[2] From Milton Abbas school, near Blandford, Bosworth Smith went on in August 1855 to Marlborough College, where he was head boy under successive headmasters—George Edward Lynch Cotton, and George Granville Bradley.

[1][3] On 16 September 1864 Bosworth Smith began work as a classical master at Harrow School, on the nomination of the headmaster Henry Montagu Butler.

In his form teaching, he leavened the classical tradition with history, scripture, geography, and English literature, especially John Milton.

[6][7][8] This was despite a socially awkward moment at dinner in the rectory in 1874: the Smiths were entertaining with the help of James Pole, John Floyer's butler.

After a long illness he died at Bingham's Melcombe on 18 October 1908, and was buried beside his parents and brothers in the churchyard of West Stafford.

[1] A portrait of Bosworth Smith was painted by Hugh Goldwin Rivière, presented by old pupils at Harrow and engraved by the Fine Arts Society.

[1] Bosworth Smith is now mainly remembered for Mohammed and Mohammedanism: Lectures Delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in February and March 1874 (1874).

[12][13] They were later supported by Edward Wilmot Blyden, a Liberian Christian missionary who argued that Islam had brought clear advantages to Africans.

[14] Blyden and Bosworth Smith met, through Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, became friends, exchanged visits, and corresponded at length.

[18] In a controversy arising towards the end of 1887, Isaac Taylor went further in attacking existing Christian missionary activity, and in particular its commercial links.

He found himself in rough consensus with Thomas Patrick Hughes, Harry Johnston, Joseph Thomson: on the positive contributions in Africa of Islam, and negative points; and on the value and prospects of Christian missionary work.

[20] Andrew Walls called Mohammed and Mohammedanism "strangely influential", the work of "one of nature's amateurs" who knew no Arabic.

He saw Smith as influenced by F. D. Maurice and the nascent study of comparative religion as represented by Max Müller, with a "cheerful evolutionism".