Visualizing the Stanley-Livingstone Meeting: The Birth and Lives of an Iconic Scene in Print Media and Beyond since 1872

The meeting between David Livingstone and Henry M. Stanley in the autumn of 1871 in the village of Ujiji, on the shore of Lake Tanganyika in present-day Tanzania, was an incident in history that has enjoyed spectacular and long-standing popularity. Livingstone, a Scot who had already undertaken explorations of Africa for two decades, but whose whereabouts had been unknown for some years, was sought for and "found" by Stanley, an enterprising young Welsh-American journalist in the service of The New York Herald. Numerous generations have learned to know the words uttered by Stanley and to recognise the manner in which the two explorers greeted each other by raising their hats. The scene, which seemed to crystallize the heroism—and solitude—of European explorers in Africa, was not only familiar to the British and Americans, but also became the cultural property of the wider Western public.

The long-lasting popularity of the event has attracted the attention of scholars, who have sought to investigate the physical setting and concrete aspects of the meeting. The exact date of the meeting, for example, has been the subject of debate and, consequently, scholars situate it either in late October or early November 1871.¹ The authenticity of the famous words of Stanley—"Dr. Livingstone, I presume?"—has also been questioned. Tim Jeal argues that the greeting was almost certainly never uttered in the actual meeting but invented by Stanley on his way back to Europe in order to present himself in a gentlemanly and dignified manner.² According to Jeal, the greeting soon began to be cited in too many newspapers, advertisements, music-hall comedies, and other contexts to be denied.³

Scholars have also sought to explain why the encounter became such an important moment in the history of African exploration. It has been described as being essential in establishing the fame of both Stanley and Livingstone.⁴ Clare Pettitt has suggested that we would probably not remember Livingstone without it.⁵ In addition to underlining the importance of the event to its two main participants, scholars have also interpreted it as a symbolic marker of a broader shift in the culture of African exploration. Thus, Felix Driver has seen it as a moment of transition whereby old methods of exploration and approaches to Africa, represented by Livingstone, met with new, increasingly aggressive ones embodied by Stanley.⁶ Edward Berenson, for his part, has explained that the meeting provided a spectacular occasion for a new, reportorial style of journalism that had been developing in the United States.⁷ Andrew Ross has described the quest to find Livingstone in relation to the public fascination with heroic explorers in Africa, which was encouraged and fed by individuals such as Sir Roderick Murchison, the President of the Royal Geographical Society.⁸ The Stanley-Livingstone meeting has also been described as a symbol of the re-establishment of an Anglo-American alliance and as a moment which crystallized Western formality and self-censorship.⁹

The general public learned the story of the meeting by reading newspapers, travel accounts by Stanley and Livingstone, popular biographies written about the explorers, histories of exploration, and other printed matter. These written descriptions—augmented by field diaries, journals, and correspondence by Stanley and Livingstone—have also formed the basis for later reconstructions and evaluations of the meeting. Although the nineteenth-century audience was also frequently provided with visual images of the meeting, surprisingly little has been said about the origin of these printed images and their role in creating and mediating the famous story within the history of African exploration. Rather than scrutinizing the visual imagery as critically as the date of the meeting, a number of studies have simply reproduced the image to illustrate the event. In some instances, questioning remarks have been made on the discrepancies observed in the accompanying picture. Clare Pettitt, for example, has wondered why the depicted flags seem to be blowing in the wind in an otherwise windless scene.¹⁰ Observations such as these have not, however...