Philip Henry Gosse - Later Career

Later Career

According to Edmund Gosse, his father's career was destroyed by his "strange act of wilfulness" in publishing Omphalos; Edmund claimed his father had "closed the doors upon himself forever." In fact, during the next three years Gosse published more than thirty scientific papers and four books.

By this time Gosse and his son had moved permanently from London to St Marychurch, Devon. (Gosse refused to use the "St" and even gave his address as Torquay so as not to have anything to do with the "so-called Church of England.") He soon became the pastor and overseer of the Brethren meeting, at first over a stable but shortly, under Gosse's preaching and peacemaking, in finer quarters—which he perhaps financed himself.

During this period, Gosse made a special study of sea anemone (Actiniae) and in 1860 published Actinologia Britannica. Reviewers especially praised the color lithographs made from Gosse's watercolors. The Literary Gazette said that Gosse now stood "alone and unrivalled in the extremely difficult art of drawing objects of zoology so as to satisfy the requirements of science" as well as providing "vivid aesthetic impressions."

In 1860 he also met and married Eliza Brightwen (1813–1900), a kindly, tolerant Quaker who shared Gosse's intense interest in both natural history and the well-being of his son. Gosse's second marriage was as happy as his first. In 1862 he wrote that Eliza was "a true yoke-fellow, in love, in spirit and in service."

By this time Gosse was "very comfortably off" with the earnings from his books and dividends from his investments, and in 1864 Eliza received a substantial legacy which allowed Gosse to retire from his career as a professional writer and live in "congenial obscurity." The Gosses lived simply, invested some of their income and gave more away to charity, especially to foreign missionaries, including ones sent to the "Popish, priest-ridden Irish."

To Gosse's great grief, his son rejected Christianity—though almost certainly not as early or as dramatically as Edmund portrayed the break in Father and Son. Nevertheless, Henry sponsored the publication of Edmund's early poetry, which gave the younger man entrée to new friends of literary importance, and the two men "came out of the years of conflict with their relationship wary but intact." Henry and Eliza welcomed Edmund's wife to the family and enjoyed visits with their three grandchildren.

Meanwhile, the ever active Gosse had taken up the study of orchids and exchanged a number of letters on the subject with Darwin, though he never published on it himself. His penultimate enthusiasm was with the genitalia of butterflies about which he published a paper in the Transactions of the Linnean Society But before his death he returned to rotifera, much of his research appearing in a two-volume study with another zoologist, C.T. Hudson.

His wife recalled that Gosse's final illness was triggered by his enthusiasm to adjust his telescope at an open window on a winter night. Gosse had prayed regularly that he might not taste death but meet Christ in the air at his Second Coming, and he was bitterly disappointed when he realized that he would die like everyone else.