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Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments (Twentieth Century Classics)
 
 
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Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments (Twentieth Century Classics) (Paperback)

by Edmund Gosse (Author) "Father and Son was first published anonymously in the autumn of 1907 ..." (more)
4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
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Product details

  • Paperback: 272 pages
  • Publisher: Penguin Classics; New Ed edition (27 Jul 1989)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0140182764
  • ISBN-13: 978-0140182767
  • Product Dimensions: 19.2 x 12.8 x 2 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 146,995 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

Product Description

At birth Edmund Gosse was dedicated to 'the Service of the Lord'. His parents were Plymouth Brethren. After his mother's death Gosse was brought up in stifling isolation by his father, a marine biologist whose faith overcame his reason when confronted by Darwin's theory of evolution. Father and Son is also the record of Gosse's struggle to 'fashion his inner life for himself' - a record of whose full and subversive implications the author was unaware, as Peter Abbs notes in his Introduction. First published anonymously in 1907, Father and Son was immediately acclaimed for its courage in flouting the conventions of Victorian autobiography and is still a moving account of self-discovery.
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Average Customer Review
4.8 out of 5 stars (5 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars A painful portrayal of a child's struggle to become., 22 Oct 1999
By A Customer
Gosse's autobiographical account of his early years with his strictly Puritan family is beautifully written and, although often a painful book to read, a book which one will remember. It is a slice of life from a time that, although not so long ago, seems drastically different to our modern day world. Gosse charts his development as a child and his development as a literary figure in Father And Son and produces one of the finest semi-autobiographical novels in the English language. A criticism of the novel could be that it occasionally verges upon the self-pitying yet it is a sad tale and a tale told delicately. I personally enjoyed the novel and found that, in it's style, it offers something fresh and worthy. Unlike most autobiography, Father And Son does not act as a self-advertisment for the writers greatness. What it does do is offer an insight into a life that most modern day readers would find difficult to imagine.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A brilliant autobiography, but not "nothing but the truth", 15 Feb 2009
By Bob Sherunkle (London, UK) - See all my reviews
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.
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5.0 out of 5 stars A Classic, 7 Sep 2009
By Rf And Tm Walters "rtwalters" (London) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
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.
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