Father & Son: A Study of Two Temperaments

"Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments" (1907) is a memoir by poet and critic Edmund Gosse, which he subtitled "a study of two temperaments." The book describes Edmund's early years in an exceptionally devout Plymouth Brethren home. His mother, who died early and painfully of breast cancer, was a writer of Christian tracts. His father, Philip Henry Gosse, was an influential, though largely self-taught, invertebrate zoologist and student of marine biology who, after his wife's death, took Edmund to live in Devon. "Father & Son" focuses on the father's response to the new evolutionary theories, especially those of his scientific colleague Charles Darwin, and Edmund's gradual rejection of both his father and his father's fundamentalist religion. As Michael Newton, Lecturer in English, University College London, has written, the book is "a brilliant, and often comic, record of the small diplomacies of home: those indirections, omissions, insincerities, and secrecies that underlie family relationships." "Brilliantly written, and full of gentle wit," "Father & Son: A Study of Two Temperaments" is "an unmatched social document, preserving for us whole the experience of childhood in a Protestant sect in the Victorian period....Above all, it is one of our best accounts of adolescence, particularly for those who endured...a religious upbringing."