Wednesday, February 15, 2012

HOW HENRY MORGAN STANLEY FOUND HIS FAMILY


Of all the basic human drives surely one of the most fundamental is our need to belong to a family.  I described in an earlier blog how that drive was so strong in Stanley that after being rejected repeatedly and then totally abandoned by his biological family, he created a “false family” that included his legal adoption by Henry Love Stanley, a wealthy cotton broker in New Orleans.   Stanley had never even met Henry Love Stanley!  It was a fiction he managed to conceal from prying journalists and the world’s public for thirty years.   
 I also described how Stanley came to believe he had found in Livingstone the father figure he had been seeking all his life.   Biographer Tim Jeal confirms that “The father and son aspect of their relationship did not exist solely in Stanley’s imaginings.  Livingstone came to think of Stanley in precisely that role.  ‘That good brave fellow has acted as a son to me,’ he would write to his daughter, Agnes.”  And when Livingstone asked Stanley to find the grave of his son, Robert, who had died fighting with Union forces in the battle of Gettysburg, and to erect a memorial stone over his body, Livingstone was entrusting to Stanley a filial task.  One reason for Stanley’s highly positive description of Livingstone in his book, How I found Livingstone, was his desire to tell his friends he had been cherished, as a son, by a truly good man.  But Livingstone died a few years later and in any case, could not fulfill Stanley’s undying quest for his own family.   
Stanley’s hunger to belong to a family never seemed to end and nothing else seemed to satisfy him.  A major reason Stanley had become an explorer in Africa was to become rich and famous. But when fame arrived he found it “was useless to him.”  The relatives who had rejected him as a child and young man were now after his sudden wealth and became ever more grasping.  More generally, Stanley came to see himself as surrounded by the envious. “I can count my friends on my fingers but my enemies are a host” he wrote.  He received threatening letters.  He hated being stared at in the streets and had to take expensive hackney cabs everywhere to avoid that.  He loved dogs and had five of them, three rescued from a pound.  But they could not fulfill his desire for a human family. 
Eventually, in his 50s, Stanley married Dorothy (Dolly) Tennant, an attractive 36- year-old woman twenty years his junior.  After many medical consultations and attempts to produce what she called “my great expectation and deepest desire,” they were faced with the fact they would have no children from their own bodies to love.   
But Henry would not give up.  In l894 he pleaded with Dolly to agree to adopt a child.  She refused.  But by the autumn of 1895 she had at last become aware of how deep was his wish to adopt and gave her permission.  Without the hope of one day raising a child, Stanley believed that the rest of his life would be very bleak.
An opportunity arose when a son of one of his first cousins died, leaving a widow who was too poor to support her six-month-old-son.  At least that’s the story Stanley and Dolly would tell close friends.  However, biographer Tim Jeal writes, it is more likely that the boy was actually the illegitimate grandson of Stanley’s half sister Emma.  Why, once again, did Stanley make up a cover story?  Most likely, writes Tim Jeal, he wanted to spare the boy the stain of illegitimacy which Stanley had suffered through during his own youth. 
When the 13-month-old baby boy was brought to their home, Stanley was ill in bed.  Dolly, who described the boy as “a delicate featured beautiful little boy with a finely shaped head,” carried him upstairs to their bedroom and laid the baby down beside Stanley.  Dolly and Stanley smiled as they looked at each other and Stanley said:
“We will keep him forever.  He is ours.”  
From then on Henry Morton Stanley’s happiness became almost entirely bound up with giving his adopted son the love he himself had never known as a boy.  Stanley finally had his family. 

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