Background
Francis Mason was born on April 2, 1799 in York, England. His father, Thomas Mason, was a cobbler by trade, a radical in politics, and a lay preacher of a local Baptist society; his mother's maiden name was Hay.
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Francis Mason was born on April 2, 1799 in York, England. His father, Thomas Mason, was a cobbler by trade, a radical in politics, and a lay preacher of a local Baptist society; his mother's maiden name was Hay.
The son acquired a rudimentary education at the parish school (for the children of workers) and served as errand-boy in a shoe-factory. Too poor to pay the apprentice's fee in the factory, he finally went to work with his father. Because of a strike in York, the family moved to Hull, where the boy became interested in geography and mathematics, and studied Euclid in a night school conducted by a retired naval officer. From Hull the family moved to Leeds, the mother's native city.
In 1818 at the age of nineteen, Francis emigrated to the United States, his passage money being provided by a maternal uncle already in America. He landed in Philadelphia and worked his way as a journeyman shoe-maker to Pittsburgh, thence went by boat down the Ohio and the Mississippi rivers to Cincinnati, St. Louis, and New Orleans, and finally by sea to Boston, where he arrived in 1824. Soon thereafter he settled at Randolph, Massachussets, boarding at the home of the Baptist minister, Rev. Benjamin Putnam, working at his trade, and teaching school. Influenced by his wife and by the reading of Butler's Analogy, he professed conversion and joined the Canton Baptist Church. By this church, on October 1, 1827, he was licensed to preach, and in the following November he entered Newton Theological Institution to prepare for the ministry. He had previously begun privately the study of Hebrew and Greek, and had read widely in literature, science, and theology. During his senior year at Newton, December 7, 1829, he received appointment from the Baptist missionary society to service in Burma. On May 23, 1830, he was ordained to the ministry. Three days afterward he and his bride sailed from Boston for Calcutta, arriving in October, and passing on to Maulmain in the following month. Stationed in Tavoy for work among the Karens, he began his duties in January 1831, and spent in all twenty-two years there. He was superintendent of the station several years; conducted a training school for mission workers, which was later moved to Maulmain and finally to Rangoon; engaged in extensive evangelism; and made translations, especially of the Christian Scriptures, into the Sgau and Pgho Karen dialects. He published at Tavoy in 1837 a Karen version of the Gospel of Matthew on a press established that year, which was removed to Rangoon in 1853. In 1843 his Sgau Karen New Testament appeared and also, in English, The Karen Apostle, or Memoir of Ko Thah-byu, edited by H. J. Ripley. These were followed by Synopsis of a Grammar of the Karen Language (1846), The Natural Productions of Burmah, or Notes on the Fauna, Flora, and Minerals of the Tenasserim Provinces of the Burman Empire (1850), a memoir of his second wife, Helen Griggs, entitled A Cenotaph to a Woman of the Burman Mission (1851), and his Karen Bible issued in 1853. On the completion of the Karen Bible, he turned for a time to evangelism, taking up residence in Toungoo, where he established a new station. His health was failing, however, and in January 1854 he set out for the United States, journeying by way of India, South Africa, Europe, and the British Isles, where he visited his aged mother in Leeds. He sailed again for Burma on July 2, 1856, and reached Toungoo on January 2, 1857. In 1860 he published in Rangoon his valuable Burmah, its Peoples and Natural Productions. For this and other researches and literary works he was admitted to membership in the Royal Asiatic Society and the American Oriental Society. There was a time when both Mason and the mission suffered much from the effects of a form of dementia which afflicted his wife and led to the temporary establishment of a cult. She claimed to have found in the Karen women's dresses and in various objects connected with Buddhist worship, the language in which God spoke to Adam, and believed that she had the key by which she could read it. Mason was asked to sever his connection with the mission for a time, and during that period he published a Pali grammar, and an autobiography, The Story of a Working Man's Life. He was later reinstated and died a member of the mission which he had served so conspicuously. He was buried in Rangoon.
(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)
( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)
In 1825 he married Lucinda Gill (died 1828), daughter of a farmer living in Canton, Massachussets, to which place Mason now removed and opened a shoe shop of his own. On May 23, 1830 he was married to Helen Maria Griggs (died 1846). In 1847 he was married to Mrs. Ellen Huntly Bullard, widow of the Rev. E. B. Bullard, formerly of Maulmain.
