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London Missionary Society (LMS) missionary remembered for his printing of Chinese characters and for his daughter Maria, who married Hudson Taylor.
Born in Greenwich, England. Dyer's father had been secretary of the Royal Hospital at Greenwich and was later chief clerk of the British Admiralty. Dyer was converted in 1822 and studied mathematics and law at Cambridge. In 1824, he offered to serve with the LMS and trained at Gosport and under Pye Smith at Homerton. Smith's combination of missionary, philological, and scientific interests provided a relevant background. Dyer married Maria Tarn before joining the LMS Ultra-Ganges Mission 1827.
Based in Penang, Dyer studied Hokkien and tackled the challenge of producing movable metallic types for the thousands of Chinese characters. He began with a systematic analysis of characters and strokes. Initially using wood reliefs to create the clay molds from which type could be cast, he soon moved to steel punches and copper matrices. Dyer's linguistic abilities, meticulous planning, and painstaking attention to detail resulted in Chinese fonts of high quality. They were later passed on to the American Presbyterian Mission Press in China and played a significant part in its development.
The Dyers moved to Malacca in 1835 and returned to England in 1839. Dyer was in Singapore in 1842 and in Hong Kong in 1843. In addition to articles in the Calcutta Christian Observer, Chinese Repository, and Periodical Miscellany, his publications included Vocabulary of the Hokkien Dialect (1838), A Selection of Three Thousand Characters Being the Most Important in the Chinese Language for the Purpose of Facilitating the Cutting of Punches and Casting Metal type in Chinese (1834), and Aesop's Fables (in Hokkien, 1843).
W. John Roxborogh