Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments
| Format: | Paperback 272 pages |
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Synopsis
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.
Book details
Published
27/07/1989
Publisher
Penguin Classics
ISBN
9780140182767
Publisher and industry reviews
UK Kirkus review
First published anonymously in 1907, this is a sensitive boy's record of his stifling youth. Gosse's brief, poignant, uncomfortable account of his childhood, as one of a peculiarly strict sect of Plymouth Brethren records indelibly the relationship between the father - unworldly Philip Gosse, who managed to reconcile the profession of marine zoologist with an exact belief in the Scriptures - and his son, left motherless at seven, who first accepted and then began to question all the dogmas and prohibitions. It is plotted with devastating comedy and succeeded in doing for autobiography what Eminent Victorians did for biography. (Kirkus UK)
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