First edition, wrappers issue. David Livingstone had returned to Britain on 12 December 1856 to a hero’s welcome, following his successful crossing of the African continent, and ‘[w]ithin days [...] the [Royal Geographical Society] held a special meeting, on 15 December, to bestow on him its gold medal; on the next day the [London Missionary Society] held a reception for him, chaired by Lord Shaftesbury’ (ODNB). Livingstone and John Murray III had made arrangements for the publication of an account of his travels before Livingstone had even returned home, and at the beginning of 1857 he began work on the book that would be published in November of that year under the title Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa. Following the completion of his manuscript, Livingstone spent the latter half of 1857 undertaking speaking engagements across the British Isles (both before and after the publication of Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa), and in December 1857 he travelled to Cambridge, where he addressed a meeting at the University’s Senate House on 4 December 1857 and a meeting at the Town Hall on 5 December 1857. These two lectures were published shortly afterwards as Dr. Livingstone’s Cambridge Lectures (Cambridge and London, 1858) and reprinted in a revised edition in 1860.

David Livingstone and Cambridge comprises the two lectures Livingstone gave in Cambridge in 1857, which were an important stimulus to the formation of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa. The third piece in this volume is a report of a meeting of the Oxford and Cambridge Mission to Central Africa on 1 November 1859, which recounted the work of the first year of the organisation’s existence, and the final piece describes a meeting of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa on 4 December 1907 on the fiftieth anniversary of Livingstone’s first speech in Cambridge. The work was issued in two bindings: a binding of parchment-backed boards and a binding of printed wrappers (as here).

This copy was previously in the noted collection of the explorer and bibliophile Quentin Keynes, who travelled extensively in Africa throughout the second half of the twentieth century, and collected a remarkable library of books and manuscripts relating to the exploration of Africa, particularly during the nineteenth century. Some of these works provided the basis for Keynes’s Roxburghe Club book The Search for the Source of the Nile: Correspondence between Captain Richard Burton, Captain John Speke and Others, from Burton’s Unpublished East African Letter Book; together with Other Related Letters and Papers (London, 1999) and his collection was also a resource that he drew upon for his own travels in Africa. For example, in 1958, the centenary of Livingstone’s expedition up the Zambezi River, Keynes retraced Livingstone’s route and identified baobab tree into the internal cavity of which Livingstone had carved his initials on 16 September 1858. The tree – which had not previously been located – ‘was soon afterwards declared by the Portuguese government of Mozambique to be an historical monument in honour of David Livingstone’ (S.D. Keynes, Quentin Keynes: Explorer, Film-Maker, Lecturer and Book-Collector 1921-2003 (Cambridge, 2004), p. 217).

Bartholomew, Catalogue of the Books and Papers for the Most Part Relating to the University, Town, and County of Cambridge, Bequeathed to the University by John Willis Clark, p. 151; Casada, Dr. David Livingstone and Sir Henry Morton Stanley, 1743; South African Bibliography II, p. 20.

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