Missionary linguist

Press, 26 May 1979, Page 17

Missionary linguist

William Carey: Shoemaker and Missionary. By Mary Drewery. Hodder and Stoughton. 224 pp. >12.30. (Reviewed by Colin Brown) William Carey, a pioneering Baptist missionary in India during the years 1793-1834, deserves credit for more than his evangelistic efforts. Much of his life he was plagued by guilt that he had converted so few and insisted that his tombstone bear the words, “A wretched, poor, and helpless worm, on Thy kind arms I fall.” Carey was. in fact, a distinguished and largely selftaught linguist, adept translator, and amateur botanist, as well as a devoted missionary.

Mary Drewery has written a pleasant and unpretentious biography, but it has limitations, some of them self-imposed. She has worked painstakingly from primary sources without, it seems, utilising those in India. The biography does not slight any of Carey’s activities but, especially in her summing-up, it is Carey as a missionary who is the centre of her interest rather than the

wider ramifications of his activities as linguist, translator, and interpreter of Hindu culture. Although her account does not justify the dictum that biographers who approach their subject on their knees are unable to see very far. Mary Drewery is thoroughly pious in her approach; at what she deems suitable points Biblical texts adorn the narr.ititc Not thai Mary Drewery is less than frank with what evidence she has used. Carey’s relationship to his first wife, who did not wish to go to India and spent many years there insane, is examined with candour as is the protracted and bitter struggle between Carey and his colleagues with the officials of the Baptist Missionary Society in England over control of properties and activities at Ser.impore It should be possible io write a biography of William Carey that would be consistently wider in scope, deeper in its researches, and more probing in its analyses than this one what Mary Drewery has provided is a competent and effective tribute to Carey as a missionary.