He graduated BA (achieving the ranking of twelfth wrangler in the Mathematical Tripos and winning the Hulsean Prize for an essay on the Jews and idolatry) in 1810, then MA in 1813.
Jowett is the Society's representative, and is opening a correspondence wherever he can hear of a good and zealous man, likely to assist him in distributing the scriptures and religious tracts, and in bringing Mahomedans and Heathens to know Christ.
James Connor in Constantinople, Jowett said: "Religious tracts are too generally dull, because they deal more in abstract truth than in living pictures...
William Jowett on the failure of his strength, which they believe to be mainly attributable to his exhausting labours in the Mediterranean Mission, receive with heartfelt and unfeigned regret his resignation of the office of Secretary of the Church Missionary Society — that, while the Committee would ascribe all the praise to the Grace of God our Saviour, they desire to record their grateful sense of Mr. Jowett's long-tried, self-denying, and holy services; which abroad, under the Divine Blessing resting upon his Researches in the Mediterranean, laid the foundation of the Egyptian, Greek, and Abyssinian Missions; and at home have left a succession of Instructions, and a series of many hundreds Letters, addressed to the various Missionaries of the Society, as lasting memorials of his Missionary Experience, his Spiritual Wisdom, and his Christian Love — and that the Committee further assure him, that they entertain toward him the liveliest sentiments of respect and affection, and will follow him, in his retirement to less onerous duties, with their earnest prayers that God, in His infinite mercy, may still continue to bless and make him a blessing to others.
[15] In about 1809, the French consul at Cairo, M. Asselin de Cherville, met an elderly Abyssinian named Abu Rumi, who had been both interpreter to the traveller James Bruce in North Africa and an instructor to the philologist Sir William Jones.
In 1820, while on a visit to Cairo, Jowett saw this work in manuscript, entered into negotiations with Asselin, and on 10 April 1820 bought it for the British and Foreign Bible Society "on terms which appeared to... be equitable to all parties".
[18] The manuscript consisted of 9,539 pages "...in the hand-writing of the Translator, Abu Rumi; which is a bold and fine specimen of the Amharic character".
[21] In 1815, Jowett had married Martha, a daughter of John Whiting of Little Palgrave, Norfolk, and they had seven children together, but his wife died long before him, in 1829.
[1] She had worked as a missionary alongside her husband, and according to Emma Raymond Pitman's Heroines of the Mission Field (1880), "Miss Martha Whiting in her youth received a superior education, and evinced not only a zeal for the acquisition of knowledge, but an aptitude for acquiring languages".
William Jowett M.A., She was eleven years resident as a missionary in Malta, born Oct. 22, 1789, died June 24, 1829. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?
[25] Seventy-eight letters written by Jowett from Malta and England between 1816 and 1836 are held in the British and Foreign Bible Society's Archives.