Livingstone's 'lives'

A metabiography of a Victorian icon

Justin Livingstone

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781526106797
  9780719095320
• eBook ISBN:
  9781847799128
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Architecture General
• Index: History

David Livingstone, the 'missionary-explorer', has attracted more commentary than nearly any other Victorian hero. Beginning in the years following his death, he soon became the subject of a major biographical tradition. Yet out of this extensive discourse, no unified image of Livingstone emerges. Rather, he has been represented in diverse ways and in a variety of socio-political contexts.

Until now, no one has explored Livingstone's posthumous reputation in full. This book meets the challenge. In approaching Livingstone's complex legacy, it adopts a metabiographical perspective: in other words, this book is a biography of biographies. Rather than trying to uncover the true nature of the subject, metabiography is concerned with the malleability of biographical representation. It does not aim to uncover Livingstone's 'real' identity, but instead asks: what has he been made to mean?

Crossing disciplinary boundaries, Livingstone's 'lives' will interest scholars of imperial history, postcolonialism, life-writing, travel-writing and Victorian studies.

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...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• General editor’s introduction
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations and a note on spelling
• 1 Bio-diversity: metabiographical method
• 2 Styling the self: making Missionary Travels
• 3 Death: lamenting Livingstone
• 4 Empire: imperial afterlives
• 5 Nation: Scotland’s son
• 6 Fiction: laughing at Livingstone?
• 7 Revisionism: sins, psyche, sex
• Index