Childhood
Samuel Bownas was born in 1676, to Quaker parents, although his father died when he was a month old. His father had been a Friend during the time of Quaker persecution, with meetings having been held in his house during Friends’ persecution. Bownas had been admitted as a member of Great Strickland Monthly Meeting as a baby. During his childhood he did not have a great taste for Quakerism or religion at all, although his mother would read accounts of his father’s sufferings to him in the evenings, and he went with his mother to meeting and to visit Friends imprisoned in Appleby. He was apprenticed to his uncle age 13 as a blacksmith
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Famous quotes containing the word childhood:
“The childhood shows the man,
As morning shows the day.”
—John Milton (1608–1674)
“Oh! mystery of man, from what a depth
Proceed thy honours. I am lost, but see
In simple childhood something of the base
On which thy greatness stands; but this I feel,
That from thyself it comes, that thou must give,
Else never canst receive. The days gone by
Return upon me almost from the dawn
Of life: the hiding-places of man’s power
Open; I would approach them, but they close.”
—William Wordsworth (1770–1850)
“When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss. It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of our life put together.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)