Shining Lights: Magic Lanterns and the Missionary Movement, 1839—1868

Missionary Narratives in Periodicals

Of the periodicals published by missionary societies, monthly publications offered the most space to remediate accounts of magic lantern shows. These magazines drew heavily from letters sent by missionaries abroad, though portions of their quarterly journals and annual reports appeared in monthly publications as well. For both the London Missionary Society and the Church Missionary Society, the process for publishing accounts of evangelistic activity were relatively the same. Documents written by missionaries in the field were sent to the foreign secretaries. Shorter letters confirmed their arrival, requested supplies, and asked for advice regarding time-sensitive situations. In addition to these letters, missionaries kept official journals to be sent quarterly to their respective societies.[1] These include daily entries about the comings-and-goings of the missionary station and statistics about baptisms, congregants, and expenses. As with all correspondence, there would be a delay between the day it was sent and when it was received by their respective societies. For missionaries stationed in Africa, letters took about 6 months to appear in print. If the letter was traveling from one of the stations in the South Pacific, it could take nine months to a year. This, of course, is assuming that the missionary would be able to post a letter the same day he wrote it. Missionaries who traveled as widely as Williams, Livingstone, and the Crowthers would have to delay sending their letters until they could commission a porter to carry the letter to a port town. Upon receiving the letter, the foreign secretaries would write their initials and the date on the first page. Letters of particular importance could be passed to other members of the society governing board, including the editors of the missionary magazines. The editor read the letter, then made editorial marks to indicate which passages were of interest and those which could be omitted. He also wrote introductions and conclusions to contextualize the letter before they were passed to the publisher.[2]

Because references to lantern shows were more likely to appear in letters than in quarterly journals and annual reports, their published counterparts were concentrated in monthly magazines.[3] The LMS’s Missionary Magazine and Chronicle was among the first periodicals published by a missionary society. It made its debut in 1813 under the title of the Missionary Chronicle.[4] The CMS would follow suit with two monthly magazines: the Church Missionary Record (1830) and the more streamlined Church Missionary Gleaner (1841). Both societies created periodicals for juvenile audiences, but they varied in their frequency. The LMS’s Juvenile Missionary Magazine (1844) was published monthly where there were only four issues of the CMS’s A Quarterly Token for Juvenile Subscribers (1856) per year. Specialized branches of the CMS would create their own publications, including the Missionary Leaves Association’s monthly magazine (Missionary Leaves, 1868). However, there were concerns within the CMS’s governing board that such publications would not only compromise subscriptions to the main CMS periodicals but also cause a drop in donations. To allay these fears, the editor of Missionary Leaves, R. C. Billing, warned his readers that

Once for all, it is to be understood that any interference with the regular income of the Church Missionary Society is not only not intended, but would be deprecated and, indeed, if proved, would lead to the abandonment of the undertaking.[5]

[1] Some missionaries, including David Livingstone, kept personal journals and diaries as well. Livingstone drew from these personal notes to write official narratives of his travels and evangelistic activity. For a more expansive survey of Livingstone’s field-authored work, click here.
[2] Terry Barringer is right to identify the illustrations as equally worthy of analysis as the prose. In my case study of David Livingstone, I briefly describe the editorial process for illustrations used by John Murray. Livingstone is exceptional in that Murray gave him far more license to make editorial interventions in the illustration process than what would have been available to missionary secretaries putting together their monthly and quarterly periodicals. See “What Mrs. Jellyby Might Have Read Missionary Periodicals: A Neglected Source,” Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 37, no. 4, Winter 2004, pp. 46-74, available via JSTOR.
[3] For this summary, I relied heavily on Josef L. Altholz’s The Religious Press In Britain, 1760-1900, Greenwood Press, 1989; the Waterloo Dictionary of English Newspapers and Periodicals: 1800-1900, available through IU proxy login; and Adam Matthew’s introduction to titles in their digital collection, Church Missionary Society Periodicals, also available through IU proxy login.
[4] The title would change again in January 1867 to The Chronicle of the London Missionary Society.
[5] Missionary Leaves, vol. 1, no. 1, June 1868, copy at the British Library, 18 May 2017, p.3.

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