H.M. Stanley, David Livingstone, and the Staging of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ Manliness

This article examines the portrayal of the meeting between the Scottish missionary David Livingstone and the Welsh-American journalist Henry Morton Stanley in Stanley's popular travelogue How I Found Livingstone (1872). In order to represent the meeting as emblematic of a new transatlantic ‘Anglo-Saxon’ fellowship, Stanley was forced to elide his own Welsh and Celtic identity. In Stanley's account of the meeting, the journalist's devotion to an Anglo-Saxon ideal of emotional propriety is further dramatised through Stanley's ambiguous status as both expressive author and repressed protagonist. The protagonist's battle to resist the ‘unmanning’ powers of sentiment becomes a bathetic role-play, a sentimental ploy that gives the narrative its affective power. The article analyses Stanley's ambivalent attitude to his own Celtic and Welsh identity and suggests that he also deliberately plays down Livingstone's Scottishness. By using the ‘peripheral’ space of Central Africa to delineate a mode of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ manliness in response to specific political problems, Stanley ultimately gestures towards the strategies and ideologies of a new transnational mode of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ empire.