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Victorian missionary adventurer and he could not bear to think of ‘feebly letting slip the opportunity’. 2 Rev. Ebenezer E. Jenkins was General Secretary of the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society and a powerful gatekeeper. 3 No proposal progressed far without his support. Winston lobbied mercilessly until at the end of 1886 Jenkins’s resistance crumbled. He sent Winston to spy out the land in Burma with Rev. John Brown as his ‘minder’. 4 Their main concern was whether they would be welcomed by the Protestant missionaries
Missionary families were the building blocks of an enterprise that spanned the globe in the nineteenth (and twentieth) century. This book explores both the institutional and the intimate history of the missionary family. It is anchored in the specificities of the South Seas Mission and South African Mission: the first two missions of the London Missionary Society (LMS), out on the absolute border of the spiritual frontier. The book traces the history of the missionary couple's place within LMS mission objectives in the nineteenth century. Missionary wives became unofficial and unpaid missionaries themselves with carefully delineated gendered roles. The initial ambivalence about their role gave way to their ascendency in mid-century, only to be partially marginalised upon the arrival of single 'lady' missionaries from 1875 onwards. The book shows how the personal and professional lives of male and female missionaries were structured around marriage, and if they were lucky, companionate marriage. Male and female missionaries on the spiritual frontier had to deal with the all the difficulties and delights of parenthood in a state of perceived racial and cultural isolation. The book unpacks the duality of missionary children, how their good and bad behaviour could actively shape the mission experience. Second-generation missionaries were a success story for the LMS, received encouragement from their parents, had cultural sympathy, linguistic fluency and climactic suitability, and were often just the beginning of long-standing missionary dynasties.
and privileged beyond words?’ This – this my mother told me, was a landmark in her life … She renewed her vows and went forward with fresh hope and courage. (Bessie Price talking of her mother, Mary Moffat) Sometime around the early 1820s, Ann Hamilton, seasoned and, indeed, determined, wife of LMS missionary Robert Hamilton in southern Africa, stood before her young missionary colleague, superintendent of the station Robert Moffat, in order to answer his enquiries relating to her ‘character’ and
they were unable to withstand … and their conduct since has given us extreme pain. (South Seas missionary Charles Barff, 9 September 1845) As we have seen throughout this book, then, the London Missionary Society (LMS) was constantly and consistently preoccupied with issues relating to missionary families, a situation forced upon them by missionaries in the field, who fretted anxiously about their children’s futures, and by a philanthropically- and evangelically-minded missionary public. The LMS
Essay’ on The Arabian Nights ]. Throughout the world missionaries objected to an immense range of traditional attitudes and activities quite apart from obvious targets like slavery, infanticide, cannibalism, suttee, and footbinding. Nudity and long hair were regarded as indecent, tattooing as degrading, polygyny as adulterous, bridewealth
missionary John Orsmond on the state of missionary parenting, and missionary children, 1826) In Chapter 3 we saw how the personal and professional lives of male and female missionaries were structured around marriage, and if they were lucky, companionate marriage. Somewhat inevitably missionary marriage led to missionary children, and large missionary families were the norm for most of the nineteenth century. Children could be a source of great joy and happiness for missionary parents – be they playing
The boys [of the South Seas Mission] … are too young for labour. It will however be of the highest importance that they should have regular employment before habits of indolence are formed and matured. At present there is no regular and suitable employ for the females … if this plan be continued the children of the Missionaries will neither be properly instructed or employed, but will contract habits of immaturity and sloth which will at once be destructive of their morals and destroy all
David Livingstone viewed the European exploration of central Africa as being a ‘matter for congratulation only in so far as it opens up a prospect for the elevation of the inhabitants’. For him, ‘the end of the geographical feat [was] the beginning of the missionary enterprise’. 1 Travellers passing the Cape, short-term residents and those on more specific
In September 1909, Professor Ernest D. Burton of the University of Chicago wrote to Professor Edward Caldwell Moore of Harvard University in relation to the upcoming World Missionary Conference to be held in Edinburgh, Scotland, in July 1910. He was rather perplexed that: ‘my name had been printed in the announcement of the Committee (incorrectly by the way my middle initial
imperial ideologies. Workers were involved in making global, often imperial connections at an economic, social and cultural level not only through the chocolates they produced but through migration and missionary work, and through the performance and spectatorship of race in factory minstrel shows. The Rowntree firm and their employees were not detached from the British empire but were living and working