Edmund Gosse

Abstract

A review of Gosse’s life and work must confront the difficulties that recent generations of scholars have had with the evidence. There is, to begin with, the remarkable memoir Father and Son, A Study of Two Temperaments which appeared anonymously in 1907, and which was greeted with high praise by those who believed that at last the mask of Victorian piety had been ripped away, revealing humbug and hypocrisy; the hubbub created by its reception more than matched the sensationalism of its content. In Father and Son Gosse portrayed himself as the sensitive, much-oppressed son of a famous biologist, and the unwilling participant in the religious activities of the glum Plymouth Brotherhood of St Marychurch, South Devon. Restricted to a narrow range of church literature, Gosse knew little or nothing of most creative writing, of any literature, until his adolescent years. Evan Charteris, his discreet biographer, fixes on Gosse’s seventeenth year as the true beginning of his appreciation of English literature.