The Perils of Published Missionary Letters

Abstract

Contemporaneous publications of missionary letters often include material written for publicity purposes. These can be letters written by the missionaries themselves, or even fictional letters composed for the purpose and presented as genuine. By analyzing one such fiction and the genuine letter on which it is based, this article identifies criteria for distinguishing actual correspondence from its imitation. The example is drawn from a minor incident in New Zealand in 1840 involving the meeting of a Catholic missionary with a Methodist missionary, both of whom subsequently wrote about the encounter.