John was excited and enthusiastic. Now he and William had even longer discussions as they cut soles and sewed seams. They took turns reading chapters of the Bible aloud while the other one hammered and sewed shoes.
For the next six months, things went along quite smoothly for William, until September 1779. That month, William’s master, Clarke Nichols, died suddenly, leaving both William and John without a job. By then, John had finished his apprenticeship and was able to find work quickly, but William still had two years to go on his apprenticeship. After several weeks of searching, Thomas Old of Hackleton agreed to take William in to finish his apprenticeship.
William moved two miles away to Hackleton, where he began attending a dissenter church headed by a Mr. Plackett, who had three daughters. The middle daughter was called Dolly, though her real name was Dorothy. She and William were often together at the dissenter services. Dolly also visited the Old home often because her elder sister was married to Thomas Old, William’s new boss. While Dolly was six years older than William, she was quiet and shy. William, on the other hand, had an opinion on everything. Soon the two of them were “walking out together,” as dating was then called; and in June 1781, less than two years after William had moved to Hackelton, they were married. William was nineteen years old and could barely afford a wife, since he was still an apprentice.
The wedding was small. Dolly’s younger sister, Kitty, was the bridesmaid, and when it came time to sign the marriage register, both Dolly and Kitty signed with an X. Neither of them had been to school and so had never been taught to write. This was not unusual for women during this period. William promised to teach Dolly to read and write after they were married.
At first, the marriage went well. The couple lived in a tiny cottage, and William put all his spare time into creating two gardens: one to grow vegetables and the other to grow the flowers he loved so much. Within a year, their first child, a daughter, was born. William named her Ann, after his grandmother who had died when he was very young. Now William had not only a wife but also a child to support on the small wage he earned from his shoemaking.
During his second year in Hackleton, William had become a part-time preacher for the dissenters and spoke every two weeks at the village of Earls Barton, eight miles away. Of course, he had to walk there and back. The people in the church were poor mat makers and couldn’t even afford to pay him enough to buy the leather to make a new pair of shoes to replace the ones he wore out with all the walking.
William also preached once a month at Paulerspury, where he would stop at his parents’ house for lunch after the service. William’s mother was very proud when the neighbors told her what a wonderful preacher her son was. None of the family members dared go and hear him themselves, however. It would not be right for a clerk of the Church of England or anyone living in his house to be seen at a dissenter service. It would cost William’s father his job if he attended such a meeting.
William’s parents had not made the ten-mile walk to see William at his new home in Hackleton, so they had no idea how little money he and Dolly really had. William’s family often ate oatmeal and water for days at a time. When their daughter, Ann, was eighteen months old and just starting to talk, she became very ill. William and Dolly did their best to help her, but she soon died. William also became very sick with the same illness and was not able to attend Ann’s funeral. A message was sent to his mother, who came to help the sad household.
When Elizabeth Carey arrived at her son’s house, she was appalled to see the conditions he and Dolly were living in. It was no wonder the baby had died and William was deathly ill. The cottage was so damp that the pages of William’s books were all limp. There was no food in the larder and not enough warm bed coverings to keep a person from freezing on a snowy night.
Mrs. Carey set right to work scrubbing down the moldy walls and boiling a huge pot of soup. As she worked, Dolly sat limply in the corner beside William’s bed, unable to believe what was happening. Was she to lose her baby daughter and her husband all in the same week?
With his mother’s special care, William slowly began to recover, but not completely. For the rest of his life, he caught coughs and colds easily, and often he had a sore chest, especially when the weather was cold and damp. There was one other side effect of his illness. When William got up from his sickbed, the top of his head was completely bald. All that was left were little tufts of hair around his ears. He kept waiting for the rest of his hair to grow back, but in the end, he gave up hope and ordered a cheap wig from Mr. Wilson, a wigmaker and fellow dissenter in Olney. William was only twenty-three at the time and was very embarrassed about being bald, especially when he was invited to preach somewhere new.
Although William was bald and had a delicate chest as a result of his sickness, something much worse had happened to Dolly, who had gone into shock with baby Ann’s death. Although she eventually went back to cleaning and cooking, something inside her had died. She’d lost the sparkle in her eyes.
It took many weeks before William was well enough to go back to working full time, and without his working, the family had no money to buy food. William’s younger brother, Tom, had generously sent over the money he’d been saving from his own small income. The money kept William and Dolly from starving. When Mrs. Carey returned to Paulerspury and explained the situation to her friends and neighbors, many of them gave money until there was enough for William and Dolly to buy a tiny cottage in Piddington. The cottage was located on higher ground than their previous cottage and was not so damp. Dolly was glad to move. Everything in the old cottage reminded her of the daughter she had just buried. William hoped that the new house would mean a fresh start for them both. But even after the move, Dolly still couldn’t get the thought of her daughter’s death out of her mind. It haunted her day and night.
Whenever William could, he continued to study Greek and Latin and read as many books as he could find. One that he found particularly helpful was called Help to Zion’s Travellers: being an attempt to remove several stumbling blocks out of the way relating to doctrinal, experimental and practical religion. (Books with long titles sold well in those days!) As he read and reread the book, William became convinced he should be baptized as an adult. He had been baptized as a baby in the Church of St. James the Great, but he wanted baptism to be his own choice and not just his parents’ decision for him. On October 5, 1783, William Carey was baptized in the River Nene in Northamptonshire. It was a brisk fall morning when the Reverend John Ryland baptized William and wrote in his journal, “This day baptized a poor journeyman shoemaker.” John Ryland had no idea he’d just baptized the man who was to become one of the most famous missionaries the world would know.
Three months after the baptism, Thomas Old, William’s employer and brother-in-law, died. William took over his shoemaking business along with the responsibility of supporting Mrs. Old and her four children. William didn’t have to do this, but he had a soft heart and felt sorry for them. If William’s life had been a struggle up until then, it now became all but impossible. The British had lost the American Revolutionary War, and everyone in England was suffering financially as a result. It was not a good time to start out in business, especially with as little practical experience as William had.
Somehow twenty-three-year-old William had to make enough money to support Mrs. Old, the four Old children, and Dolly. On top of this, he was still trying to study the Bible and preach at struggling dissenter churches. It was a load many young men would have buckled under, but not William.
The winter of 1784 was one of the coldest ever recorded in England. For nine weeks, frost lay heavy on the ground all day long. William nearly froze to death delivering the shoes he had made. Somehow they all made it through, and the next winter was slightly easier. William plodded on, working, studying, and trying to cheer Dolly up, not knowing whether or how things would ever improve for him.
Finally, in 1785, nearly a year after Thomas Old had died, William’s circumstances began to change. William’s sister-in-law remarried, releasing William from the burden of taking care of her and her children. Then a tiny Baptist church in Moulton, nine miles to the north, invited William Carey to be their preacher. The church could not afford to offer William much—only fifteen pounds a year for his salary and a meetinghouse that was falling down. Financially, William would not be any better off than he had been making shoes, but this change in profession was a step in the direction William wanted to go. In addition, William would now have time to study the Bible and learn languages without interruption.
With all the enthusiasm of a new minister, William set about rebuilding a congregation that had dwindled to almost nothing in the ten years since the last minister had left. Because the old schoolteacher had left Moulton, William was also able to teach school, which added some extra money to the family income.
While William enjoyed being with the local children, he found it difficult being the schoolmaster. He was not nearly strict enough, and often he smiled at the children’s tricks instead of punishing the children as he was supposed to.
William’s favorite subject to teach was geography, and William tried hard to interest the children in the world beyond England. This was a difficult task, since none of the children had ever been more than a cart ride away from home. To attract their attention, William drew a large map of the world. He glued many pieces of paper together and began the painstaking task of copying the continents of the world onto them. To guide him, he used one book in particular, a book about Captain James Cook’s explorations. Cook had been killed six years before by natives in the Sandwich Islands (now called Hawaii). Before that, however, he had made three voyages of discovery into the Pacific Ocean. On these voyages, he had mapped new islands and coastlines from Antarctica to Alaska.
Next to each of the continents and islands on his map, William wrote notes about what was known of them. Next to what is now called Australia he wrote: “New Holland 12,000,000 pagans.” Next to Easter Island was written: “People thieves. Large statues. No wood. Plantains, yams, potatoes, sugar cane, grown.” Next to China was written: “The Chinese are middle-sized with broad faces. Their eyes are black and small, noses blunt, high cheekbones, large lips. Emperors and princes wear yellow. Some mandarins wear black, some red. Common people wear blue. White is for mourning.” Next to India was recorded: “Indostan. 110,000,000 Mahamodans, pagans, Brahmins, Sitris, Beise, and Sudders. Rice, pomegranates, oranges, etc. Banyan roots, yams, radishes. 8,000,000 Indians are pagans, vigilant, cruel, warlike.”
William Carey was often more moved by the geography lessons than were his young students. Sometimes when he pointed to his map, he would have to stop and take a deep breath before going on. He so much wanted to be out sharing the gospel message with all the different races named on the map. Even though the figures on his map were not accurate, they gave William many restless nights wondering what it would be like to live in a place where the name of Jesus Christ had never been spoken.
William’s career as a schoolteacher did not last long. The old schoolteacher came back to Moulton, and overnight, all of William’s students reenrolled at his school. This left William with not enough money to feed his wife and their new baby, Felix. William went back to what he knew best—shoemaking. This time, he didn’t take on his own business. Instead, he worked under contract to Mr. Gotch, a shoemaker who supplied shoes for the Royal Army and Navy. This meant that William had to make the eleven-mile round trip to Kettering once a week to deliver his batch of new boots and shoes and pick up leather to make more. For all this work, William was paid five shillings a week, which along with the money from being a Baptist minister, was barely enough to buy food for his family.
