AnyBook4Less.com	Find the Best Price on the Web Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Home  |  Store List  |  FAQ  |  Contact Us  |
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money Keyword AuthorISBN

Title: Father and Son (Modern Classics S.) by Edmund Gosse ISBN: 0-14-000700-8 Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd Pub. Date: 28 May, 1970 Format: Paperback List Price(USD): $3.95

Your Country USA Canada United Kingdom Australia Austria Belgium France Germany Italy Netherlands Switzerland Currency AutoUSD CAD GBP EUR AUD CHF Delivery Only cheapest delivery All delivery options Include Used Books Are you a club member of: Barnes and Noble Books A Million Chapters.Indigo.ca

Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)

Rating: 5
Summary: Science and Religion
Comment: I love this story of Philip and Edmund Gosse. There is generational conflict.

Philip Gosse, son of a painter of miniatures, was a miniaturist. As a young man he went from Poole, England to New Foundland for six years and to Alabama for three. In Alabama he taught school. In 1832 he began his entomologic collection.

Philip left his Methodist chapel and joined a small group of Plymouth Brethren. In 1844 Philip was sent to Jamaica. He became a successful writer of scientific books. In 1848 he married Emily Bowes. She fell to writing religious tracts. The son, Edmund, born in 1849, suffered deprivations. He had few toys, no playmates and no reading except for religious tracts and the Bible.

In 1849 Philip purchased a microscope. He grew in knowledge and number of publications and received honors. In 1852 he invented the marine aquarium. In 1857 Philip Gosse sought to present a unified scientific and biblical version of geologic time to refute Darwinism. Before the book's publication his career had met with resounding success. After OMPHALOS he faced failure and ridicule.

The secular education of the son was neglected. Eventually Edmund reacted against the loneliness and religion of his childhood. Edmund became a Bohemian prophet without the taint of Bohemianism it is asserted in the introduction to the book. An American tour made him a public figure. Edmund Gosse's reputation plunged when he was found to have written an error-filled account of Swinburne. He became famous for having Sunday afternoon parties for all of the important people of his day. The introduction to the book by William Irvine claims that Edmund Gosse was inspired to write FATHER AND SON after he wrote a biography of another literary figure, Coventry Patmore.

The book claims to be a record of the struggle of two temperaments. Certainly temperament and spirit are featured notably in the work. Edmund's mother had rigor of spirit. She practiced constant self-denial. She was stronger than her husband.

The parents visited no one. Edmund's mother's brothers visited them. The brothers had been helped through Cambridge by her employment as a teacher at a mouldering Irish estate. The author has the idea that his mother was suited by nature to be a novelist. His mother's death when he was seven left a gap that his father sought to fill.

In his eighth year his father instructed him in the Epistles of the New Testament. The emphasis was doctrinal. The attitude of the father toward natural selection was critical to his career as noted above. After the failure to refute Darwin's theory the family moved to the sea shore. In Devonshire marine creatures were collected and documented by the father. The village in Devon is described as open and squalid. The father's life work was really the practical study of animal forms in detail. The study of British sea anemones was ready for the press in 1859.

Edmund was taught Latin by his father. When Edmund was eleven his father remarried. His father permitted him to read the poems but not the novels of Scott. Then he was allowed to read Dickens. He read PICKWICK with rapture. He was sent to a boarding school run by some Plymouth Brethren. At age fifteen he fell under the spell of Shakespeare. Later the poetry of the Romatic era interested him greatly.

The book is of great interest to us in its sensitive descriptions presented from a child's perspective of a household bereft and subject to religious mania. Since great literature was not presented to Edmund in childhood, evidently his response to it in later life was more acute. Notwithstanding the narrow channels in which his parents exercised their gifts as writers, they transmitted to him through genetic endowment or by example the vocation he was to follow as an adult.