Abstract
In January 1897, aboard a steamship bound for the east African coast via Port Said and the Suez Canal, Henry Rider Haggard met a young gentleman by the name of James Sligo Jameson.1 Jameson, an enthusiastic big-game hunter and amateur naturalist, was on his way to join Henry Morton Stanley’s Emin Pasha Relief Expedition (EPRE). Stanley’s expedition was large, well-funded (by private subscription and by the Egyptian government) and heavily armed. The ostensible objective of the expedition was to relieve Emin Pasha, the last of the provincial governors of the Egyptian Sudan to have survived the Mahdist revolt. The Pasha, a German named Eduard Schnitzer, was known in Britain as the last of General Gordon’s loyal lieutenants and preparations for the expedition were carried forward on the tide of public emotion set in motion by Gordon’s death. For Stanley, the link to Gordon was personal, too. Before Gordon agreed to take up his final role in the Sudan, he had resigned his commission to go and work alongside Stanley in the establishment of the Congo Free State; the Sudan crisis intervened, however. The EPRE was a landmark event which linked print media, exploration and imperialism. Not only did Stanley’s expedition represent a major point of contact between New Journalism and New Imperialism but that accounts of the expedition also informed Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
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Notes
Henry Morton Stanley, In Darkest Africa, or the Quest, Rescue and Retreat of Emin, Governor of Equatoria, vol. 1 (New York and Toronto: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1890), 43. Unless otherwise stated, references to In Darkest Africa refer to this edition.
See Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa (London: Abacus, 2003), 331
and James S. Jameson, The Story of the Rear Column of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, authorized edition, ed. Mrs James S. Jameson (New York: National Publishing Company, [1890]).
Several such books were published in addition to the Jamesons’, including A.J. Mounteney-Jephson, Emin Pasha and the Rebellion at the Equator: A Story of Nine Months’ Experiences in the last of the Soudan Provinces (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1891);
Thomas Heazle Parke, My Personal Experiences in Equatorial Africa as Medical Officer of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1891);
Walter George Barttelot, The Life of Edmund Musgrave Barttelot, Being an Account of His Services for the Relief of Kandahar, of Gordon, and of Emin, 3rd edition (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1890);
John Rose-Troup, With Stanley’s Rear Column, 2nd edition (London: Chapman and Hall, 1890).
Christopher GoGwilt, The Invention of the West: Joseph Conrad and the Double Mapping of Europe and Empire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 121.
Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995), 259.
Rubery , The Novelty of News (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 172.
Clare Pettitt, Dr Livingstone, I Presume? Missionaries, Journalists, Explorers & Empire (London: Profile Books, 2007), 123.
John Stape, The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad (London: Arrow Books, 2008), 61–62.
Tim Jeal, Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer (London: Faber and Faber, 2007), 16.
Stanley , The Autobiography of Sir Henry Morton Stanley, ed. Dorothy M. Stanley (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1909), vii.
Frank McLynn, Stanley: The Making of an African Explorer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 13–14.
Ian Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century (London: Chatto and Windus, 1980), 145.
Iain R. Smith, The Emin Pasha Relief Expedition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972) 57.
Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost (London: Pan Macmillan, 2006), 100. In a further irony, just two years after his relief, Emin Pasha was decapitated in the Ituri Forest, close to where the Relief Expedition had passed. See Pettitt, Dr Livingstone, I Presume?, 195.
Stanley , In Darkest Africa, vol. 1 (London: Sampson Low, 1890), title page.
Joseph Conrad, ‘Geography and Some Explorers,’ Last Essays (London: Dent, 1926), 278.
Conrad , Heart of Darkness, ed. Paul B. Armstrong (London and New York: Norton, 2006), 7.
Peter Mallios, ‘Reading The Secret Agent Now: The Press, the Police, the Premonition of Simulation,’ in Carola M. Kaplan, Peter Mallios and Andrea White, eds., Conrad in the Twenty-First Century (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 156.
Conrad , ‘Karain: A Memory,’ Tales of Unrest (1898; London: Penguin, 1977), 56.
Conrad , Under Western Eyes (1911; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 85.
Conrad , Chance (London: Methuen & Co., 1920), 4.
Conrad , Within the Tides (New York, Doubleday Page & Company, 1916) 13, 81 and 263–264.
Henry Norman, ‘The Globe and the Island,’ Cosmopolis, 7.19 (July 1897), 79–92.
Linda Dryden, ‘At the Court of Blackwood’s: In the Kampong of Hugh Clifford,’ in David Finkelstein, ed., Print Culture and the Blackwood Tradition, 1805–1930 (Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 215.
David Finkelstein, The House of Blackwood: Author-Publisher Relations in the Victorian Era (Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 107.
Laurel Brake, ‘Maga, the Shilling Monthlies and the New Journalism,’ in Finkelstein, ed., Print Culture and the Blackwood Tradition (Toronto, Buffalo and London: Toronto University Press, 2006), 206.
John Kucich, Imperial Masochism: British Fiction, Fantasy and Social Class (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007), 245.
It is worth noting that the only major concession the House of Blackwood made to New Journalism was the publication in volume form of George W. Steevens’ immensely lucrative volumes (based on his Daily Mail correspondence) With Kitchener to Khartum and Capetown to Ladysmith. These volumes accounted for a large portion of Blackwoods’ profits. See Lawrence Davies, ‘“A Sideways Ending to It All”: G.W. Steevens, Blackwood, and the Daily Mail’, in Finkelstein , ed., Print Culture and the Blackwood Tradition (Toronto, Buffalo and London: Toronto University Press, 2006), 236–258.
Conrad , A Personal Record, eds. Zdzislaw Najder and J.H. Stape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2008), 15.
Edward Said, Culture & Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994), 26.
Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984), 261.
Stanley , In Darkest Africa, vol. 1 (London: Sampson Low, 1890), xvi.
Stanley , In Darkest Africa, vol. 1 (London: Sampson Low, 1890), xxxi.
Stanley , In Darkest Africa, vol. 1 (London: Sampson Low, 1890), 6–7.
Chinua Achebe, ‘An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,’ in Achebe, ed., Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays (New York: Doubleday, 1989), 4–5.
Stanley , In Darkest Africa, vol. 6 (London: Sampson Low, 1890), 420.
E.A. Bennett, ‘A Gossip about Books,’ Hearth and Home: An Illustrated Weekly Journal for Gentlewomen, 8 November 1900, 14.
John Galsworthy, ‘Joseph Conrad: A Disquisition,’ Fortnightly Review, 83:496 (April 1908), 632.
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© 2015 Andrew Griffiths
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Griffiths, A. (2015). A Scramble for Authority: Stanley, Conrad and the Congo. In: The New Journalism, the New Imperialism and the Fiction of Empire, 1870–1900. Palgrave Studies in the History of the Media. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137454386_5
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