Missionary Travels: Livingstone, Africa and the Book

Illustrations and Victorian Print Culture: A Case Study from the Expeditionary Narrative

“…As the historical geographer Felix Driver notes, "a journey of exploration only really counted as such when it was described by a narrative". 6 The illustrations that appeared in such texts participated in the task of bearing witness to the expedition; they had the responsibility, argues cultural historian Leila Koivunen, of "relaying the exploration of Africa" so that "[f]ar-away places, which had previously been accessible to only a handful of people, could now be seen and examined in almost every home". 7 The illustrations then weren't simply decorative, but formed part of the expedition's scientific record on matters ranging from geography, to natural science and ethnography.…”

Authorising geographical knowledge: the development of peer review in The Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, 1830–c.1880

“…In his study of one of the best-selling works of nineteenthcentury travel, David Livingstone's Missionary Travels (1857), Driver has positioned the exploration of Africa as nothing short of 'a literary event'. 22 Whilst Driver's work is predominately a close textual reading of the rhetorical and illustrative devices employed in Livingstone's text, he notes that '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'. 23 Such a suggestion sits neatly alongside Charles Withers' assertion that we need to pay closer attention to the material and epistemological conditions that lie behind the making, shaping and consumption of texts in geography.…”

“…22 Whilst Driver's work is predominately a close textual reading of the rhetorical and illustrative devices employed in Livingstone's text, he notes that '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'. 23 Such a suggestion sits neatly alongside Charles Withers' assertion that we need to pay closer attention to the material and epistemological conditions that lie behind the making, shaping and consumption of texts in geography. 24 Moreover, both Driver and Withers reaffirm that place and, more specifically, the processes and nuances of particular sites in the publishing trade matter in the context of making and consuming texts.…”

Plagiarists, enthusiasts and periodical geography: A.F. Büsching and the making of geographical print culture in the German Enlightenment, c.1750–1800

“…Such calls have emanated from the growing literature on the ‘geography of the book’, which has shown that understanding where books were made, printed and read, and how books circulated within and across boundaries, is crucial for understanding how print and geography shaped one another (Keighren ; Ogborn and Withers ). Scholars have primarily focused on ‘a specific material form: the printed (non‐fiction) book’ (Keighren , 752), and especially books of travel (Driver ; Henderson ; Keighren et al . ; Rupke ), geography books narrowly understood (Keighren ; Mayhew ), atlases (Withers ) and books by Darwin and Newton (Livingstone ).…”