The Man Who Did the Right Thing: A Romance

About the book

In 1886 Lucy Josling listens to her fiancé John Baines preach before his departure for missionary work in Africa. The prospect invites admiration from their community, but it also raises practical questions about marriage, separation, and the life Lucy herself might want. Johnston follows these concerns outward into East African mission and colonial society, where religious purpose is entangled with political and material interests. His prefatory note explains that remembered experience has been deliberately reshaped into fiction. The title's confident moral phrase thus encounters circumstances in which doing right is not a simple matter of obeying established expectations. The novel offers a historical view of imperial assumptions as well as their contradictions, and its representations of African people need to be read within that unequal perspective.

• Duty and moral judgment
• Mission and empire
• Marriage and self-determination

Why read it

The passage from a village farewell sermon to overseas affairs shows how private expectations help sustain larger imperial projects.

English Macmillan edition published April 1921