stylistic:tone, information:extraction
Author and campaigner

He returned to Britain in December 1856. The Royal Geographical Society awarded him their Patron's Medal in 1855 for his explorations in Africa. Encouraged by the London Missionary Society, he wrote up his journal, but unconventionally had his Missionary Travels published in 1857 by John Murray, making it a bestselling travelogue. The book included his field science, and exceptionally sympathetic descriptions of African people. He proposed that missions and "legitimate commerce" by river into central Africa would end slave trading.

Livingstone was encouraged by the response in Britain to his discoveries and support for future expeditions. He proposed to do more exploration, primarily to find routes for commercial trade which he believed would displace slave trade routes, more so than for solely missionary work. The London Missionary Society (LMS) on learning of his plans sent a letter which Livingstone received at Quelimane, congratulating him on his journey but said that the directors were "restricted in their power of aiding plans connected only remotely with the spread of the Gospel". This brusque rejection for new mission stations north of the Zambezi and his wider object of opening the interior for trade via the Zambezi, was not enough to make him resign from the LMS at once. When Roderick Murchison, president of the Royal Geographical Society, put him in touch with the Foreign Secretary, Livingstone said nothing to the LMS directors, even when his leadership of a government expedition to the Zambezi seemed increasingly likely to be funded by the Exchequer. "I am not yet fairly on with the Government," he told a friend, "but am nearly quite off with the Society (LMS)." Livingstone resigned from the London Missionary Society in 1857, and in May of that year he was appointed as Her Majesty's Consul with a roving commission, extending through Mozambique to the areas west of it. In February 1858 his area of jurisdiction was stipulated to be "the Eastern Coast of Africa and the independent districts in the interior".

While he negotiated with the government for his new position as Consul, the LMS thought that he would return to Africa with their mission to the Kololo in Barotseland, which Livingstone had promoted. That mission eventually suffered deaths from malaria of a missionary, his wife, a second missionary's wife and three children. Livingstone had suffered over thirty attacks during his previous journey but had understated his suffering and overstated the quality of the land they would find, and the missionaries set out for the marshy region with wholly inadequate supplies of quinine. Biographer Tim Jeal considered this episode a major failing for Livingstone, and indicative of a pattern of putting his goals and career above the lives of those around him.

Livingstone was now a celebrity, in great demand as a public speaker, and was elected to the Royal Society. He gained public backing for his plans, and raised finances for his next expedition by public subscription, as well as £5,000 from the government to investigate the potential for British trade via the Zambezi.