The Terrors, Pains and Early Miseries

An Anthology of Childhood in the Lake Counties

Wordsworth, looking back on his childhood in the Lake Country, felt that: Fair seedtime had my soul and I grew up/Foster’d alike by beauty and by fear.

Many others recalled a rather different childhood in the towns and countryside of Cumberland and Westmorland. William Fairish knew starvation in Carlisle. The Green children of Grasmere were cut off for days in their isolated cottage by the snowstorm in which their parents perished. Aged twelve, Mary Ann Dixon made her lonely journey on foot from Newcastle to Wigton in the depth of winter.

The Terrors, Pains and Early Miseries tells of childhood as it was experienced in the Lake Counties of long ago.