![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Livingstone attended Blantyre village school, along with the few other mill children with the endurance to do so despite their 14-hour workday (6 am–8 pm). This monotonous work was necessary to support his impoverished family, but it taught him persistence, endurance, and a natural empathy with all who labour, as expressed by lines that he used to hum from the egalitarian Robert Burns song: "When man to man, the world o'er/Shall brothers be for a' that". Monteith's Blantyre cotton mill were also important from ages 10 to 26, first as a piecer and later as a spinner. Livingstone's reading of missionary Karl Gützlaff's Appeal to the Churches of Britain and America on behalf of China enabled him to persuade his father that medical study could advance religious ends. For Livingstone, this meant a release from the fear of eternal damnation. Influenced by revivalistic teachings in the United States, Livingstone entirely accepted the proposition put by Charles Finney, Professor of Theology at Oberlin College, Ohio, that "the Holy Spirit is open to all who ask it". At age fifteen, David left the Church of Scotland for a local Congregational church, influenced by preachers like Ralph Wardlaw, who denied predestinarian limitations on salvation. Other significant influences in his early life were Thomas Burke, a Blantyre evangelist, and David Hogg, his Sunday school teacher. In 1832, he read Philosophy of a Future State, written by Thomas Dick, and he found the rationale that he needed to reconcile faith and science and, apart from the Bible, this book was perhaps his greatest philosophical influence. Neil feared that science books were undermining Christianity and attempted to force his son to read nothing but theology, but David's deep interest in nature and science led him to investigate the relationship between religion and science. This rubbed off on the young David, who became an avid reader, but he also loved scouring the countryside for animal, plant, and geological specimens in local limestone quarries. He read books on theology, travel, and missionary enterprises extensively. Neil Livingstone was a Sunday school teacher and teetotaller who handed out Christian tracts on his travels as a door-to-door tea salesman. He and his brother John worked twelve-hour days as piecers, tying broken cotton threads on the spinning machines. He was the second of seven children born to Neil Livingstone (1788–1856) and his wife Agnes (née Hunter 1782–1865).ĭavid was employed at the age of ten in the cotton mill of Henry Monteith & Co. Livingstone was born on 19 March 1813 in the mill town of Blantyre, Scotland, in a tenement building for the workers of a cotton factory on the banks of the River Clyde under the bridge crossing into Bothwell. Early life Livingstone's birthplace in Blantyre, South Lanarkshire, Scotland David Livingstone's birthplace, with period furnishings At the same time, his missionary travels, "disappearance", and eventual death in Africa-and subsequent glorification as a posthumous national hero in 1874-led to the founding of several major central African Christian missionary initiatives carried forward in the era of the European " Scramble for Africa". ![]() It is this power which I hope to remedy an immense evil." His subsequent exploration of the central African watershed was the culmination of the classic period of European geographical discovery and colonial penetration of Africa. "The Nile sources", he told a friend, "are valuable only as a means of opening my mouth with power among men. Livingstone's fame as an explorer and his obsession with learning the sources of the Nile River was founded on the belief that if he could solve that age-old mystery, his fame would give him the influence to end the East African Arab–Swahili slave trade. Livingstone had a mythic status that operated on a number of interconnected levels: Protestant missionary martyr, working-class " rags-to-riches" inspirational story, scientific investigator and explorer, imperial reformer, anti-slavery crusader, and advocate of British commercial and colonial expansion. David was the husband of Mary Moffat Livingstone, from the prominent 18th-century missionary family, Moffat. David Livingstone FRGS FRS ( / ˈ l ɪ v ɪ ŋ s t ə n/ 19 March 1813 – ) was a Scottish physician, Congregationalist, and pioneer Christian missionary with the London Missionary Society, an explorer in Africa, who wanted to abolish slavery, and one of the most popular British heroes of the late 19th-century Victorian era. ![]()
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