Cirrus@Austlit

Pain, an English journalist, humourist and poet, was the son of John Odell Pain and his wife Maria. He was educated at Sedbergh School from 1979-1883 and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge where he edited the Cambridge Fortnightly, an undergraduate paper. He began writing for popular magazines like the Cornhill and Punch in 1889 and his first book, In a Canadian Canoe (1891) was an immediate success and established his reputation as a humourist. A number of his stories and poems were published in Australian magazines and newspapers but there is no evidence that Pain ever visited Australia.

(Source: John D. Cloy, Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 135: British Short-Fiction Writers, 1880-1914: The Realist Tradition. ed. William B. Thesing, (1994). 262-268.)