography of Livingstone, this project can be situated within a growing body of research that is concerned with the ideology of representation over and against the pursuit of the subject’s authentic identity.³⁰ Recently, several studies have applied similar methodologies to the afterlives of historical figures. While Rupke has offered the most sophisticated formulation of the metabiographical framework, the same term is used by Lucasta Miller in her examination of the ‘Brontë myth’. In exploring the ‘years of cultural accretion’ that have generated the mythology, Miller does not aim to ‘sweep away all previous false versions of the story and resurrect the true Brontës in their place’.³¹ Instead of engaging in iconoclastic demystification, in order to reveal the ‘real’ Brontës, she offers ‘a book about biography, a metabiography’, which exposes ‘just how malleable the raw material’ of life-writing can be.³² Patricia Fara takes largely the same approach to ‘Newton’s posthumous reputations’. Without explicitly declaring a metabiographical outlook, she states that her work ‘is emphatically not a conventional biography’, for ‘one of its central arguments is that no true representation of Newton exists’;³³ the succeeding reinterpretations of his life were perennially ‘laden with ideological import’.³⁴ Metabiographical elements are evident too in Steven Aschheim’s work on the ‘transformational nature of the Nietzsche legacy’ in Germany. He rejects an essentialist approach that evaluates the vascillating interpretations of the philosopher with a ‘prior interpretive construction of the real Nietzsche’.³⁵ From a cultural historical perspective, the task is not to assess the validity of different interpretations but to ‘map their agendae, contexts and consequences’.³⁶ Metabiography is not as interested in the question of the subject’s true selfhood, as in the malleable and historically situated nature of posthumous identity. Accordingly, this project is less concerned with making its own claims about the ‘real’ David Livingstone than with charting the claims that have been made by so many others.³⁷

The influence of several distinct intellectual currents can be readily detected in metabiographical analysis. Two of these are signalled by Rupke, who considers both reception theory and developments in postmodern approaches to historiography to be precursors to his project. In this sense metabiography weds theories of reading and writing; it is a theory of both hermeneutics and narrative, interpretation and inscription.

The indebtedness of metabiography to the flourishing industry of reception theory lies in its insights into the contrasting production of meaning in differing readerships. Important to the genesis of this movement by way of intellectual influence, and thus a critical foundation to metabiography, were the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans Georg Gadamer. As Robert Holub points out, Gadamer, more than any other thinker has been ‘concerned with the situated nature of our interpretations’ and ‘the historical nature of understanding’.³⁸ For Gadamer, when we read, our inescapable human setting, our locatedness, is necessarily implicated in the production of any meaning that will be ‘discovered’.³⁹ Since our historical boundedness is inexorable, the present situation and past experience of ‘knowers’ become ‘constitutively involved in any process of understanding’.⁴⁰ Rehabilitating the idea of prejudice, Gadamer argues that our preconceptions and presuppositions should not be considered obstacles to understanding: rather, they are actually enabling. As Holub writes, prejudices are in reality ‘a fundamental part of any hermeneutic situation’.⁴¹ The notion of the horizon, which Gadamer so famously developed, is a potent metaphor that is intended to encompass ‘our situatedness in the world’ and everything that we bring to bear on interpretation: the horizon is that ‘over which we cannot see’.⁴²

In Gadamer’s wake, one of his students and one of reception studies’ early theorists, Hans Robert Jauss, began to take account of ‘the reader’s constructive activity’ in approaching a text, and the importance of the ‘paradigms, beliefs and values’ that they brought to bear upon it.⁴³ Following his teacher, Jauss’s ‘methodological centerpiece’ was his notion of the ‘horizon of expectations’, which Robert Holub broadly defines as the ‘structure of expectations, a system of references or a mind-set that a hypothetical individual might bring to any text’.⁴⁴ In a similar vein, another reader-oriented critic, Stanley Fish, argues that meaning should not be understood simply as an inherent quality residing in a text, but rather ‘as an event, something that is happening between the words and in the reader’s mind’.⁴⁵ In the wake of these theorists, subsequent reception studies have turned increasingly to real readers, in an effort to determine the impact of historical and geographical location in the construction of discrete textual meanings. As James Machor and Philip Goldstein observe, working from ‘Jauss’s assumption that as positive constructive influences the prejudices of the reader establish his or her subjective horizon and divide it from the historical other’, modern reception study ‘examines the changing horizons of a text’s many readers’:⁴⁶ its overarching concern is the ‘the sociohistorical contexts of interpretive practice’.⁴⁷ They are aware, as Fish has argued, that readerly habits depend on one’s historical situation, on the social group and ‘interpretive communities’ to which one belongs.⁴⁸ As with texts, the meaning of a life can never be fixed. It inevitably lies open to interpretation and revision. In a sense, metabiography can be considered the consequence of extending hermeneutic logic to the ways in which people and legacies are multifariously interpreted. It is thus an important argument of this book that the historicality and horizons of David Livingstone’s biographers inevitably impinged upon the way in which he was interpreted and deemed to have significance.

But while metabiography is ‘a hermeneutic of biography’, it makes claims that go beyond reception theory.⁴⁹ Indeed, the point is that in life-writing the biographical subject is not just interpreted, but constructed: the biographee not only is reread, but is recreated. Metabiography is not solely a theory about reading but also one about writing. In this respect it is indebted, in a restricted sense at least, to the insights of the postmodern challenge to conventional historical enquiry.⁵⁰ Metabiography necessarily engages with ‘the way we frame historical questions, our attempts to capture past meaning, and the relationship of these to ideology, politics and power’.⁵¹ Although Rupke does not make any explicit link, there is an obvious resonance, even in the name, with Hayden White’s project of ‘metahistory’. As White argues, it is important to take seriously ‘the essentially provisional and contingent nature of historical representations and of their susceptibility to infinite revision’. Historical writing, he contends, has not been sufficiently appraised as a form of narrative. For White, it is vital to examine the historical text as a literary artefact, a discourse whose explanatory power lies in its ability to make ‘stories out of mere chronicles’.⁵² As White puts it, ‘The events are made into a story by the suppression or subordination of certain of them and the highlighting of others, by characterization, motif repetition, variation of tone and point of view, alternative descriptive strategies, and the like.’⁵³ In other words, the facts of the historian have to be selected and then ‘emplotted’ into the narrative form that readers receive.⁵⁴ In this sense historians are involved in making history rather than simply retrieving it. The importance of this perspective for metabiography is White’s observation that the same historical events can be emplotted in disparate ways. The raw biographical material of Livingstone’s life, it will become clear, has been integrated into a variety of plots and inscribed with an array of meanings across different contexts. Our socio-cultural locatedness is thus relevant not only to the way in which we interpret, but to the narratives we choose to write and the way in which we choose to write them. To this degree, the project of metabiography is engaged with the relationship between the writing of history and questions of politics and ideology.

To argue this is not necessarily to cast the historical method aside as irredeemably fictive, or to lapse into a debilitating relativism. Metabiographical analysis is itself an historical endeavour, a mode of enquiry that presumes the capacity to detect the agendas at work in the biographical representations it explores. Rather than wallowing in the limits of our capacity to effect historical insights, the challenge is to approach the task of recovering the past in a chastened manner. While historians and biographers may not be in the business of tracking down objective truth, it is nonetheless the case that there are varying degrees of warrant for the claims they make. Some versions of history will clearly have greater credibility than others. It is worth pointing out that, to some extent, the partiality of historical research has long been acknowledged in practice. It is now over fifty years since E.H. Carr enjoined scholars to ‘study the historian before you begin to study the facts’.⁵⁵ Few historians naively believe they are in the business of capturing unambiguous truth; they are under no illusion that their findings are anything more than provisional. The encounter with postmodernism then, has most conspicuous benefit when it heightens such reflexivity in the practice of both history and biography. As one of its foremost critics, Richard J. Evans, observes, postmodernism at its best can encourage ‘historians to look more closely at documents, to take their surface patina more seriously, and to think about texts and narratives in new ways’, while interrogating ‘their own methods and procedures as never before’.⁵⁶ In this way, it has the potential to have a self-referential therapeutic effect on research. Despite the postmodern influences on my metabiography of Livingstone, I do not deny that some biographical portrayals are more plausible than others. Yet, the respective quality and authenticity of the representations is a question that this study, and all metabiography, must set to one side in order to prosecute its fundamental argument: all biographies, regardless of sophistication, intersect with the socio-political cultures from which they emerge.

Further to the impact of reception theory and postmodernism, recent developments in biographical studies have added credence to the metabiographical project. While they may not have influenced Rupke’s formulation directly, they are striking in their intellectual compatibility. As Richard Holmes has pointed out, one of the most notable features of life-writing as a genre is the way in which biographies continually pass into redundancy, to be supplanted by others offering a fresh take on the life in question. The process by which biographies re-envision their subjects in the light of the present registers how ‘social and moral attitudes’ and ‘standards of judgement’ evolve between generations.⁵⁷ Biography’s inherent dynamic of perpetual reinterpretation functions as a barometer of broader societal changes. Its ‘shifts and differences – factual, formal, stylistic, ideological, aesthetic’ are some of the genre’s most stimulating features and, for Holmes, they warrant the founding of ‘virtually a new discipline’ for which he offers the epithet ‘comparative biography’. Such a project would entail an examination of ‘the handling of one subject by a number of different biographers, and over several different historical periods’. ⁵⁸ Metabiography is at the very least intimately related to this enterprise, yet one could even consider it to be a fully articulated response to the disciplinary appeal for comparative biography.

That a life can be rewritten from ever-new angles indicates that a perennial feature of biography is debate. This duly raises questions about the nature of the genre itself: just what kind of writing is it, where dispute is the life-blood? One feature that recent criticism has commented on is its inability to truly capture its subject, the sense that the biographee always remains elusive. Lucasta Miller suggests that ‘Patchwork, rather than photographic likeness, is all the biographer can truly hope to achieve.’⁵⁹ Even the fullest representation of a life will never be more than partial. In the same vein, criticism has also drawn attention to biography’s irremediable subjectivity. As Hermione Lee writes, it can never offer ‘an entirely objective treatment’ of a life since ‘we write from a certain position, constructed by our history, nationality, race, gender …’.⁶⁰ This is of course true, broadly speaking, of all life’s interpretive endeavours, for we are inherently located beings. A stronger version of this argument, however, goes so far as to contend that every biography is really a kind of autobiography, revealing as much about the author as about the subject.⁶¹ While this is overstating the case, and implies a pessimistic view of our capacity to comprehend the other, the autobiographical function of biography is a suggestive notion. Indeed, many of those who wrote ‘lives’ of Livingstone did recreate him in their own image. He was continually constructed so as to instantiate the politics and cherished values of those producing him.

Related to the charge of subjectivity is the contention that biography incorporates ‘fictive’ elements. This stems from the way in which, through narrative, it imposes form on the facts of its subject’s existence. As Miranda Seymour points out, ‘Life in the raw is often shapeless; the biographers must create their persuasive narrative by inserting a connecting thread.’⁶² Biographies are thus subject to aesthetic considerations and the compulsion to create a compelling and satisfying story. It has even been suggested that the creative impulse is more complex in biography than in fiction. Michael Benton argues, developing an observation of David Cecil’s, that ‘the novelist’s creativity shows itself mainly in invention, in the power to create characters, to put them in scenes’. ‘[T]he biographer’s creativity’, on the other hand, ‘shows itself in interpretation, in a capacity to discover in the scenes and anecdotes and the mass of other raw material the dominant thematic life story to be fashioned into a work of art.’⁶³ The deeply interpretive nature of life-writing, its artistic mores and its formal proximity to fiction are thus integral features of the genre.

Yet it seems self-evident that biography is not purely fictional. While David Ellis notes that both biographers and novelists ‘use many of the same literary devices and methods’, he argues that outward semblance should not be taken to mean that the two forms are identical.⁶⁴ A key difference of course is ‘the imaginary pact’ that biographers make to respect the information to which they have access.⁶⁵ Any story that they tell must coalesce with the evidence they have assembled. In other words, biographers and novelists deal with a different order of events; the former are bound to aspire towards a faithful depiction of what really happened and what their subject was really like, even if this remains difficult to grasp. While biographies are interpretive, and so are necessarily underdetermined by the facts of a life, the possibility of true representation must at least serve as a regulative principle for good biographical practice. All this rubs up, however, against that ever-present imperative to translate a life into a compelling tale. It is this tension that has led recent critics to theorise biography as a genre that occupies the space between fiction and history. As Holmes suggests, ‘all good biographers struggle with a particular tension between the scholarly drive to assemble facts as dispassionately as possible and the novelistic urge to find shape and meaning’.⁶⁶ Michael Benton similarly argues that biography ‘lies between history and fiction’, and that its ‘main generic feature’ is a ‘concern to document facts driven by a strong narrative impulse’.⁶⁷ Biography shares terrain with fiction in aesthetics, but parts company in its function and subject matter. This leads critics like Lucasta Miller to call it ‘an amphibious art form’.⁶⁸ Or as Benton puts it, biography is ‘hybrid’.⁶⁹ The difficulty with these descriptions, however, is that they could be taken to imply that biography is in some way a corrupted or inferior genre. Indeed, as Ben Pimlott observes, biography has sometimes been seen as ‘neither chalk nor cheese: limited in imaginative range, and of its nature insufficiently grounded in the historical method’.⁷⁰ Emphasising biography’s hybridity could thus enforce the unfortunate notion that it is not quite one thing or the other. As Pimlott reminds us, however, biography ‘can claim to be as ancient as any other written form’. It is not the little cousin of two great genres: rather, ‘Biography is itself.’⁷¹ However, as long as it is understood to be an entity in its own right, the recognition of biography’s amphibian and hybrid character can be productive. These concepts helpfully draw attention to the dualistic and interstitial nature of an enduringly popular literary form.

Given the complex makeup of life-writing, Benton suggests that we should describe and study it as ‘biomythography’.⁷² In supplying this moniker, he seeks to counterbalance the received notion that biography offers unmediated access to its subject by drawing attention to the process of myth-making that is so prevalent in its literature. While taking biography’s concern with the documentary record seriously, Benton aims to subvert ‘any concept of life-writing based on a simplistic account of supposed facts’.⁷³ His model is intended to serve as a reminder that a life can never quite be textually captured and that consequently, no biography can ever be considered truly ‘definitive’. Biomythography has clear resonances with the metabiographical project, for it is interested in the mutability of biographical representation and the tendency of each generation to rewrite its celebrated lives anew according to contemporary concerns and conventions.

In addition to its roots in reception theory and the postmodern encounter with history, metabiography thus clearly rises to meet certain disciplinary demands in biographical studies. It fulfils the petition for biomythography by attending to the interpretive and fictive dimensions of life-writing: in fact, the contingent and constructed nature of biography is the sine qua non of this project. Furthermore, metabiography also responds to Holmes’s suggestion that comparative analysis is one of the most productive means of studying the genre. It is not merely a theoretical paradigm, but a direct call to detailed empirical study across a range of contexts. In examining the shifting legacy of a single figure, David Livingstone, questions of history will therefore be paramount. In addition, comparative analysis necessitates a discussion of location, for geographical situatedness bears upon biographical narration. Metabiography will thus be attentive to what Stephen Daniels and Catherine Nash describe as the relationship ‘between script and space in the making of life histories’.⁷⁴

Before going on to examine Livingstone’s afterlife, the next chapter sets out to consider his own self-representation by critically analysing his bestselling travelogue, Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (1857). Despite being one of the most celebrated travel texts of the nineteenth century, and a cornerstone of his posthumous reputation, the book has received surprisingly little critical attention. Treating the text as a mechanism of self-projection, the chapter discusses the narrative strategies by which Livingstone managed his image and cultivated his authority as an explorer. In writing Missionary Travels, he drew on a number of genres in order to create a hybrid text and thereby present a multifaceted persona to the public. The body of letters between Livingstone and his publisher, John Murray, which deal with the process of the book’s publication, are central to the argument of this chapter. Through this correspondence, Missionary Travels is revealed to be a censored text, subject to a process of rigorous ‘impression management’. Livingstone’s editing practices, and indeed the pressures of the marketplace, become yet clearer when the published version of the book is compared with the original handwritten manuscript. While this manuscript has been routinely overlooked in Livingstone scholarship, it contains a number of significant variations to the print version. Most importantly, Livingstone had originally included a protracted diatribe against the role of the British in the Cape Frontier Wars. Engaging in counterfactual speculation, we might surmise that his posthumous reputation might have been rather different had he not excised this powerful extract. Livingstone’s text had an active imperialist afterlife, deeply influencing the way in which Victorian Britain perceived the African continent. Some of the material that he removed for publication, however, might not have been quite so appealing to imperialist sensibilities. Yet, even as it stands in its published version, Missionary Travels should be considered a highly complex text and one that cannot be unproblematically categorised as imperialist. Indeed, it is likely that Livingstone has been able to sustain such diverse posthumous interpretations because of the protean nature of his text, which has offered readers a range of exploitable quotations to draw upon. This is, of course, true only to a limited extent, for the interpretive practices and prejudices of his biographers were of the utmost consequence.

In the third chapter, I proceed to explore Livingstone’s Victorian commemoration by focusing on the ways in which he was constructed in 1874, the year in which his body was returned to British soil after his death in the African continent. When Livingstone passed away in Chitambo, Ilala, after a long battle with debilitating illness, his attendants removed and buried his innards and dried and preserved his body, before transporting it to the coastal town of Bagamoyo in a journey of over a thousand miles. From there, his remains were shipped to Britain, where he was granted a national funeral in the tomb of heroes, Westminster Abbey. The news and circumstances of Livingstone’s death quickly took on sensational proportions and were reported, discussed and debated in the contemporary press. He was venerated in numerous obituaries and eulogies, as well as in a profusion of elegiac poetry. Focusing solely on the year of Livingstone’s interment presents a unique opportunity to explore this wealth of previously unexamined literature, which was of course integral to the constitution of his legacy. This process of memorialisation opens a window on the Victorian cult of the hero and the period’s culture of death and mourning. More important than this, however, is the fact that Livingstone was not always commemorated in the same manner. By examining the differing ways that he was produced in diverse social spaces, Livingstone’s name and legacy are revealed to be the subject of dispute; he was, to some degree at least, a space for debate. While Livingstone was certainly the hero of Victorian culture, he is perhaps better thought of as a hero who had multiple meanings for a plurality of Victorian cultures.

The fourth chapter takes up Livingstone’s post-mortem imperialist reputation, which can be considered the hegemonic dimension of his afterlife. Most of the texts that use Livingstone in this way can be described as ‘exemplary lives’ – or even ‘hagiography’ – in that they idealise their subject, presenting him entirely without blemish. While saintly writing of this stripe was predominantly a Victorian penchant, such biographical practices broke the confines of the nineteenth century. The first argument of this chapter is that the many hagiographic representations of Livingstone were imperialist in their effects. They often emplotted him into a romance narrative in which he played the role of the questing hero. Applied to an African context, this construed a racial dynamic in which the white explorer was elevated into a conquering champion, while indigenous peoples were reduced to obstacles that barred his path and confronted him with disorder. After exploring the logic of hagiography, the focus of the chapter turns to the way in which Livingstone was routinely shaped by his biographers in order to meet the demands of the changing face of empire. Expanding on John M. MacKenzie’s account of Livingstone’s legacy, I argue that, as the poster-boy of imperialism, he was remoulded and re-presented with each major shift in colonial policy in a pattern that persisted into the empire’s twilight years. Yet it is an important argument of this chapter that he was not presented homogenously at any one chronological moment. Certainly, shifts in colonial attitude were decisive, but Livingstone was used by his biographers to enter into dialogue with their contemporary environment. Indeed, while he was continually found to speak to present-day politics, Livingstone was actually constructed according to a range of imperialisms. This chapter also explores a less-developed dimension of Livingstone’s legacy that resisted the hegemonic colonialist representation. Certain authors countervailed the norm by using him to offer a limited critique of imperialism. For several of his biographers dating from the mid-twentieth century, Livingstone foreshadowed sensitive intercultural engagement and even cultural relativism.

In recent years, a considerable amount of Livingstone scholarship has been devoted to his Scottish identity and his position within the nation’s social and intellectual history. In keeping with this critical trajectory, my fifth chapter takes up Livingstone’s Scottish legacy. The aim, however, is not to discuss the formative influence of his cultural background or the Scottish bent of his ideas and vision. Rather, the purpose is to ask both how his Scottishness has been represented, and more specifically, how he has been represented by Scots. The chapter begins by considering those biographies that were not particularly interested in his Alban roots at all. Indeed, for some, Livingstone embodied an ‘English’ national character, while, for others, he exemplified supposedly ‘Anglo-Saxon’ qualities. In these Anglocentric representations, Livingstone’s Scottishness was not quite effaced but was certainly relegated to the sideline. Yet, for his northern biographers, the explorer’s national identity has been of vital importance and has functioned in a variety of contexts. Under the Celtic revival, from the late nineteenth century, researchers took it upon themselves to delve into Livingstone’s Gaelic lineage. In an effort to confront Anglo-Saxonism, and to increase the prestige of the Gàidhealtachd, Livingstone was soon connected with a range of Highland heritages. In contrast to the polarised Anglo-Saxon and Celtic representations, other authors were attracted to Livingstone because he could represent a fusion of races. While his ancestry was Highland and Jacobite on his father’s side, it was Lowland and Covenanting on his mother’s. Given the longstanding antipathy between the Highland and Lowland regions, it was fitting that Scotland’s foremost champion could serve as a unifying figure for the entire nation. At the same time, I argue, many authors sought to use Livingstone for an even broader purpose, in order to assert a Scottish national consciousness within the confines of the Union and empire. In the late nineteenth century, and leading up to the First World War, those who were keen to assert Scotland’s prestige within the imperial project insisted on the vital influence of Livingstone’s nation of origin in shaping his character and talents. One of the effects of the preoccupation with Livingstone’s Scottishness, however, was the production of many biographies redolent of Kailyard literature. Presenting his life in terms of Scotland’s best-known genre was ambivalent in its effects: on the one hand, it conveyed a limited and parochial vision of the nation, but on the other, it served to direct attention to Livingstone’s identity as a Scot. The chapter concludes by revisiting the period of the Scottish National Memorial to David Livingstone, which opened in 1929.⁷⁵ Since it enshrined him as a distinctly national hero, this is generally thought of as the era in which the connection between Livingstone and Scottish identity was at its strongest. While this is true to a large extent, I offer some revision of this perspective. By chronicling the longer history of Livingstone’s Scottish legacy, I argue that the memorial should be understood as both an intensification and modification of a longstanding national reputation.

Following this coverage of Livingstone’s extensive biographical legacy, the sixth chapter examines the ways in which he has been represented in fiction and drama. The creative literature that David Livingstone inspired has not been subjected to sustained interrogation; in fact, it has been almost universally ignored. This is surprising, for even while they are outweighed in volume by the numerous biographical portraits, fictional portrayals constitute a significant dimension of his reputation in their own right. The most interesting of this work emerges in the aftermath of the political and intellectual shifts that were inaugurated by decolonisation. Under the auspices of postcolonialism, Livingstone was radically rewritten: he served as a cherished icon of empire, and thus as a focal point against which to direct critique, vandalism and the project of ‘writing back’. In symbolic capacity, he was employed to debunk the Western myth of ‘discovery’, to ‘laugh back’ at the imperial centre and to offer comment on both the linguistic legacy of imperialism and the complex relationship between Christianity and colonialism. But while the politico-intellectual project of postcolonialism spawned some of the most creative re-evaluations, an alternative image of Livingstone emerged from the oppressive context of South African apartheid. For certain authors with liberal and radical agendas, he symbolised in varying degrees the breakdown of division and the possibility of positive racial interaction.

Although Livingstone has been scrutinised extensively by historians, historical geographers and historical anthropologists, it is perhaps a perspective derived from a background in literary analysis that permits an original contribution to the field. It is close engagement with textuality, literary genre and authorship that enables this book to offer a critical exploration of David Livingstone’s multifaceted legacy, covering ground from his own self-staging to his Victorian commemoration, and from imperial and Scottish representations to fictional re-creations. Interpreting the term ‘biography’ broadly – so as to encompass forms of life-writing such as elegy, obituary, drama and the novel – this metabiography traces the rich range of contexts in which Livingstone has found meaning and maps the evolution of these reputations over a considerable historical period. Of course even in the span of a lifetime, the meaning of a self is never stable. As Richard Jenkins argues, selfhood should not be conceived of as ‘a fixed entity’ that persists in stasis throughout life’s duration, but instead should be ‘understood as process, as being or becoming’.⁷⁶ Indeed, as Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre have suggested, the self can be grasped as a story, an unfolding and developing narrative.⁷⁷ And this narrative, as my study shows, does not conclude with an individual’s death. The subject’s identity is not left to rest in peace, but persists in an afterlife of continued revision which generates fresh meanings in ever new contexts.

Notes

1  In his essay ‘The Proper Study’, which appeared in Mapping Lives, Richard Holmes attributed this quotation to an article by Updike in the New York Review of Books (4 February 1999). The phrase, however, does not actually occur anywhere within Updike’s piece, which is entitled ‘One Cheer for Literary Biography’. Others who have cited this comment, like Hermione Lee in Biography: A Very Short Introduction, quote it indirectly from Mapping Lives.

2  David Ellis, Literary Lives: Biography and the Search for Understanding (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), p. 3.

3  Michael Benton, Literary Biography: An Introduction (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), p. 3.

4  Richard Holmes, ‘The Proper Study?’, in Peter France and William St Clair (eds), Mapping Lives: The Uses of Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 7.

5  Indeed, Holmes’s own appointment to a chair of ‘Biographical Studies’ in East Anglia signals the change in intellectual climate.

6  Peter France and William St Clair, ‘Introduction’, in Peter France and William St Clair (eds), Mapping Lives: The Uses of Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 4.

7  John M. MacKenzie, ‘David Livingstone and the Worldly After-Life: Imperialism and Nationalism in Africa’, in John M. MacKenzie (ed.), David Livingstone and the Victorian Encounter with Africa (London: National Portrait Gallery, 1996), p. 203.

8  John M. MacKenzie, ‘The Iconography of the Exemplary Life: The Case of David Livingstone’, in Geoffrey Cubitt and Allen Warren (eds), Heroic Reputations and Exemplary Lives (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 102.

9  Lawrence Dritsas, Zambesi: David Livingstone and Expeditionary Science in Africa (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010); Felix Driver, Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001); James R. Ryan, Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire (London: Reaktion Books, 1997).

10  Clare Pettitt, Dr. Livingstone, I Presume? Missionaries, Journalists, Explorers, and Empire