Charles Thomas Marvin, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death
TweetCharles Thomas Marvin
British writer
Date of Birth: 10-Jun-1854
Place of Birth: Plumstead, England, United Kingdom
Date of Death: 04-Dec-1890
Profession: writer
Zodiac Sign: Gemini 
About Charles Thomas Marvin
- Charles Thomas Marvin (1854–1890), writer on Russia. Marvin was born at Plumstead, Kent, in 1854 and in 1868 was employed in a warehouse in Watling Street, in the city of London.
- At the age of sixteen he went to Russia to join his father, who was assistant-manager of an engineering works on the Neva.
- He remained in Russia for six years (1870–6) and acquired a good knowledge of the language.
- During eighteen months he was the correspondent of The Globe at Saint Petersburg.
- Returning to London, on 10 January 1876, after passing the civil service examination, was appointed a temporary writer in the custom-house, and in May was transferred to the Inland Revenue at Somerset House and thence to the post-office.
- He afterwards returned to the custom-house.
- On 16 July 1877 he entered the foreign office, and here, although only a writer, with 88l.
- a year, on 29 May 1878 he was entrusted to make a copy of the secret treaty with Russia.
- The same evening he furnished to The Globe, from memory, a summary of the document.
- On 1 June Lord Salisbury, in the House of Lords, said that this summary was "wholly unworthy of their lordships' confidence".
- On 14 June The Globe printed the complete text of the treaty from Marvin's extremely retentive memory.
- On 26 June he was arrested and on 16 July discharged, as he had committed no offence known to the law.
- In 1878 he published Our Public Offices, Embodying an Account of the Disclosure of the Anglo-Russian Agreement, and the Unrevealed Secret Treaty of 31 May 1878.
- During the Russo-Turkish war in 1878 he contributed to twenty publications. In 1880 he published his first book on the Russo-Indian question, The Eye-witnesses' Account of the Disastrous Campaign against the Akhal Tekke Turcomans, which was adopted by the Russian government for the military libraries and commended by General Mikhail Skobelev.
- In 1881 he printed Merv the Queen of the World and the Scourge of the Man-stealing Turcomans.
- With an Exposition on the Khorassan Question, in which he predicted that the next Russian advance would be pushed to Panjdeh.
- In 1882 he was sent to Russia by Joseph Cowen, M.P., to interview the principal generals and statesmen on the Russo-Indian question.
- On his return he wrote The Russian Advance towards India: Conversations with Skobeleff, Ignatieff, and other Russian Generals and Statesmen on the Central Asian Question.
- The following year he proceeded to Caucasus and explored the Russian petroleum region.
- An account of this was published in 1884, in The Region of the Eternal Fire: an Account of a Journey to the Petroleum Region of the Caspian.
- The best-known of his works is The Russians at the Gates of Herat, 1885, a book of two hundred pages, written and published within a week, which circulated sixty-five thousand copies. He died at Grosvenor House, Plumstead Common, Kent, on 4 Dec.
- 1890 and was buried in Plumstead new cemetery on 10 December.
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