Missionary Narratives in Periodicals
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.