Although Gosse used pseudonyms throughout the book, the identities of many of the people depicted are now known. The book focuses on the relationship between a stern, religious father who rejects the new evolutionary theories of his scientific colleague Charles Darwin and the son's gradual coming of age and rejection of his father's fundamentalist religion. His father, Philip Henry Gosse, was an influential, largely self-taught, invertebrate zoologist and student of marine biology who, after his wife's death, took Edmund to live in Devon. His mother, Emily Gosse, who died at the age of 50 of breast cancer, was a writer of Christian tracts. The book describes Edmund's early years in an exceptionally devout Plymouth Brethren home.
Frontispiece to the first edition of Father and Son.įather and Son (1907) is a memoir, initially published anonymously in both England and America, by poet and critic Edmund Gosse, subtitled "a study of two temperaments". Philip Henry Gosse with his son Edmund Gosse, 1857.
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