Customer Reviews

Dorothy Carey: The Tragic and Untold Story of Mrs. William Carey

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This is the story of Dorothy Carey, wife of William Carey, the first English Baptist missionary to India. Dorothy Carey was a simple, uneducated English women married to the man who became known as the Father of Modern Missions. While William was a linguistic genius and fell on Indian soil like a seed on fertile ground, Dorothy did not fare so well. With two small boys in tow and a babe in arms, Dorothy was physically sick from the time they arrived until she died twelve years later. William flourished, easily learning the language and productively translating Scripture. Dorothy buried her baby, suffered constant dysentary and finally sunk into deep paranoia. Her final years were spent confined to home under constant watchcare. Much of the day to day happenings are from the journals of William Carey. Those journals,along with letters back to the Mission Committee in England, give the sad story of the wife of the "Father of Modern Missions." Dorothy Carey also deserves to be remembered for the sacrifices she made for the cause of Missions and James Beck has done us a great service in presenting her story.

I have read a number of authors who have excoriated William Carey for the way he treated his wife. I felt that Beck has given a much more nuanced and balanced portrayal of Dorothy's life and her relationship with William. One of the things he points out is that if William had taken her back to England, the treatment at the time for people with emotional illness was quite harsh, and that she probably received much more loving and gentle treatment by remaining in India under the care of William.

William Carey is known as the father of the modern missionary movement. From a self-educated cobbler to a genius in linguistics, his place in missionary history is undisputed. However, the wife he took to India with him did not thrive in this adopted country as William did. She suffered from terrible homesickness, months of disabling dysentary and the death of a child. Within three years of arriving in India, she was suffering with mental illness and she died in India never having recovered her sanity. James Beck has given a facinating picture
of her life.