A fascinating photographic record of Stanley's Childhood, including photographs of the place of Stanley's birth and infancy (Moses Parry's house, Denbigh), the parish church of St Hilary's (where he was baptised and named John Rowlands), Bowling Green Cottage by Denbigh Castle, where he boarded with the Prices in 1846, St Asaph Union Workhouse where he stayed 1847-1856, and his aunt Mary Owen's farm Fynnon Beuno, Brynford where he boarded 1856-57.
The photographs were commissioned by Stanley in April 1902 as he was working on his autobiography, retracing the haunts of his childhood in North Wales. The photographs of his birthplace and of the St Asaph Union Workhouse were illustrated in the Autobiography edited by Lady Stanley, published in 1909. "Forty years of my life has passed, and this delving into my earliest years appears to me like an exhumation of Pompeii, buried for centuries under the Scoriae, lava and volcanic dust of Vesuvius. To the man of the Nineteenth Century, who paces the recovered streets and byeways of Pompeii, how strange seem the relics of the far distant life! Just so appear to me the little fatherless babe, and the orphaned child.'(Autobiography, p.6).