Father and Son (Unabridged) [Audio Download]

This is one of the outstanding works of early twentieth century English literature, and probably one of the best British autobiographies ever written. Edmund Gosse describes his life up to the time when he left home to move back to London to start his career.

His upbringing was unusual, even by mid-Victorian standards. In his infancy, his intensely pious parents shunned all except the equally devout of their own kind, the Plymouth Brethren. His mother died when Edmund was seven, and her dying wish was that Edmund become a minister of their religion. His father then devoted himself, ultimately without success, to realising this wish. Gosse's career in literature brought him into friendship with such as Swinburne, than whom Gosse's father could hardly have imagined a more unsuitable acquaintance.

Gosse does clear justice to the affection within his immediate family. He also presents a balanced view of how far his parents realised their talents. He expresses his respect for their achievements - his mother as an evangelistic writer, and his father as one of the greatest marine biologists of the period. On the other hand, he suggests that their piety may have hampered even greater achievement. He suspects that his mother may have stifled a real talent for writing fiction on purely moral grounds ("because it was not true"), and explains - not without sympathy - how his father opposed Darwin's theory of evolution on purely religious grounds, and lost.

The doubts attaching to Father and Son are not of literary quality, but of accuracy. In the preface, Gosse says that he is writing while his memory is "still perfectly vivid", and that "at only one point has there been any tampering with precise facts". However, Ann Thwaite puts forward a very different view in Glimpses of the Wonderful, her excellent biography of Gosse's father. She quotes Edmund as describing his memory as "like a colander", and she relates several minor and some major events in Father and Son in respect of which Edmund is either remembering inaccurately or is being creative with the truth. The answer probably is - one with which Edmund would probably wryly agree - that there is no absolute truth, only greater or lesser.

The book is not unremitting gloom. There are several anecdotes where Gosse displays his subtle, wicked sense of humour, as seen throughout his career.

I enjoyed this book. I had feared that it would be a dense difficult book but I was pleasantly surprised by the facility and beauty of the prose. It is the story of the author's upbringing by his father , after his mother's death. both parents were members of the Plymouth Brethren who were and are a fundamentalist Christian group. The father was a distinguished naturalist who believed that God created teh world with fossils in their place. He was dumbfounded that his demonstration, by reference to teh Bible, that Darwin was wrong was met by derision.This is a side issue as the main story here is of an only child who loses his mother and finds his way despite his father's religous stiffness. There are other interesting aspects to teh book. We think of the Victorian age as being one long period but here teh author demonstrates the difference between the generation who were born in the regency era and the more mdern thinking later Victorians. There are many other useful insights including the observations public health in the 1850s and that the coast had been ruined by 1900 by all the tourists looking for samples etc. A fascinating book that is well worth reading.

A thought-provoking, beautifully written account of an unusually sheltered childhood. In the most controlled terms, the author describes his passage from child to man with a degree of fairness and frankness that lets us judge for ourselves the validity of his father's controlling ways. Although the atmosphere of the Gosses' home is strict and repressive, the book itself never becomes oppressive. It has too much gentle humour and lightness. What is remarkable is how much tenderness and sympathy we feel for both of these people. The father is not a bad man, and he acts only out of misdirected love. Nevertheless, the story unfolds with an inevitability that is deeply sad. Nowadays, straight-forward horror stories of appalling physical and mental abuse sell by the million, but this was Victorian England, and this account of subtler damage done was initially published anonymously, so shocking for its time were the revelations. In a brilliant Epilogue, the author unleashes an indictment of religious fundementalism that remains as relevant as ever.