Reclaimed by her father at the age of five, we know little of Isobel's life until she became step-daughter to Cecilia Thornton in marriage to her father, William Cuthbert, in 1827. Isobel would gain a step-sister and step-brother from this union, and then lose them as both succumbed to the misery, disease and poverty of marginal life on the fringes of rural Scotland during the early 1830's, her father's trade and income fell into decline under the onslaught of mechanisation in the textile industries, the rise of machines was destined to eradicate the craft of hand-weaving which was William's occupation. Eventually Cecelia was to fold into the grave also, reducing family Cuthbert back to where it had started, approximately fourteen years before, just father and daughter.
Closing the curtain on any hope of a normal family life and ushering in the darkness, William Cuthbert now dropped his moral torch and instead lit a flame for his teen-aged daughter. There would come years of distress and abuse, a perpetual nightmare of manipulation and molestation from the mid eighteen-thirties until Isobel’s arrest at the age of twenty-one in the dawn of the following decade.
Read more of the story of Isobel Cuthbert “Do not use me so”
