JOSHUA

See also:

• JOSHUA MARSHMAN (1768–1837)

MARSHMAN (1768–1837)  , English Baptist missionary and orientalist, was born on the loth of April 1768, at Westbury Leigh, in Wiltshire . He followed the occupation of a weaver until 1794, but having meanwhile devoted himself to study he removed to Broadmead, Bristol, to take charge of a small school . In 1799 he was sent by the Baptist Missionary Society to join their mission at Serampur . Here, in addition to his more special duties, he studied Bengali and Sanskrit, and afterwards Chinese . He translated the Bible into various dialects, and, aided by his son, established newspapers and founded Serampur College . He received the degree of D.D. from Brown University, U.S.A., in 1810 . He died at Serampur on the 5th of December 1837 . His son, John Clark Marshman (1794-1877), was official Bengali translator; he published a Guide to tke Civil Law which, before the work of Macaulay, was the civil code of India, and wrote a History of India (1842) . Marshman translated into Chinese the book of Genesis, the Gospels, and the Epistles of Paul to the Romans and the Corinthians; in 1811 he published The Works of Confucius, containing the Original Text, with a Translation, and in 1814 his Clavis Sinica . He was also the author of Elements of Chinese Grammar, with Preliminary Dissertation on the Characters and Colloquial Mediums of the Chinese, and was associated with W . Carey in the preparation of a Sanskrit grammar and of a Bengali-English dictionary . See J .

C . Marshman,

Life and Times of Carey, Marshman and Ward (2 vols., 1859) .