Childhood and Early Adulthood
Carey, the youngest of five children, was born to Edmund and Elizabeth Carey, who were weavers by trade in the village of Paulerspury in Northamptonshire. William was raised in the Church of England; when he was six, his father was appointed the parish clerk and village schoolmaster. As a child he was naturally inquisitive and keenly interested in the natural sciences, particularly botany. He possessed a natural gift for language, teaching himself Latin.
At the age of 14, Carey’s father apprenticed him to a cobbler in the nearby village of Piddington, Northamptonshire. His master, Clarke Nichols, was a churchman like himself, but another apprentice, John Warr, was a Dissenter. Through his influence Carey would eventually leave the Church of England and join with other Dissenters to form a small Congregational church in nearby Hackleton. While apprenticed to Nichols, he also taught himself Greek with the help of a local villager who had a college education.
When Nichols died in 1779, Carey went to work for the local shoemaker, Thomas Old; he married Old’s sister-in-law Dorothy Plackett in 1781 in the Church of St John the Baptist, Piddington. Unlike William, Dorothy was illiterate; her signature in the marriage register is a crude cross. William and Dorothy Carey had seven children, five sons and two daughters; both girls died in infancy, as well as their son Peter, who died at the age of 5. Old himself died soon afterward, and Carey took over his business, during which time he taught himself Hebrew, Italian, Dutch, and French, often reading while working on his shoes.
There is some debate over whether Carey was a shoemaker or a cobbler, one who repairs shoes. Though John Brown Myers entitled his biography of Carey, William Carey the Shoemaker Who Became the Father and Founder of Modern Missions, Carey is also quoted by a primary source to have said in response to it being said of him that he was a shoemaker that he was no more than a simple cobbler who only repaired shoes in order to underscore his humble beginning.
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