Joshua Marshman

Joshua Marshman (1768-1837) was originally a weaver. He left that trade as a young man to teach at the Broadmead charity school in Bristol; he would become a student at Bristol Academy in the late 1790s. Influenced by Carey’s writings on India, Marshman and his wife, Hannah  (1767-1847), sailed with Ward, Brunsdon, and Grant in 1799 for Bengal, where Marshman became a valuable part of the Serampore Trio. Though not a great preacher, he was an excellent organizer, becoming the Mission’s chief secretary in dealing with the East India Company. He also became the chief developer of the various educational wings of the Mission, helping to found Serampore College in 1818 as a place where nationals could be trained to replace missionaries. His Hints Relative to Native Schools, Together with the Outline of an Institution for Their Extension and Management (Serampore, 1816, 1817) reinforced the fact that the education of native children had long been a concern of the Serampore mission, with instruction primarily in the vernacular languages. Carey opened his first school at Mudnabatty in 1794. In 1802 the mission published its Plan for the Education of the Children of Converted Natives, patterned at that time after traditional models of English nonconformist education. Marshman was instrumental in founding the Benevolent Institution in Calcutta in 1810, and by 1813 sixteen schools were operating in India under its auspices, all of them patterned now after a Lancastrian model. Between July 1816 and October 1817, as G. E. Smith writes, BMS missionaries opened 103 schools, instructing more than 6,700 students. By the time of the above letter, BMS missionaries in the East were operating 126 schools with a student population of more than 9000. During his years at Serampore, Marshman devoted himself in particular to mastering the Chinese language, the results of which were several significant translations of Chinese works into English and from English into Chinese. Among these were The Works of Confucius (Serampore, 1809), Elements of Chinese Grammar (1814), and the translation of the Bible into Chinese (mentioned in the above letter) between 1818 and 1824.He was also involved with Ward in numerous publishing ventures of the Mission. Not always easy to get along with, Marshman’s personality led some younger missionaries to associate more with Eustace Carey and the Calcutta Mission after 1818. While on furlough in 1827-1828, Marshman, along with Christopher Anderson of Edinburgh, superintended the separation of the Serampore Mission from the BMS, a rift not healed until 1838. See See Cox, History, 1:231-33, 315; G. E. Smith, “Patterns of Missionary Education: The Baptist India Mission 1794-1824,” Baptist Quarterly 20 (1963-1964): 300; M. A. Laird, “The Serampore Missionaries as Educationists 1794-1824,” Baptist Quarterly 22 (1967-1968): 320-25; Keith Farrer, William Carey: Missionary and Botanist (Kew, Victoria, Australia: Carey Baptist Grammar School, 2005) 41-46; A. Christopher Smith, “Joshua (1768-1837) and Hannah Marshman (1767-1847),” ed. Haykin, in The British Particular Baptists, 2:237-253.