Someone recently posed a question about how based in reality is a book, The Diary of Dorcas Good. I haven't seen this book, and am mildly interested. But I'd say taht probably the girl never wrote a diary. It would have been one interesting diary if she had written it. Dorcas Good was imprisoned with her homeless mother, Sarah Good, when she was four years old. She was apparently coerced to testify against her mother. Her parents, William and Sarah, were destitute and homeless, and dependent on people taking them into their homes in exchange for labor. But Sarah "suffered from melancholly" though her spirit never broke during her imprisonment and jailing, and she had a very difficult personality, and muttered and ranted at people when refused charity, and repeatedly got herself thrown out of peoples' homes. It seems that her father, John Solart, was a successful tavern owner, I think, in Wenham, and the family were prosperous, until he committed suicide. It would appear that a tendency to depression ran in the family. There was an inequitable distribution of his estate, and it took Sarah a very long time to get even a small part of it, by which time she had made two unfortunate marriages and ended up losing what little she got, and the family were completely destitute, homeless, and dependant on charity. The girls making the accusations went after the small child Dorcas, too, claiming that her spectre was chasing children in the village streets and biting and scratching them. It is speculated that this excessive sadistic cruelty was the result of the psychological abuse the girls themselves had suffered. Dorcas was sort of transferred from one jail to another following her mother, and was kept chained at the insistence of the accusers, to keep her spectre from chasing them! Her mother was executed in June or early July, and Dorcas was kept chained in jail among the other women who were accused until the following winter when all the victims who survived were released. In that time, Dorcas turned from a healthy and hearty child into a palid, thin girl with wild, unkempt hair and a furtive manner. In 1710, when many of the families of the victims of the witch trials sought and got financial compensation, Dorcas's father William wrote that she never fully recovered her senses from that experience; in other words, she never had full mental health. One author wrote that she was permanently insane, though not having fully recovered her senses doesn't necessarily imply that degree of impairment. One has to wonder if she ever learned to write, or if her father ever had any interest in teaching her or having her taught. I don't know where she was living when her mother was arrested; she isn't described as with them in incidents involving her parents, and it seems as if if she had lived with homeless, destitute and rough-edged people dependent on being taken in by others, how could she have been a healthy and wholesome looking child. I guess it would be forgivable if someone wrote what they imagined that a child in that situation would have seen and thought if she had remained sane and been able to write. Yours, Dora _______________________________________________________________ Get Free Email and Do More On The Web. Visit http://www.msn.com