The meaning and making ofMissionary Travels: the sedentary and itinerant discourses of a Victorian bestseller

Missionary Travels: Livingstone, Africa and the Book

“…As Louise Henderson and Justin Livingstone have shown, Missionary Travels was the product of many hands, including those of ghost writers, editors and illustrators (Henderson 2009;Livingstone 2011). John Murray and his assistants had a significant influence on the final shape of the work.…”

Geographies of the Book: Review and Prospect

“…Certain writers highlighted their institutional warrants of credibility and professional practice (such as their membership of learned societies) to demonstrate their competence as reliable and trustworthy observers; others emphasised precisely the opposite: their status as amateur and untrained, plain‐speaking and unbiased, mirrors of the places and peoples they described. Decisions with regard to authorial presentation and literary style in texts of travel were often made directly by publishers who, with an eye to the market for books of geography, sought to position their literary ‘property’ in respect of audience expectation quite apart from their authors’ views or wishes (Finkelstein , ; Livingstone ,, ; Withers ). In this respect, books of geography are seen to be always and implicitly the work of collaboration (whether willing or otherwise) and of rhetorical schemes designed to communicate geographical ‘truth’ in particular ways (Brace ; Withers ).…”

“…Gadamer's perspectives on textual interpretation, together with the work of other theorists of reader response, help to explain the ways in which social, political and religious contexts (among other things) align to shape the ways in which individual readers (and communities of readers) approach and interpret the meaning of specific texts in particular locations (Davis and Womack ). Livingstone has employed this approach in charting the reception of various scientific books, not least Charles Darwin's On the origin of species (1859) (Livingstone , , , ,).…”