Chapter One - ‘The Paradigm Case’: Contesting the Father in Edmund Gosse's Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments

Summary

A son cannot speak adequately about his father. There is a certain impiety in formulating sentences about the author of our being and the moulder of our character.

—John Addington Symonds, Memoirs

FATHER! - to God himself we cannot give

A holier name! then lightly do not bear

Both names conjoined.

—William Wordsworth, ‘Ecclesiastical Sketches’

The author of this book has no doubt settled it with his conscience how far in the interests of popular edification or amusement it is legitimate to expose the weaknesses and inconsistencies of a good man who was also one's father.

—Times Literary Supplement review of Father and Son

A little over one hundred years ago the British author Edmund Gosse published Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments. It detailed the author's memories of his austere upbringing in London and the Devonshire coast, his mother's tragic death while he was still a young boy, his religious education under his father's strict yet loving hand, and his eventual break with his father at the age of 18. Lauded both by critics and prominent fellow writers upon its release in 1907, it also caused somewhat of a stir for its candid and at times unflattering depiction of the author's father, the eminent naturalist Philip Henry Gosse. Rudyard Kipling called it ‘extraordinarily interesting - more interesting than David Copperfield because it's true’, while one review remarked that ‘This is an excellent book, though we hardly like the anatomisation of one's father’ (cited in Thwaite, Literary Landscape 435–6).