The author portrays his own struggle with ill health and eventual spiritual growth

And in making this attempt I must write from my own experience. No other method would be worthwhile. The mere exposition of a thesis would have little or no value. It is a case in which nothing can be helpful to others which has not been demonstrated for oneself, even though the demonstration be but partial. In writing from my own experience, I must ask the reader's pardon if I seem egoistic or autobiographical. Without taking oneself too smugly or too seriously one finds it the only way of reproducing the thing that has happened in one's own life and which one actually knows...FROM THE BOOKS.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

Worrying: A Literary and Cultural History suggests a unique approach to the inner lifeand its ordinary pains. Francis O'Gorman charts the emergence of our contemporaryidea of worry in the Victorian era and its establishment, after the First World War,as a feature of modernity. For some writers between the Wars, worry was the "diseaseof the age." Worrying examines the everyday kind of worry-the fearful, non-pathological, andusually hidden questioning about uncertain futures. It shows worry to be a naturalcompanion in a world where we try to live by reason and believe we have the right tochoose, finding in the worrier a peculiarly contemporary sufferer whose mental lifeis not only exceptionally familiar, but also deeply strange. Offering an intimately personal account of an all-too-common human experience, and of a word that slips in and out of ordinary conversation so often that it has become invisible in its familiarity,Worrying explores how the modern world has shaped our everyday anxieties.