David Livingstone and the Imperial Imagination (Essay‪)‬

David Livingstone had a lasting effect upon the way Britons in the nineteenth century and beyond would look at primitive peoples and at themselves. Today it is the man and not his writings that we remember, but the three books by Livingstone which were published during the Victorian era left a powerful mark on the public imagination and helped eventually to create an ethos that would become, temporarily, the accepted moral foundation of the British Empire in Africa. The books themselves, written before England had begun to think about Africa in fully imperial terms, were the product of a knowledgeable, eclectic, passionate and opinionated mind. Livingstone was one of the last of the great Victorians to be debunked, and even at this late moment in the twentieth century that process continues to be a half-hearted one. Oliver Ransford's David Livingstone, the Dark Interior presents Livingstone, not altogether convincingly, as a manic-depressive; but the overall tenor of the book is that of hero-worship. Tim Jeal's 1973 biography is certainly the most comprehensive and credible work on Livingstone, and its portrait of a man driven by ambition and the egoism of his own vision to ruthlessness and sometimes cruelty is ultimately convincing. But even Jeal never puts into question the largeness of Livingstone's vision or the quality of his faith. His Livingstone, though human, is still a great man.