ABSTRACT
Biographical exhumation can now reveal that when Johanna Trosiener’s future childhood mentor arrived in Dumfries in 1753, her son’s future headmaster was living, aged three, in the wilds of the English border country just 60 miles away, at Alston, for the headmaster and founder of what in 1803 was popularly known as ‘the Rev. Mr Lancaster’s Academy’ was the Rev. Thomas Lancaster was ordained deacon on appointment as curate of Culgaith in 1745. Culgaith, about four miles east of Penrith in the northernmost Pennines, is a long, straggling village, beautifully situated on the top of an eminence above the river Eden and commanding an extensive prospect on every side. The life initially led by his son, Schopenhauer’s future headmaster, was much the same. Thomas Lancaster junior passed both his childhood and his early manhood in the Alston Moor area, a wild, remote and therefore backward district, but one which was just beginning to change.
