David Livingstone and the Literature of African Exploration
Paper 1: Dr Justin Livingstone
Manuscript to Print: Editing Livingstone, Past and Present
For scholars of Victorian exploration, British imperial culture, and nineteenth-century African history, David Livingstone’s Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (1857) has long been regarded as an important document. Yet, although the travelogue bears canonical status in the corpus of African travel writing, Livingstone’s handwritten draft of the book – which has seldom been read– offers new perspectives. Extending the work of book historians who attend to the negotiations involved in the publishing process, this paper goes behind the final publication offered to readers in 1857. By examining editorial interventions, emendations, and excised material, it traces the narrative’s literary journey from manuscript to print. This research emerges from ongoing work towards a digital image-based edition of Missionary Travels. Integrating insights from this project, the paper offers reflections on the possibilities of digital scholarship for work on the archive of exploration.
Paper 2: Dr Kate Simpson
Rediscovering David Livingstone in the Digital Archive
David Livingstone is a Victorian hero, Christian missionary, relic from the classrooms of people’s youth, and most famous for being the recipient of the phrase “Dr Livingstone, I presume”. The fact that due to the digital archive, we can now read his previously unpublished works, or works not considered suitable for print, for the first time in over 140 years is truly stunning, but what does that mean for colonial and historical study? In this talk I will explore what new information can be gleaned from the digitisation, encoding and subsequent archiving of the letters, diaries, journals and manuscripts of David Livingstone. I will look at the processes of historical recovery, and what that means in the study of imperialism and colonialism in the long nineteenth century. I will also discuss whether the digital humanities tools used in historical recovery are helpful in looking beyond what Schomburg called the ‘bigotry of civilisation’ to provide a more coherent understanding of nineteenth century history.
Biographies
Justin Livingstone is a research fellow at Queen’s University Belfast, having previously worked at the University of Glasgow and completed his PhD at the University of Edinburgh. His interests are broadly in colonial literature, travel writing and African exploration and he has published articles on these topics in journals such as Studies in Travel Writing, Victorian Literature and Culture, and English in Africa. His first monograph, Livingstone's ‘Lives’: A Metabiography of a Victorian Icon, was published by Manchester University Press in 2014. He is currently developing a digital edition of David Livingstone’s Missionary Travels (1857) and working on a second book, entitled The Fiction of Exploration.
Kate Simpson is a researcher at Queen’s University Belfast, where she holds a Modern Humanities Research Association postdoctoral fellowship. She is a Project Scholar for Livingstone Online, and is currently working on a critical digital edition of Missionary Travels (1857). She previously worked on the David Livingstone Multi-Spectral digital imaging project. Kate’s research focuses on 19th century European exploration in Africa and digital cultural creation and curation. She studies transnational influences in disparate cultures in the long nineteenth century: from David Livingstone’s phonetic transcriptions of indigenous central and southern African languages to H. Rider Haggard’s mythologizing of Zulu history, how cultures interacted with each other and how that can be traced within the archive. She also looks at areas of interaction: she is interested in what is happening in the space between technical (or digital) archives and the actual physical archive. She has previously worked as both an archivist and a librarian