Customer Reviews

Glimpses of the Wonderful

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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.