Livingstone was married to Mary Moffat Livingstone , from the prominent 18th-century Moffat missionary family. As a result, Livingstone became one of the most popular British heroes of the late 19th-century Victorian era. Livingstone's fame as an explorer and his obsession with learning the sources of the Nile 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 ArabβSwahili slave trade.
It is this power [with] which I hope to remedy an immense evil. Livingstone was born on 19 March 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.
He and his brother John worked hour days as piecers , tying broken cotton threads on the spinning machines. 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 read books on theology, travel, and missionary enterprises extensively. 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.
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.
Other significant influences in his early life were Thomas Burke, a Blantyre evangelist , and David Hogg, his Sunday school teacher.
