Edmund GosseRecensioni

$25.

Beautifully written, and a wonderful document about the late nineteenth century clash between 'religion' and 'science.' Also, Gosse goes out of his way to present his father as a decent human being, not something that can be said about the other books in this tradition.

Edmund Gosse was born in London in 1849. His parents, Philip Henry Gosse and Emily Bowes, were evangelical Christians, members of the strict Plymouth Brethren sect, and from the outset their religious faith overpowered any other considerations in the upbringing of their only son. Even in the much more religious atmosphere of Victorian Britain, the Gosse family was extreme in its views, and their religion permeated their every activity, and those of their son. Associations with people outside their strict sect were discouraged, and the young Edmund grew up with virtually no companions outside his immediate family.

Much of the pleasure from reading this book comes from the reactions of the infant Edmund to the situation in which he found himself, which although clearly a loving home, was an unusual and sometimes harsh environment for a young child:

My parents said: 'Whatever you need, tell Him and He will grant it, if it is His will. 'Very well; I had need of a large painted humming-top which I had seen in a shop window in the Caledonian Road. Accordingly, I introduced a supplication for this object into my evening prayer, carefully adding the words: 'If it is Thy will'. This, I recollect, placed my Mother in a dilemma, and she consulted my Father. Taken, I suppose, at a disadvantage, my Father told me I must not pray for 'things like that'. To which I answered by another query, 'Why?' And I added that he said we ought to pray for things we'd needed, and that I needed the humming-top a great deal more than I did the conversion of the heathen or the restitution of Jerusalem to the Jews, two objects of my nightly supplication which left me very cold.

But equally interesting is the author's attempt to understand the mind of his father, his mother dying when he was quite young. Philip Henry Gosse was a well known naturalist who had published many books on natural history. He knew and corresponded with many of the scientists of the day, such as Darwin, Hooker and Lyell. But he was unable to reconcile Darwin's theory of evolution with his own religious faith, suffering a further blow when his book Omphalos, offered to suggest an explanation for the apparent age of the earth and the appearance of fossils, was soundly rejected:

'Never was a book cast upon the waters with greater anticipation of success than was this curious, this obstinate, this fanatical volume ... He offered it with a glowing gesture to atheists and Christians alike. This was to be a universal panacea; this the system of intellectual therapeutics which could not but heal all the maladies of the age. But alas, atheists and Christians alike looked at it and laughed, and threw it away'

This memoir was written in 1907 by which time Edmund Gosse had completely rejected his father's beliefs. From an upbringing in which all fiction was completely forbidden, he had become a poet, a lecturer in English Literature at Cambridge, a celebrated art critic and the person most responsible for introducing Ibsen's work to England.

Overall, this is an interesting book looking at the consequences of two very different 'temperaments' between father and son, as well as the upheavals in belief caused by the theory of evolution in the middle of the nineteenth century.

Not a Victorian scientist novel... but a novel about a Victorian scientist. Well, a memoir told novelistically at any rate. You may know Edmund Gosse's father as Philip Henry Gosse, the man who did not say that God put the fossils there to test our faith, but whom everyone thought said that. Father and Son is a great read, but it had less to say about science and seeing scientifically than I had expected. If anything makes Philip Gosse a terrible dad (and he sure is, at least as Edmund tells it) it was his religious piety, which Edmund said left only "what is harsh and void and negative" (248). Philip was a self-denying emotionless man, but because he thought that was spiritually correct, not because of scientific training. A far cry from the mix of Christianity and science employed by Philip's friend Charles Kingsley.

Isn't the Internet wonderful? While re-reading this in paperback in my lunch hour at work, I was able to use my smartphone to see the wonderful detailed colourful scientific drawings Philip Gosse made of sea creatures for his studies of seashore life.

I just didn't like the narrator which spoiled this for me - see my review http://www.dnsmedia.co.uk/reviews/view/1195

Address by Gosse as president of the English Association. Brief sensible remarks about what criticism of literature should be and should not be

At the risk of showing my biases here, I can't help but see this as a quiet and deeply sad chronicle of the ways religious faith and the expectations it engenders in parents for their children can drive wedges between them and hollow people out. Or primarily that; it's also a record of the practices of a particular fundamentalist sect, the Plymouth Brethren; a historical document of one corner of the evolution controversy (the thing where humans and dinosaurs lived on earth at the same time and the geological evidence was put on earth by God to trick us was not actually attributable to Philip Henry Gosse; it was a nasty caricature of his Omphalos by the press--funny how now it's considered fair comment and worthy of respect in some quarters); an examination of the furtive imaginations and priggish unpleasance of the stifled and melancholy child. But mostly it's the wedge-driving thing. Love your kids anyway--and that "anyway" should cover everything.

This was recommended, in a newspaper article on Father’s Day, as a classic of the growing generational differences between a father and his son. This is true, and worthy of reading and contemplating for its universal message, but this was no ordinary family: Gosse the father was a zoologist of some repute, but he was also a man of severe, fundamental religious principles; his attempt to bridge the gap between faith and growing evidence for evolution was a failure and sidelined him from what might have been a brighter career as a scientist, as a cataloguer, as a proselytizer of science at the time when there was a growing hunger for exposure to such ideas in the general population. But his uncompromising religious faith provided the prism through which each and every action in life was to be measured or assessed and, all too often, found wanting. Nevertheless, as Gosse says in the opening lines of the book:

“This book is the record of a struggle between two temperaments, two consciences and almost two epochs. It ended, as was inevitable, in disruption. Of the two human beings here described, on was born to fly backward, the other could not help being carried forward. There came a time when neither spoke the same language as the other, or encompassed the same hopes or was fortified by the same desires. But, at least, it is some consolation to the survivor, that neither, to the very last hour, ceased to respect the other, or to regard him with a sad indulgence.”

Gosse junior led a very sheltered, restricted life as a child, one conditioned solely and completely by his father and his father’s expectation that Edmund would pursue some sort of life in the church. Edmund’s mother died when he was only seven, but she would probably not have been much of a mitigating influence as she shared her husband’s uncompromising view that all of life was to consecrated to the glory of God in preparation for life after death or for the imminent second coming. As a child, Edmund had no idea that his was a very different sort of upbringing as he had very little contact with children his own, or any other age; he was, in things religious, mature beyond his years and seen as something of a prodigy. But, he began to move apart as he grew into his teen years, as he became exposed to the wider worlds of literature and art and society, as he came to see even within the confines of the religious strictures of his life, that his father was not infallible and that God was likely neither omniscient nor omnipotent.

While maintaining his respect, and love, for his father, Gosse can see the limitations imposed on his father’s life: “My Father’s inconsistencies of perception seem to me to have been the result of a curious irregularity of equipment. Taking for granted, as he always did, the absolute integrity of the Scriptures, and applying to them his trained scientific spirit, he contrived to stifle, with a deplorable success, alike the function of the imagination, the sense of moral justice, and his own deep and instinctive tenderness of heart.”

Gosse’s final word on the pernicious effects of unblinkered fervor is still pertinent today:

“After my long experience, after my patience and forbearance, I have surely the right to protest against the untruth (would that I could apply to it any other word!) that evangelical religion, or any religion in a violent form, is a wholesome or valuable or desirable adjunct to human life. It divides heart from heart. It sets up a vain, chimerical ideal, in the barren pursuit of which all the tender, indulgent affections, all the genial play of life, all the exquisite pleasures and soft resignations of the body, all that enlarges and calms the soul, are exchanged for what is harsh and void and negative. It encourages a stern and ignorant spirit of condemnation; it throws altogether out of gear the healthy movement of the conscience; it invents virtues which are sterile and cruel; it invents sins which are no sins at all, but which darken the heaven of innocent joy with futile clouds of remorse. There is something horrible, if we will bring ourselves to face it, in the fanaticism that can do nothing with the pathetic and fugitive existence of ours but treat it as if it were the uncomfortable ante-chamber to a palace which no one has explored and of the plan of which we know absolutely nothing.”

This is also a book about a time and places that have long disappeared: life in small English villages in the second half of the 1800s, when government provided no social supports, when life was direct and often poor and often hard, when people were strongly influenced by class, by superstition, by beliefs, and when they found their pleasures without all the paraphernalia that characterize our world today.

This book is also a considerable pleasure to read. It is beautifully written, in a style of grammatical correctness and mellifluous expression that are, alas, also something of the past.

This memoir broke ground in the early 20th century by presenting generational conflict in an apparently frank, dispassionate, indeed "scientific" way. In its restrained way, it helped lead Gosse's countrymen from the piety of the Victorian vision of family life to Philip Larkin's definitive statement: "They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do. / They fill you with the faults they had / And add some extra, just for you." The truly fascinating part of reading this book is in the inexorable build up of the tension in the central relationship, a tension that is not fully realized until the extraordinary "Epilogue." It is also touching to witness the long-term effects of the father's indefatigable judgmentalism on the son's ingrained self-criticism. I am now going to provide an extended quote that will chill the blood of anyone possessed of an abundant super-ego in the form of an insistent voice of a strong parent figure. The fact that the author himself is not aware of life-blighting process that is just now beginning makes it all the more poignant: "But of all the thoughts which rushed upon my savage and undeveloped little brain at this crisis, the most curious was that I had found a companion and a confidant in myself. There was a secret in this world and it belonged to me and to a somebody who lived in the same body with me. There were two of us, and we could talk with one another. It is difficult to define impressions so rudimentary, but it is certain that it was in this dual form that the sense of my individuality now suddenly descended on me, and it is equally certain that it was a great solace to me to find a sympathizer in my own breast." That this "sympathizer" will mature into the child's most intolerant critic and implacable enemy is never recognized. "Ah, the pity of it Iago."

Edmund Gosse (the son) wrote this memoir of his relationship with his father a hundred years ago. By all accounts he became the most convivial of men; his father Philip, a reclusive naturalist, the very opposite. Edmund was aware from an early age that his parents intended his life to be dedicated to their rather narrow view of Christ, and he was baptised at the early age of ten, becoming the equal of some adult members of the Plymouth Brethren and the superior, in spiritual terms, of many. His mother having died when he was young, his cramped life was to an extent alleviated by the benign influence of his Quaker stepmother who while religious was not bigoted. As an account of the effect of religious fanaticism on an intelligent child it is still difficult to beat. I have always wondered if Philip Gosse was one of the originals from which Stella Gibbons drew her portrait of Amos, preacher at the Church of the Quivering Brethren.

A seminal memoir from a young man who struggles within his Protestant English family with faith, youth, parents, written with depth and beauty, and a literary classic.

Father and Son is the memoir of the childhood and young adulthood of the author Edmund Gosse, the "Son" of the title. Both his parents were members of the religious sect the "Plymouth Brethren" and it was in an atmosphere of strict adherence to the teaching of this religion that Edmund grew up. From an early age he was taught that imagination was a sin, was told stories of missionaries rather than fairytales and had no childhood companions. Yet this was not an unhappy childhood and his affection for his parents is clear, but they were unable to suppress the imagination and curiosity that is natural to every child. Over time, as the child suffers the death of his mother and grows into a young man, he starts to question the faith of his father so rigidly enforced upon him and to develop his own interests in the outside world which leads to him pursuing his own path in life. This is an affecting and often emotional portrayal of the everyday life and crises of a remarkable Victorian family.