The letter is dated using contextual information from the letter, specifically the reference to Marshman’s visit to the King of Denmark, which occurred in August 1826.

Joshua Marshman was an extremely able linguist, and had by this time translated the scriptures into more than ten languages, including Bengali, Sanskrit and Hindi. The first translation of the Bible into Chinese was the work of several individuals, including Marshman and his sons in addition to an Arminian Mandarin-speaking factor resident in Serampore, and a number of Chinese assistants. The first edition appeared in 1822, but was quickly superseded in 1823 by a translation by Robert Morrison that was considered superior. Marshman may have exaggerated his progress to More: the volume of The Religious Magazine for January-June 1828 claimed that Marshman had ‘advanced as far as Leviticus’ (p. 224), the third of the five Biblical books in the Pentateuch. It is unclear whether Marshman’s second edition was published.

Marshman was instrumental in developments in printing in Chinese, experimenting throughout the 1810s with different means of printing Chinese characters: early attempts with wooden blocks lead to extremely large and expensive books as a result of the large amount of space left by the blocks around each character. During 1811 and 1812 attempts were made to use metal type, but difficulties in casting characters were the cause of further problems. When finessed, however, metal type enabled five times the number of characters to be printed compared to wooden blocks, which represented a significant improvement. The crowning achievement of the Serampore press was the publication in Chinese in 1822 of Marshman’s translation of the Bible. However, the considerable expenses involved in printing in Chinese, in addition to the further advances made in the field by printers in China itself, meant that the Serampore venture made little money.

Serampore College was founded in 1818 by Marshman, William Carey, and William Ward. Marshman’s audience with the king of Denmark was not, as More asserts here, to secure permission to erect a college, but to obtain a Royal Charter which granted the College the power to award degrees. This power was not exercised until 1915.

Serampore was a Danish colony from 1755 until 1845, when it was purchased by the British. The purchase included provisions for maintaining the powers granted by the Danish Royal Charter awarded to Serampore College in 1827.

Lewis Way had travelled to the Holy Land as a missionary with the Jews Society (which he had founded) in 1823. Whilst there he rented a building at Antoura, on Mount Lebanon, from a Roman Catholic Bishop, with the intention of setting up a place where missionaries could prepare for their work in the area. Ill health obliged Way to return to Europe in August 1823, but work at the Mount Lebanon residence continued in his absence, until the intervention of the recently-founded Roman Catholic Society for the Propagation of the Faith, who wrote to the Maronite Patriarch, urging him to prevent Way’s missionaries from distributing Bibles in the region. The Patriarch accordingly issued an edict early in 1824 which forced the closure of Way’s enterprise.