father and son a study of two temperaments

A year later the boy and his father moved from London to Devon, where both were captivated by the sea. The absurdity of such scenes is a welcome foil to the sadness of his mother’s death when Gosse was just seven. He would cheekily test the limits of his familial faith by petitioning the Almighty for an expensive toy that he ‘needed’ and praying to a wooden chair to see if he’d be struck down for idolatry. It was always taken for granted that Edmund would follow his father into the ministry, and early on he had a sense of a split self: the external persona he put on to please his parents, and the deeper self that struggled to divine its purpose. His mother quashed her own love of making up stories because she believed fiction was in some way sinful.

Like Thomas Hardy, the infant Edmund was presumed dead at birth and set aside, so it’s thanks to keen-eyed nurses that we have these two late Victorians’ significant literary output today.Īlthough his first word was “book” and he could read by age four, Edmund was initially forbidden to read fiction. Philip Gosse was a minister with the Plymouth Brethren and married late, at 38 his wife was 42, very late for contemplating motherhood in those days.

While Gosse père (1810–88) was a devoted naturalist as well as a dogged believer in the literal truth of the Bible, even in adolescence his son (1849–1928) was a literature aficionado and troubled skeptic. The book’s subtitle, “A Study of Two Temperaments,” gives an idea of the angle Gosse takes here: this is not a straightforward biography (after all, he’d already written his father’s life story in 1890) or a comprehensive memoir, but a snapshot of his early years and an emotional unpicking of the personality clash that results from fundamentally different approaches to life. For my “In the Spotlight” article about a book in particular need of conservation, I chose Philip Henry Gosse’s Omphalos, his well-meaning but half-baked contribution to the Victorian science versus religion debate, and did a lot of secondary reading about the Gosses and their milieu. I was reminded of that literary debt when I worked for King’s College London’s library system and did a summer placement in the Special Collections department in 2011. Two of its early incidents – the son’s anticlimactic birth announcement in the father’s diary, and the throwing out of a forbidden Christmas pudding – were famously appropriated by Peter Carey for creating Oscar’s backstory in his Booker Prize-winning novel Oscar and Lucinda (1988), which I read in 2008 but didn’t much like. I’d known about Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son (1907) for ages, and even owned a copy. I can’t believe how long it’s taken me to get to this splendid evocation of 1850s–60s family life in an extreme religious sect.

Father and son a study of two temperaments