This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ H. M. Stanley and the Literature of Exploration Empire, Media, Modernity Murray, Brian Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. 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Stanley and the Literature of Exploration: Empire, Media, Modernity Brian H. Murray Thesis for the Degree of PhD King’s College, University of London 2011 DECLARATION I declare that this work contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference has been made in the text. The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without prior acknowledgment. BRIAN H. MURRAY September 2011 2 ABSTRACT This thesis constitutes the first sustained single-author study of the writings of the Welsh- American explorer Henry Morton Stanley (1840-1904). Stanley‟s works have generally been treated as generic examples of „colonial discourse‟ or simply as a historical footnote to the canon of colonial adventure fiction. Little attention has been paid to the possible reasons for the phenomenal popularity and enduring appeal of these texts. I will expand upon previous readings of Stanley not by ignoring the imperial context but by acknowledging that „imperial discourse‟ was itself in dialogue with various other social and cultural trends. My concern throughout is with the exploratory encounter as modernising event – not simply in the sense of the „civilised‟ explorer shedding light on the „dark continent‟ – but in the sense that the retransmission of these frontier narratives in the centre of empire had a transformative affect on how Britons conceived of themselves as modern subjects. By emphasising the imperial „margin‟ as a space in which modernity happens and the exploration narrative as the means by which this process is documented, represented and enacted, I challenge conventional notions of modernity as an urban phenomenon diffused from imperial metropolis to colonial periphery. Focusing on the (largely ignored) Welsh and American aspects of Stanley‟s identity, allows us to decentre the notion of a fixed imperial metropolis and forces us to acknowledge the complexity, ambivalence and richness of the literature of the exploratory contact zone By looking at the ways in which explorers interacted with and impacted upon contemporary developments in journalism, telecommunications, tourism, museum culture, popular entertainment and folklore studies, I offer a series of originally inflected readings that resituate Stanley‟s texts within a broader historical context without denying their centrality to the imperial moment. 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS Declaration………………………………………………………………………………..2 Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………...3 Table of Contents………………………………………………………………………....4 Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………………...6 List of Abbreviations……………………………………………………………………...7 List of Figures…………………………………………………………………………….8 Introduction……………………………………………………………………………..9 Modernity at the Margins...................................................................................................11 From Pre-colonial to Postcolonial...................................................................................19 Why Stanley?........................................................................................................................24 Geographical Forms: Literature and Exploration..........................................................29 Literature Review................................................................................................................33 Overview..............................................................................................................................37 1. The Frontier Index: The Missouri Democrat at the Indian Peace Commission...42 1.1 Civilisation and the Frontier.......................................................................................42 1.2 Stanley at the Frontier..................................................................................................47 1.3 The Great Father..........................................................................................................55 1.4 Vanishing Americans...................................................................................................57 1.5 Reservations..................................................................................................................63 1.6 Conclusion.....................................................................................................................70 2. ‘Flesh of your Flesh, Bone of your Bone’: How I Found Livingstone as Sentimental Journey.................................................................................................................73 2.1 Moving Narratives........................................................................................................73 2.2 Representative Men......................................................................................................79 2.3 Anglo-Saxon Chronicles..............................................................................................88 2.4 Almost Unmanned.......................................................................................................95 2.5 This Chain of Love......................................................................................................99 2.6 Conclusion...................................................................................................................104 4 3. ‘Savage Telegraphy’: Sympathetic Media in Through the Dark Continent..........109 3.1 New Media and New Journalism.............................................................................111 3.2 Stanley and the Telegraph.........................................................................................118 3.3 Warning Signals..........................................................................................................122 3.4 The Coming of the Wire...........................................................................................126 3.5 Unspeakable Eloquence............................................................................................131 3.6. „Real and Pure Sympathy‟.........................................................................................138 3.7 Conclusion...................................................................................................................142 4. ‘A Tourist over an Unknown Country’: Travel, Tourism and Spectacle................147 4.1 Explorer and Tourist.................................................................................................149 4.2 Travel Agents..............................................................................................................153 4.3 Safari.............................................................................................................................161