First edition. Written by the cleric and historian, George Seaver (1890-1976), who had served as Assistant Native Commissioner, Northern Rhodesia (1919-1924), David Livingstone: His Life and Letters is ‘[o]ne of the most important Livingstone biographies […]. Seaver’s approach is one of allowing Livingstone to speak for himself whenever possible […]. In addition to full use of several of the best known manuscript collections, the work is based on consultation in the standard printed sources. In some ways the first modern biography, the book’s principal shortcoming is its lack of analysis’ (Casada).

This copy was previously in the noted collection of the explorer and bibliophile Quentin Keynes, who travelled extensively in Africa throughout the second half of the twentieth century, and collected a remarkable library of books and manuscripts relating to the exploration of Africa, particularly during the nineteenth century. Some of these works provided the basis for Keynes’s Roxburghe Club book The Search for the Source of the Nile: Correspondence between Captain Richard Burton, Captain John Speke and Others, from Burton’s Unpublished East African Letter Book; together with Other Related Letters and Papers (London, 1999) and his collection was also a resource that he drew upon for his own travels in Africa. For example, in 1958, the centenary of Livingstone’s expedition up the Zambezi River, Keynes retraced Livingstone’s route and identified baobab tree into the internal cavity of which Livingstone had carved his initials on 16 September 1858. The tree – which had not previously been located – ‘was soon afterwards declared by the Portuguese government of Mozambique to be an historical monument in honour of David Livingstone’ (S.D. Keynes, Quentin Keynes: Explorer, Film-Maker, Lecturer and Book-Collector 1921-2003 (Cambridge, 2004), p. 217).

Muller et al., A Select Bibliography of South African History, 2321; cf. Casada, Dr. David Livingstone and Sir Henry Morton Stanley, 142 (1st US ed.).

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