David Livingstone and the Idea of African Evolution
John Butt marks the birth of the great missionary, idealist and explorer of Africa, born at Blantyre, Lanarkshire, in March 1813.
Speaking in the Senate House at Cambridge in December 1857, a far from fluent, harsh-voiced, slight, gentle, sunburned missionary came to the end of his speech and appealed to the idealism of his undergraduate audience:
“Gentlemen ... I beg to direct your attention to Africa ... I go back to Africa to make an open path for commerce and Christianity. Do you carry on the work which I have begun. I leave it with you.”
Of all the representatives of the Victorian conscience, none is more typical than David Livingstone; indeed, he was the patron saint of British industrial society, a salve upon its abuses and a symbol of its religious sublimation.
He was born in a model tenement near the banks of the Clyde at Blantyre, Lanarkshire, on March 19th, 1813; his family, of Highland stock, had settled there after leaving the Island of Ulva shortly after 1790. His career was essentially that of the great self-made man. At the age of ten, he went to work the usual long day in the cotton-spinning sheds of Monteith and Company in Blantyre, as a “piecer.” He escaped from the factory by his literacy.
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