Glasgow, Chipping Ongar and London: the Student

Abstract

At the time of his twenty-first birthday, Livingstone was working in the mill as a spinner, promotion which had come two years earlier. He described the work, which was better paid than his previous occupation, as ‘excessively severe on a slim, loose-jointed lad’,¹ a harsh criticism from one who virtually never complained of physical hardship. But its routine nature left him free to make plans and to dream. His desire to travel to remote corners of the globe must have been inspired originally by books, for he knew no one with personal experience of distant lands. But, if any of the accounts written by the great African explorers of the time reached him, they failed to fire his imagination. His thoughts were all of China, teeming with so many millions of souls destined to be lost eternally unless someone could reach them in time to tell them the good news of the Christian gospel.