William Carey

William Carey (1761-1834) was a shoemaker by trade. He became a Baptist in his teens and assumed his first pastorate at a small congregation in Moulton.  In 1789 he removed to Harvey Lane in Leicester, where Robert Hall would later pastor. For several years Carey had been developing a strong sense of the need for Baptist missions to foreign lands; he spoke on the subject at a Northamptonshire association meeting on 30 May 1792, shortly after he had published his famous discourse, An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens (1792). He and several other ministers formed the Baptist Missionary Society in October 1792, and on 13 June 1793 Carey and his family, along with Dr. John Thomas, sailed for India, where Carey remained until his death in 1834. After spending some years doing missionary work while operating an indigo plantation near Mudnabatty and later at Kidderpore, conditions required that Carey move the mission to Serampore, Bengal, about fifteen miles from Calcutta and at that time under the control of the Danes. Late in 1799, Joshua Marshman and William Ward joined him, and together they formed the “Serampore Trio.”  In India, Carey became one of the leading linguists in the world, translating the Bible into Bengali, Oriya, Sanskrit, Hindi, Assamese, Marathi, and other languages, as well as numerous texts from those languages into English. In 1801 he was appointed professor of Bengalee and Sanscrit at the College of Fort William, and in 1818 founded Serampore College. He also became a renowned horticulturalist as well, establishing an Agricultural and Horticultural Society at Serampore around 1820. See Carter, Terry G. Carter, ed. The Journal and Selected Letters of William Carey (Macon GA: Mercer University Press, 2000); Mary Drewery, William Carey: A Biography (Grand Rapids MI: Zondervan, 1979); S. Pearce Carey, William Carey, D.D. (London: George H. Doran, 1923); F. D. Walker, William Carey, Missionary, Pioneer, and Statesman (Chicago: Moody Press, 1951); George, Faithful Witness; idem, “William Carey (1761-1834),” ed. Haykin, in The British Particular Baptists, 2:143-161; Keith Farrer, William Carey: Missionary and Botanist (Kew, Victoria, Australia: Carey Baptist Grammar School, 2005).