Walter and Henry Ling Roth: 'On the Signification of Couvade': The Place of Australia and British Guiana in the Fin de Siecle Debate Concerning the History of Humanity

Abstract

Henry Ling Roth travelled to the West Indies from England in 1875. His reasons for doing so are obscure, although he does not say that he was unfortunate in the treatment he received from the person who induced him to go out, and who repudiated their agreement almost immediately. He provides an amusing though unenlightened picture of the local society in his reminiscences, published in the Halifax Courier in 1916. By that time he had retired to Yorkshire, where he was keeper and curator of the Bankfield Museum; and it was there that he wrote the works that established his name - The Natives if Sarawak and British North Borneo, 2 Vols. (1896), Great Benin: Its Customs, Arts and Horrors (1903), The Maori Mantle (1923), and many others - mostly about places he had never been and peoples he had never met.