Philip Henry Gosse - Father and Son

Father and Son

After his father's death, Edmund Gosse published a typical Victorian biography, The Life of Philip Henry Gosse (1890). Nevertheless, after reading the latter, the writer George Moore suggested to Edmund that it contained "the germ of a great book," which Edmund Gosse first published anonymously as Father and Son in 1907. It has never gone out of print in more than a hundred years. The reaction of readers to Henry's personality and character as represented in Father and Son has included phrases such as "scientific crackpot," "bible-soaked romantic," "a stern and repressive father," and a "pulpit-thumping Puritan throwback to the seventeenth century."

Even a modern editor of Father and Son has rejected this portrait of Philip Henry Gosse on the grounds that his "writings reveal a genuinely sweet character." The biographer of both Gosses, Ann Thwaite, has established just how inaccurate Edmund's recollections of his childhood were, that Edmund indeed, as Henry James remarked, had "a genius for inaccuracy." Although Edmund went out of his way to declare that the story of Father and Son was "scrupulously true," Thwaite cites a dozen occasions on which either Edmund's "memory betray him—he admitted it was 'like a colander'"—or he "changed things deliberately to make a better story." Thwaite argues that Edmund could only preserve his self-respect, in comparison to his father's superior abilities, by demolishing the latter's character.