Remediation as a Research Strategy
Because the history of nineteenth-century missions is a global one, critical work in this vein represents an equally expansive and diverse scholarly landscape. The histories that have shaped my own approach have tended to adopt three strategies in order to limit their scope. The first, the biography, has dominated studies of David Livingstone, making him a touchstone for emergent approaches to nineteenth-century missionary activity and exploration. Justin Livingstone’s metabiography offers an overview of these constantly evolving conversations, ranging from late-Victorian narratives that lionize Livingstone (Thomas Hughes, 1901) to scathing pathographies (Judith Listowel, 1974; Tim Jeal, 1973, revised and expanded 2013) to feminist studies of Mary Livingstone, his wife, and his family (Jamet Wagner Parsons, 1997; Julie Davidson, 2012) to postcolonial digital practices that foreground the presence and perspectives of his African context (Livingstone Online). The second strategy grounds an analysis of complex social networks in a sense of place. J.F. Ade Ajayi’s Christian Missions in Nigeria (1965), for example, discusses the mounting tensions between African and European missionaries who were involved in expeditions along the Niger. Similarly, Eric Flint’s “Trade and Politics in Barotseland During the Kololo Period” uses the Zambezi and Kwando as the geographic limits of his account of the complex political landscape governing the Central African ivory trade between 1830 and 1860. Rosemary Seton’s Western Daughters in Eastern Lands offers a more expansive model by focusing on women from a wide range of denominational backgrounds who were stationed in India or China. The third strategy is similar to Seton’s work in its focus on people, for early missionary histories were organized by society, but these have fallen out of fashion.
These approaches are facilitated by the structure of the physical collections of missionary society papers. Of these, the London Missionary Society Archives at the School of Oriental Studies in London and the Church Missionary Society Archives at the University of Birmingham are typical in the way that they are oriented toward regional histories and biographies. Though the LMS and CMS archives will be my focus here, I also consulted Scottish Missionary Society (National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh), the Wesleyan Methodist Church (John Rylands Center, Manchester), Wesleyan-Methodist Missionary Society Archive (School of Oriental and African Studies, London), the Brethren Missionary Society (University of Manchester), and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (Weston Library, Oxford). Missionary collections tend to be divided by department, then by region, making it easier to explore all incoming correspondence from a particular area. Both the LMS and the CMS archives have detailed finding aids that identify the sender of a letter as well as the date and location from which it was sent. The biographers of CMS missionaries are aided by a set of index cards compiled by one of the Cadbury Research Center that list materials that reference a particular person across departmental divisions. These physical finding aids form the basis of each special collection’s digital catalog record, but the analog form of these records often contain far more information than their digital counterparts. The LMS physical finding aids are of particular interest for they are unusually detailed. They contain a brief summary of all the letter’s content, making this metadata the most robust record of unpublished field-authored documents.
But how do you search for content that might not be represented in these physical finding aids, and, by extension digital counterparts in the form of online catalogs? When I began this project, I had a clearer sense of the what than the who, where, or when. I suspected that the lantern had a global history, but I did not yet know which missionaries took magic lanterns with them on their travels abroad. To make matters more challenging, most of the accounts of magic lantern shows that I would be working with would never have been published as part of a critical edition in print, let along a fully-searchable digital counterpart. (In this respect, Livingstone is yet again the exception.) To identify missionaries who were using lanterns, I turned to copies of missionary periodicals in digital collections. Most of the LMS periodicals are available open-access via Google Books. For CMS material (and additional LMS magazines), I had to use two subscription-based services: Adam Matthew’s Church Missionary Society Archive and Hathi Trust. As remediations of field-authored letters, magazines offered a means to search primary source material of missionaries who did not achieve the level of celebrity that Williams, Livingstone, and Crowthers did. Digital copies of these published excerpts made it possible to search for references to magic lanterns and dissolving views on a global scale through published quotations of their letters and quarterly reports. Once I had identified missionaries who are known to have used a magic lantern abroad through their appearance in periodicals, I then focused my research in physical collections to letters and journals written by these people. I reasoned (and discovered rightly so) that because they had a lantern, their correspondence would contain accounts of multiple lantern shows, even if only one of these was published. Discrepancies between the unpublished and published accounts form the basis of my analysis of mediation. While this technique overlooked missionaries whose lantern shows were not represented in print or in catalog records, it did enable me to identify primary source material that I would not have found through the physical finding aids and digital catalog records. (Rather, I may have found the material, but it would have required sifting through thousands of pages of handwritten material instead of hundreds.)
Most of these accounts were far too brief to reconstruct the content of their lantern shows. For the dissertation, the case study model provided the widest platform from which to identify extant examples of slides and projectors that serve as the closest parallels to the apparati used by the missionary. The most robust accounts happened to be written by four of the foremost missionaries and explorers of the nineteenth-century missionary movement.