Frontispiece portrait of Livingstone.
David Livingstone was a nineteenth century celebrity; his travels in Africa gained him an international reputation. In 1880, William G. Blaikie published The Personal Life of David Livingstone through the Fleming H. Revell Company, “publishers of evangelical literature.”
Blaikie claims to be writing to discuss aspects of Livingstone’s life and career which have not been covered in Livingstone’s own works discussing his missionary work and explorations in Africa. The Personal Life is certainly bulky enough to carry out Blaikie’s claims on behalf of his work: it clocks in at just over 500 pages and the table of contents alone is enough to daunt any but the truly fascinated reader. The descriptions of the chapters, elaborate enough for the most discriminating Victorian reader, are almost over-informative for a modern reader, providing almost a Cliff Notes version of each chapter.
The text itself is detailed, covering Livingstone’s life and family from before his birth in Scotland, but is also pleasantly readable. Blaikie intersperses his own work with long quotations from related volumes and Livingstone’s own writings, making for a sort of composite presentation. He spends a great deal of time discussing Livingstone’s work as a missionary rather than focusing on his work as an explorer, making this text a fascinating source for researchers interested in the history of missions in Africa, many of which had a medical component as well as a religious one.
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