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Editorial Review Product Description
Edmund Gosse wrote of his account of his life, "This book is the record of a struggle between two temperaments, two consciences and almost two epochs." Father and Son remains one of English literature's seminal autobiographies. In it, Edmund Gosse recounts, with humor and pathos, his childhood as a member of a Victorian Protestant sect and his struggles to forge his own identity despite the loving control of his father. His work is a key document of the crisis of faith and doubt and a penetrating exploration of the impact of evolutionary science. An astute, well-observed, and moving portrait of the tensions of family life, Father and Son remains a classic of twentieth-century literature. This edition contains an illuminating introduction, and provides a series of fascinating appendices including extracts from Philip Gosse's Omphalos and Edmund Gosse's harrowing account of his wife's death from breast cancer. ... Read more Customer Reviews (3) 
An Inner Life Regained
"The life of a child is so brief, its impressions are so illusory and fugitive, that it is as difficult to record its history as it would be to design a morning cloud sailing before the wind."
With this enchanting sentence, Edmund Gosse reveals as much of his own sensitive, poetic nature as he does of the style in which this eminently Victorian (and yet also curiously timeless) memoir was written.The book is written in language which will seem overly ornate to the reader unaccustomed to the glories of Nineteenth century English prosody, but its theme is universal.The memoir tells the tale of a young man's coming of age against a backdrop of Biblical literalism, what today we should call Fundamentalism, and coming to take - as the last lines of this book put it - "a human being's privilege to fashion his inner life for himself."
Much of the book, particularly the earlier sections, is really quite droll.This should not be so terribly surprising, as a rigid, literal adherence to any text goes hand in glove with an invitation for the absurd to transpire whenever certain quotidian facts obtrude into an inflexible mindset.As Gosse puts it, "...allowing nothing for the changes of scene or time or race, my parents read injunctions to the Corinthian converts without any suspicion that what was apposite in dealing with half-breed Achaian colonists of the first century might not exactly apply to English men and women of the nineteenth." But, formost of the narrative, what Gosse says in the Preface regarding his relations with his father is painfully borne out, "...the comedy was superficial, and the tragedy essential."
Another reviewer has already quoted the concluding part of the book - a very powerful manifesto - which I hope the reader won't mind my iterating in part due to its significance, "It (Fundamentalism) 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."
And yet he and his father loved each other exceedingly, each after his own fashion; so much greater the pity and tragedy that his father had to press matters until they broke asunder.
As well as being as pertinent, thematically, today as it was when it was penned, the memoir sets the stage for the great early Twentieth Century autobiographical novels in which young men painfully cast off Fundamentalist strictures, particularly the troika:
!.) The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler
2.) Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham
3.) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
Those who wish to delve deeper into the psychological pathos which Gosse uncovers will find - particularly in the first of these three - that the story picks up more or less where Gosse leaves us here.
A justly celebrated memoir of the Victorian age
Edmund Gosse's FATHER AND SON is legitimately considered one of the highpoints of Victorian autobiography. As has been noted by others, the book recounts the relationship between Edmund Gosse and his father, a member of the Christian sect generally known as Plymouth Brethren, but who was also a member of the Royal Society and one of the foremost marine biologists of his time. The narrative tends to break down into a number of definite segments: the author's birth until the death of his mother; life with his father until the time of the publishing of Darwin's THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES; the move of the Gosses to the coast of England; and young Gosse's schooling and gradual growth away from the religious teachings and expectations he had received from his parents.
A number of powerful impressions evolve over the course of the telling. First and foremost, one is left with an impression of how overwhelmingly Gosse's childhood was stripped of nearly all fun by his parents' puritanical and stern religion. Gosse's father is presented not as a cruel, vicious, and hypocritical. Instead, he is shown as a caring parent, a completely earnest practitioner of his religion, but fanatically concerned to eliminate all activities that do not lead to increased religious devotion and moral seriousness. Unfortunately, this resulted for Gosse in a childhood from which all possibility of play and fun and delight had been eliminated. Near the end of the book, I was left wondering if Gosse would have been inclined to leave Christianity if he had just had more fun as a kid.
The section of the book dealing with his father's reaction to Darwin's ORIGIN OF SPECIES was for me the most interesting part of the book. His father's scientific standing was such that Darwin actually contacted him before the publication of his theories, and asked his response. Gosse notes that his father instantly understood that the scientific evidence clearly supported Darwin's theory. His reading of Genesis, however, indicated to him that the world was created in six days, which precluded the scenario articulated by Darwin. He therefore concluded that god created the earth in six days, but in so doing implanted fossils and geologic strata into the earth. In this way, his father was able to explain both the apparent evidence for eons long development of the earth and homo sapiens and yet retain his belief in the belief that Genesis taught a six day literal creation.
There are any of a number of reasons to read this work. It is a classic autobiography, an important source for one response to the reception of Darwin, and a magnificent evocation of puritanical religious life during the Victorian age. Most of all, it is a disturbing account of the distortive effect that intolerant and narrow-minded religious upbringing can have on an individual.
Another memoir of the clash between rational individualism and fundamentalistic religion
A century ago Edmund Gosse was a noted man of British letters, who went on to be knighted in 1925.Today, the only work of his that is still noted or read, even marginally, is FATHER AND SON.George Bernard Shaw called it "one of the immortal pages in English literature."It is best described as a memoir of Gosse's youth, up until he was 21.His mother died when he was seven, so his father took on added importance in his upbringing -- and hence, the title of the book.
The book is not an easy read, mostly because Gosse's Victorian language is now so unfamiliar and almost baroque; it strikes me as more ornate and indirect than the norm for his time, although I certainly have not read widely among the Victorians.But I found the book worth the time and effort to make my way through it, both as a singular memoir but even more so for the light it shines from more than a century ago on contemporary issues posed by fundamentalistic and evangelical religions, especially whether they have any place for reflective individualism.
Edmund Gosse's father Philip was a distinguished British naturalist of the mid-19th Century, a colleague of Darwin, Lyell, and Hooker, and a Fellow of the Royal Society, but he also was a very strict and devout Puritan or "extreme Calvinist" (actually, a member of the Plymouth Brethren).Edmund's mother was also a devout Puritan, perhaps even stricter than his father.Edmund was an only child, born in 1849.Because of his parents' antediluvian approach to life, he had a very unusual childhood.A faint breath of normality was introduced into his life only after his father married his Quaker stepmother when he was twelve.A schism gradually opened between Edmund and his father and ultimately Edmund was compelled to turn his back on his father and his father's religiously determined universe.
Some of the oddities of Gosse's chidhood: When he was born, his father noted in his diary "E. delivered of a son.Received green swallow from Jamaica."While his natural mother was alive, no fiction of any kind was allowed in the house; his mother regarded fiction as a lie of sorts, and thus sinful.Until about the age of seven, Edmund had no interaction with other children.He was received into his father's congregation via adult baptism at the age of ten, fully expected to henceforth conduct himself as an adult and in literal accordance with the Bible.In summary, as he writes, "The Great Scheme" of his parents was "that I should be exclusively and consecutively dedicated through the whole of my life, to the manifest and uninterrupted and uncompromised 'service of the Lord'."
Gosse pays lip-service respect to his parents' devoutness and rectitude, but throughout the memoir there is a strong undercurrent of criticism.For example:"Here was perfect purity, perfect intrepidity, perfect abnegation; yet there was also narrowness, isolation, an absence of perspective, let it be boldly admitted, an absence of humanity.And there was a curious mixture of humbleness and arrogance; entire resignation to the will of God and not less entire disdain of the judgement and opinion of man."He becomes more explicit in his criticism at the end of the book.He notes that his father would have been an exemplary "charming companion" and "delightful parent" if it had not been "for this stringent piety which ruined it all."He then continues:
"Let me speak plainly.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 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 invents virtues which are sterile and cruel; it invents sins which are no sins at all * * *.There is something horrible, if we will bring ourselves to face it, in the fanaticism that can do nothing with this 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."
That last sentence is one of the more remarkable sentences I have encountered.And the entire paragraph is quite an indictment of evangelical religion.By coincidence, the book I read immediately after FATHER AND SON was "Infidel" by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, published 100 years later.Her memoir is commonly regarded as an indictment of Islam, but reading it juxtaposed with FATHER AND SON suggests that Islam is not so much the bogeyman as a style of religion that, unfortunately, has been the prevalent style among some influential segments of humanity for far too long.
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