Father and Son

by Edmund Gosse

Book Overview

Edmund Gosse wrote of his account of his life, "This book is the record of a struggle between two temperaments, two consciences and almost two epochs." Father and Son remains one of English literature's seminal autobiographies. In it, Edmund Gosse recounts, with humor and pathos, his childhood as a member of a Victorian Protestant sect and his struggles to forge his own identity despite the loving control of his father. His work is a key document...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0199539111
• ISBN13: 9780199539116
• Release Date: October 2009
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.0" x 7.6"

Customer Reviews

A justly celebrated memoir of the Victorian age

Edmund Gosse's FATHER AND SON is legitimately considered one of the highpoints of Victorian autobiography. As has been noted by others, the book recounts the relationship between Edmund Gosse and his father, a member of the Christian sect generally known as Plymouth Brethren, but who was also a member of the Royal Society and one of the foremost marine biologists of his time. The narrative tends to break down into a number of definite segments: the author's birth until the death of his mother; life with his father until the time of the publishing of Darwin's THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES; the move of the Gosses to the coast of England; and young Gosse's schooling and gradual growth away from the religious teachings and expectations he had received from his parents. A number of powerful impressions evolve over the course of the telling. First and foremost, one is left with an impression of how overwhelmingly Gosse's childhood was stripped of nearly all fun by his parents' puritanical and stern religion. Gosse's father is presented not as a cruel, vicious, and hypocritical. Instead, he is shown as a caring parent, a completely earnest practitioner of his religion, but fanatically concerned to eliminate all activities that do not lead to increased religious devotion and moral seriousness. Unfortunately, this resulted for Gosse in a childhood from which all possibility of play and fun and delight had been eliminated. Near the end of the book, I was left wondering if Gosse would have been inclined to leave Christianity if he had just had more fun as a kid. The section of the book dealing with his father's reaction to Darwin's ORIGIN OF SPECIES was for me the most interesting part of the book. His father's scientific standing was such that Darwin actually contacted him before the publication of his theories, and asked his response. Gosse notes that his father instantly understood that the scientific evidence clearly supported Darwin's theory. His reading of Genesis, however, indicated to him that the world was created in six days, which precluded the scenario articulated by Darwin. He therefore concluded that god created the earth in six days, but in so doing implanted fossils and geologic strata into the earth. In this way, his father was able to explain both the apparent evidence for eons long development of the earth and homo sapiens and yet retain his belief in the belief that Genesis taught a six day literal creation. There are any of a number of reasons to read this work. It is a classic autobiography, an important source for one response to the reception of Darwin, and a magnificent evocation of puritanical religious life during the Victorian age. Most of all, it is a disturbing account of the distortive effect that intolerant and narrow-minded religious upbringing can have on an individual.

Another memoir of the clash between rational individualism and fundamentalistic religion

A century ago Edmund Gosse was a noted man of British letters, who went on to be knighted in 1925. Today, the only work of his that is still noted or read, even marginally, is FATHER AND SON. George Bernard Shaw called it "one of the immortal pages in English literature." It is best described as a memoir of Gosse's youth, up until he was 21. His mother died when he was seven, so his father took on added importance in his upbringing -- and hence, the title of the book. The book is not an easy read, mostly because Gosse's Victorian language is now so unfamiliar and almost baroque; it strikes me as more ornate and indirect than the norm for his time, although I certainly have not read widely among the Victorians. But I found the book worth the time and effort to make my way through it, both as a singular memoir but even more so for the light it shines from more than a century ago on contemporary issues posed by fundamentalistic and evangelical religions, especially whether they have any place for reflective individualism. Edmund Gosse's father Philip was a distinguished British naturalist of the mid-19th Century, a colleague of Darwin, Lyell, and Hooker, and a Fellow of the Royal Society, but he also was a very strict and devout Puritan or "extreme Calvinist" (actually, a member of the Plymouth Brethren). Edmund's mother was also a devout Puritan, perhaps even stricter than his father. Edmund was an only child, born in 1849. Because of his parents' antediluvian approach to life, he had a very unusual childhood. A faint breath of normality was introduced into his life only after his father married his Quaker stepmother when he was twelve. A schism gradually opened between Edmund and his father and ultimately Edmund was compelled to turn his back on his father and his father's religiously determined universe. Some of the oddities of Gosse's chidhood: When he was born, his father noted in his diary "E. delivered of a son. Received green swallow from Jamaica." While his natural mother was alive, no fiction of any kind was allowed in the house; his mother regarded fiction as a lie of sorts, and thus sinful. Until about the age of seven, Edmund had no interaction with other children. He was received into his father's congregation via adult baptism at the age of ten, fully expected to henceforth conduct himself as an adult and in literal accordance with the Bible. In summary, as he writes, "The Great Scheme" of his parents was "that I should be exclusively and consecutively dedicated through the whole of my life, to the manifest and uninterrupted and uncompromised 'service of the Lord'." Gosse pays lip-service respect to his parents' devoutness and rectitude, but throughout the memoir there is a strong undercurrent of criticism. For example: "Here was perfect purity, perfect intrepidity, perfect abnegation; yet there was also narrowness, isolation, an absence of perspective, let it be boldly admitted, an absence of humanity. And th

Science and Religion

I love this story of Philip and Edmund Gosse. There is generational conflict. Philip Gosse, son of a painter of miniatures, was a miniaturist. As a young man he went from Poole, England to New Foundland for six years and to Alabama for three. In Alabama he taught school. In 1832 he began his entomologic collection. Philip left his Methodist chapel and joined a small group of Plymouth Brethren. In 1844 Philip was sent to Jamaica. He became a successful writer of scientific books. In 1848 he married Emily Bowes. She fell to writing religious tracts. The son, Edmund, born in 1849, suffered deprivations. He had few toys, no playmates and no reading except for religious tracts and the Bible. In 1849 Philip purchased a microscope. He grew in knowledge and number of publications and received honors. In 1852 he invented the marine aquarium. In 1857 Philip Gosse sought to present a unified scientific and biblical version of geologic time to refute Darwinism. Before the book's publication his career had met with resounding success. After OMPHALOS he faced failure and ridicule. The secular education of the son was neglected. Eventually Edmund reacted against the loneliness and religion of his childhood. Edmund became a Bohemian prophet without the taint of Bohemianism it is asserted in the introduction to the book. An American tour made him a public figure. Edmund Gosse's reputation plunged when he was found to have written an error-filled account of Swinburne. He became famous for having Sunday afternoon parties for all of the important people of his day. The introduction to the book by William Irvine claims that Edmund Gosse was inspired to write FATHER AND SON after he wrote a biography of another literary figure, Coventry Patmore. The book claims to be a record of the struggle of two temperaments. Certainly temperament and spirit are featured notably in the work. Edmund's mother had rigor of spirit. She practiced constant self-denial. She was stronger than her husband. The parents visited no one. Edmund's mother's brothers visited them. The brothers had been helped through Cambridge by her employment as a teacher at a mouldering Irish estate. The author has the idea that his mother was suited by nature to be a novelist. His mother's death when he was seven left a gap that his father sought to fill. In his eighth year his father instructed him in the Epistles of the New Testament. The emphasis was doctrinal. The attitude of the father toward natural selection was critical to his career as noted above. After the failure to refute Darwin's theory the family moved to the sea shore. In Devonshire marine creatures were collected and documented by the father. The village in Devon is described as open and squalid. The father's life work was really the practical study of animal forms in detail. The study of British sea anemones was ready for the press in 1859. Edmund was taught Latin by his father. When Edmund was eleve

An endearingly human work

There are few works of autobiography that lay bare the author's soul as convincingly and seeringly as this. In an astonishing tour de force Edmund Gosse, by then a substantial Edwardian homme des lettres, remembers his childhood and adolescence in his father's house and his indoctrination into a Victorian, evangelical, creationist, scientific, wilfully unliterary way of life and his growth out of this via Shakespeare, Marlowe and some decidedly morbid poems. What is so astounding about this book is the kindness with which Gosse remembers his past which is always present and never tempered with dishonesty. There are moments when we cannot but find fault with Gosse senior (when he writes to his son in London invoking his mother's memory to try and force him back to the brethren) but with the Edmund Gosse painting so loving a picture of him we could never see him as, for example, the father of Samuel Butler's "The Way of All Flesh" (a great and loosely autobiographical novel which is often metioned alongside "Father and Son" as expressing the same painful differences between the evagelical Victorians and their children) - that is desicated, corrupted, and malicious. There is one killingly funny moment where Edmund Gosse reads from Marlowe's "Hero and Leander" to his stepmother and the idea of the straight laced little saint reading aloud about Leander "His bodie was as straight as Circes wand,/ Jove might have sipt out Nectar from his hand./ Even as delicious meat is to the tast,/ So was his necke in touching, and surpast/ The white of Pelops shoulder." to the god fearing wife of his god fearing father, minister to the brethren, and not expecting a strange reaction, is as bizarre as it is amusing. A most endearingly human work most warmly recommended.

An ex-exclusive brethren perspective

Father and Son is the story of two men, Edmund Gosse (the writer) and his father, Philip Gosse. Philip was a biologist, a contemporary of Charles Darwin. The story covers a period of about twenty years, from 1849 to about 1870, during which Edmund grew from infancy to university student. Edmund Gosse became a well-known English man of letters. Among his works is a biography of his father.Speaking of his parents' faith, he writes ...They called themselves 'the Brethren', simply; a title enlarged by the world outside into 'Plymouth Brethren'.Given that there is no mention of John Darby in the book, and that the book follows the 1848-49 schism that resulted in open and exclusive brethren, and that the assemblies described in the book seem essentially autonomous, I assume Gosse is referring to the 'open brethren' when he speaks of Plymouth Brethren.Readers raised among any of the groups that have evolved from the Brethren groups that began in Dublin in the 1820's will find much familiar material.The book is worth reading at least twice. I've just read it again after owning it for a year and am struck again at how well he describes life among the brethren and the incredible stress parents can put upon their children in the name of faith.