Edward Thomas was born in Lambeth on 3rd March, 1878, and spent most of his childhood in London. His holidays, however, were spent with relatives in Swindon, and it was there that he developed his abiding love of all thingsrural.He was educated at St Paul's Hammersmith, and was encouraged in his creative writing by James Ashcroft Noble, whose daughter he secretly married, after her father's death, and to the great disapproval of her family.Despitegrowing anxiety over poverty, ill health and lite...