Glimpses of the Wonderful [Hardcover]

Ann Thwaite (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 7, 2002

This is a vivid reassessment of the life of Philip Henry Gosse, the renowned Victorian naturalist, author, illustrator and Christian fundamentalist, who as both friend and antagonist of Charles Darwin, was at the very heart of the Victorian conflict between science and religion. The author of 40 books, Philip Henry Gosse also perfected and popularized the aquarium and travelled widely before settling in Devon as a self-trained entomologist, botanist, lepidopterist, ornithologist and above all, marine biologist. In a reassessment of the extraordinary life of the man described by Stephen Jay Gould, the Harvard palaeontologist, as the "David Attenborough of his day", Ann Thwaite also addresses the key question of why he has been perceived as a cruel and tyrannical father - a notion generally attributed to "Father and Son", the classic memoir by his son Edmund. But Edmund himself was shocked and surprised by such reactions to his work. The father he remembered - the man deemed by the Royal Society to have done more than any before to popularize the study of natural history in England - was at odds with this portrait he seemed to have delivered to the public domain.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Ann Thwaite is the author of Waiting for the Party: The Life of Frances Hodgson Burnett, Edmund Gosse: A Literary Landscape, which won the Duff Cooper Prize, 1985, A. A. Milne: His Life, recipient of the Whitbread Biography of the Year, 1990, and Emily Tennyson: The Poet's Wife. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Faber & Faber; First Edition edition (October 7, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0571193285
• ISBN-13: 978-0571193288
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,051,805 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars A first-rate biography, February 3, 2008

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Anson Cassel Mills (Lake Santeetlah, NC) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Glimpses of the Wonderful (Hardcover)

In his introduction to a recent Oxford University Press edition of Edmund Gosse's Father and Son, Michael Newton has argued that from first publication "it has been a common reaction" for readers to prefer the tyrannical, joyless, religiously maniacal Father to the priggish and rebellious Son. It was so with me. In part this reaction stemmed from the tragedy that (at least in Edmund's telling) Philip Henry Gosse's religious fanaticism ultimately broke his own spirit and destroyed his reputation as a naturalist.

I had always hoped to learn more about Henry Gosse (1810-1888), never guessing that his son's portrait, so literarily and psychologically true could have been so factually bogus. Ann Thwaite has provided more than a balance to what can only be termed Edmund's imagined childhood and adolescence.

Henry Gosse, though deeply religious, turns out to have been a warm and generous person, deeply in love with life and his family, as well as a popular natural historian (and well-nigh inventor of the aquarium) who never lost his reputation in his own era but was rather slugged into opprobrium by his son's memoir.

Thwaite has a sure touch as a writer. Although her research has been more than careful, she does not parade learning before her intended audience, the educated general reader. Neither is she is preachy about Henry' religious enthusiasms or Edmund's deficiencies as an autobiographer. The book itself is a beautiful production with many illustrations from Henry Gosse's own forty books. I regret only that Gosse is today so obscure that few will look into this exceptionally fine biography.