15 - MARY PALEY MARSHALL

Summary

Mary Marshall deserves a record of piety and remembrance, not only as the wife of Alfred Marshall, without whose understanding and devotion his work would not have fulfilled its fruitfulness, but for her place in the history of Newnham, now nearly three-quarters of a century ago, as the first woman lecturer on Economics in Cambridge, and for her part in the development of the Marshall Library of Economics in Cambridge in the last twenty years of her life.

She came of that high lineage from which most of virtue and value in this country springs—yeoman farmers owning their own land back to the sixteenth century and beyond, turning in the eighteenth century into thrifty parsons and scholars. The Paleys had been thus settled at Giggleswick in Yorkshire for many generations. Her great-great-grandfather took his degree at Christ's College, Cambridge, in 1733, and was headmaster of Giggleswick Grammar School for fifty-four years. Her greatgrandfather, born just over two hundred years ago, was William Paley, fellow and tutor of Christ's and ‘ the delight of combination rooms’, Archdeacon of Carlisle, author of the Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy, which anticipated Bentham, and of what is generally known as ‘Paley's Evidences’ (Natural Theology, or Evidence of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity collected from the Appearances of Nature), the reading of which a generation later by another Christ's man, Charles Darwin, put him on the right track.