Catherine Marsh or Miss C. M. Marsh (15 September 1818 – 12 December 1912) was an
English philanthropist and author writing about soldiers and
navvies during the 1850s.
Life
Marsh was born in
Colchester at the vicarage for St Peters church in 1818. Her mother was Maria Chowne (born Tilson) and her father was
William Marsh, a clergyman with whom she lived all her life. In 1850 she was concerned about the soldiers bound for the
Crimean War. She decided to write about the short life of a Christian soldier and ''Memorials of Captain Hedley Vicars'' was published in 1855. It was well read and 78,000 copies were sold in the first twelve months. Two years later she published a similar work ''English Hearts and English Hands'' which sympathetically described the
navvy's life having witnessed the workers who had been re-building the
Crystal Palace.
[ That book led to an exchange of letters with ]Julia Wightman
Julia Bainbrigge Wightman (1817–1898), , was a British philanthropist, writer and Temperance activist. She wrote sometimes as Mrs Charles Wightman. Her profits and the St. Alkmund's Total Abstinence Society paid for "Wightman's Hall" in Shrews ...
who was an advocate for Temperance in Shrewsbury. In 1859 Wightman published her own book that included many of the letters.
Marsh published ''The Life of Arthur Vandeleur, Major, Royal Artillery'' in 1862.
In 1866 there was an outbreak of Cholera and Marsh created a convalescent home in Brighton.[ The following year she published a biography of her father who had died in 1864.][
Marsh died in Feltwell rectory in Norfolk in 1912.]
References
External links
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Marsh, Catherine
1818 births
1912 deaths
People from Colchester
English women non-fiction writers
19th-century English non-fiction writers
19th-century English women