It is hard to believe that her symptoms were not a result of her circumstances. For reasons of his own, her father, Edward Moulton Barrett, forbade any of his 11 children from marrying; he did, however, encourage Elizabeth, the eldest of the brood, to write and she dedicated all her early volumes to him. Passionately committed to social and political issues, poems like "The Cry of the Children" ("They look up with their pale and sunken faces") dealt with child labour, while "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point" is spoken in the voice of a black slave girl. Slavery was a subject Barrett Browning knew a good deal about, as the family wealth came from sugar plantations in Jamaica. "I belong to a family of West Indian slaveholders," she told the art critic John Ruskin, "and if I believed in curses, I should be afraid."