Author Description

For readers of “Father and Son” in this century it is difficult to credit this factual and indeed well-documented chronicle of religious fanaticism in the middle of the last. We have grown used to hysterical outbursts of anger against “the older generation”; how infinitely more telling is the calm, measured, and often humorous style in which Edmund Gosse records the mental straitjacket of his early years in London and Devon. The elder Gosse was a marine zoologist of considerable repute; he was also a Plymouth Brother and a man of such unbending and fundamental Christianity that, in an effort to reconcile geology and Genesis, he publicly challenged the findings of Darwin and others during the controversy over evolution. But what (assisted by his first wife, the godly daughter of a New England tradition of Puritanism) he did to the mind of a brilliant and sensitive son was far worse. That Edmund Gosse remained sane is extraordinary; that he so far triumphed over the stifling dogmas of his childhood to write this gentle masterpiece and to contribute substantially to English literary criticism is a miracle.