Robert Codrington (1830-1922) trained to be a priest at Oxford
University where he was ordained in 1857. He volunteered to work in
Nelson, New Zealand, from 1860-4 and was appointed as headmaster of the
Melanesian Mission training school on Norfolk Island in 1867. He spent
the next twenty years in this post and for eight of these years he was
the head of the Mission traveling through the Melanesian region.
Throughout his time in the region he attempted to gain an ethnographic
understanding of the people whom he was serving. To this end he studied
local languages and translated scriptures into Mota, the lingua franca
of the Mission. However, for Codrington material artifacts were
fundamental to his understanding of Melanesian life. He therefore took a
lively interest in material culture as a collector and donated objects
to a number of museums, including the British Museum and The Pitt Rivers
Museum. His specialist knowledge made him a valued informant for
scholars of Melanesia who regularly consulted him. He is regarded today
as one of the founding scholars of Pacific anthropology.
This book intends to provide a more comprehensive understanding of how
Codrington formed his collection, through the study of his written
anthropological works, correspondence with other collectors and scholars
and particularly through the private correspondence with his brother and
his five journals written between 1867 and 1882. The book also
highlights his equally important contribution to the development of
material culture studies in the region and how his work has influenced
Melanesian studies to the present day.
