Philip Henry Gosse - Early Life

Early Life

Gosse was born in Worcester in 1810 of an itinerant painter of miniature portraits and a lady's maid. He spent his childhood mostly in Poole, Dorset, where his aunt, Susan Bell, taught him to draw and introduced him to zoology as she had her own son, Thomas Bell, twenty years older and later to be a great friend to Henry.

At fifteen he began work as a clerk in the counting house of George Garland and Sons in Poole, and in 1827 he sailed to Newfoundland to serve as a clerk in the Carbonear premises of Slade, Elson and Co., where he became a dedicated, self-taught student of Newfoundland entomology, "the first person systematically to investigate and to record the entomology" of the island. In 1832 Gosse experienced a religious conversion—as he said, "solemnly, deliberately and uprightly, took God for my God."

In 1835 he left Newfoundland for Compton, Lower Canada where he farmed unsuccessfully for three years, originally in an attempt to establish a commune with two of his religious friends. Nevertheless, the experience deepened his love for natural history, and locals referred to him as "that crazy Englishman who goes about picking up bugs." During this time he became a member of the Natural History Society of Montreal and submitted specimens to its museum.

In 1838 Gosse taught eight months for Reuben Saffold, the owner of Belvoir plantation, near Pleasant Hill, Alabama. Gosse studied and drew the local flora and fauna, assembling an unpublished volume, Entomologia Alabamensis, on insect life in the state. He also recorded his negative impressions of slavery, later published as Letters from Alabama (1859).