Joshua Marshman

[1] His mission involved social reforms and intellectual debates with educated Hindus such as Raja Ram Mohan Roy.

Of his family little is known, except that they traced their descent from an officer in the Army of Cromwell, one of a band who, at the Restoration, relinquished, for conscience-sake, all views of worldly aggrandisement, and retired into the country to support himself by his own industry.

His father John passed the early part of his life at sea and was engaged in the Hind, a British frigate commanded by Captain Robert Bond, at the 1759 capture of Quebec.

She was a descendant of a French family who had sought refuge in England following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes; after his marriage he lived in Westbury Leigh and took up the trade of a weaver.

Although there was a threat of a French naval attack the family landed safely at the Danish settlement of Serampore, a few miles north of Calcutta, on 13 October 1799.

Their youngest daughter Hannah married Henry Havelock, who became a British general in India, and whose statue is in Trafalgar Square, London.

Together they shaped the boys as Carey pampered his botanical specimens, performed his many missionary tasks and journeyed into Calcutta to teach at Fort William College.

Marsman's son, John Clark Marshman (1794–1877), was also to become an important part of the missionary work at the college; he was also an official Bengali translator and published a Guide to the Civil Law which, before the work of Macaulay, was the civil code of India; he also wrote a "History of India" (1842).

On 5 July 1818, William Carey, Joshua Marshman and William Ward (another member of their missionary team) issued a prospectus (written by Marshman) for a proposed new "College for the instruction of Asiatic, Christian, and other youth in Eastern literature and European science".