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  • Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer
  • Tim Youngs (bio)
Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer, by Tim Jeal; pp. xx + 570. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007, $38.00, $18.00 paper, £25.00,£9.99 paper.

Tim Jeal's revisionist biography of Henry Morton Stanley has won plaudits and been scorned for its attempts to restore the reputation of the man generally regarded as both the most brutal and (thanks to his infamous greeting of "Dr. Livingstone, I presume") the most comical of all African explorers. It is easy to see why it has divided opinion. Persuaded by what he has found in documents unavailable to previous biographers, Jeal is convinced that Stanley is a man maligned. He believes that the evidence shows his subject to have been a private, sensitive, and insecure person whose journalistic instinct and fear of not being taken seriously led him to exaggerations that left him open to criticism. Confident that "the facts of Stanley's life, and the truth about his personality, can (and I believe will) rescue his posthumous reputation" (468), Jeal appears especially moved by Stanley's tenderness towards his adopted son, Denzil. But this relationship is wholly irrelevant to the measure by which Stanley must be judged: his actions and legacy in Africa. Stanley's personality matters little compared to the consequences of his adventures in what he labelled the dark continent. These continue to be played out.

There are no African voices in Jeal's book except for those ventriloquized by [End Page 363] Stanley and other whites. There are no black African historians represented here and no oral histories, not even any anthropologists or ethnographers, African or otherwise. Nineteenth-century pronouncements on African "tribes" and "cannibals" are recycled without question or qualification. When Jeal declares of Stanley that "from the beginning of his time on the Congo to the end, he tried to look after the interests of the indigenous inhabitants" (241), it is both men who decide for the Congolese what their interests are, and when he assures us that Stanley "showed commendable restraint with Africans" (107), the lack of African perspectives is obvious.

Jeal does provide important new information—notably about Stanley's time in New Orleans, which he sees as crucial to the man who emerged as Henry Morton Stanley; his Welsh family; his relationship with his wife; and about his clerk and valet Anthony Swinburne—but he is too sympathetic to his subject. Moreover, much of what he makes of the connections between Stanley's private and public lives has already been suggested by others: the sublimation of desire in work and duty; the flight from unhappiness; the need to use Africa to prove his worth after so humble a childhood and after so many rejections. The paternal/filial regard in which Stanley and Livingstone held each other has been noted by many commentators. The account of Stanley's time in Abyssinia and of the humiliation he suffered following his supposed greeting of Livingstone adds little to Ian Anstruther's I Presume (1956), and most of the information on Alice Pike will be known to those familiar with Richard Hall's biography of Stanley.

There is too little (for literary scholars, at least) on the differences between Stanley's various written versions of events. The revelation that Stanley's "carefully written large journal" of the Livingstone expedition was not produced in Africa as has been assumed but "was actually composed in London with the help of his earlier diary and various notebooks, after the publication of How I Found Livingstone, in November 1872—a year after the meeting" is very interesting and invites many questions about Stanley's process of writing and editing (119), but these are left mainly unanswered. Jeal contends that the account written closest to the event is usually the most reliable, but too often he takes even those accounts at face value. Despite his awareness of differences between various versions, Jeal is too trusting of Stanley's notebooks and diaries. He repeats Stanley's tale of handing over to superstitious Africans his Chandos edition of Shakespeare instead of sacrificing his...

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