Edmund Gosse's Father and Son was one of the first and most wounding of the Edwardian attacks on the high Victorians. Casting himself as a 'little helpless child', Gosse represented his father, the naturalist Philip Henry Gosse, as a small-minded bigot. In Edmund's case, the not uncommon inclination to see ourselves as pitiful victims when we remember our childhood was magnified by the wish to imply a heroic escape from the tyranny of an eminent Victorian. Even Edmund, however, was taken aback by the reaction when his memoir was published in 1907. He had not intended an all-out assault on the father he professed to see as 'a good and even great man, whose character was too powerful not to have its disconcerting sides'. But the book was read as 'a bitter cry from a world without tenderness and without gaiety', or, as Frederic Harrison put it, 'a story of rank cruelty and almost insanity'. Virginia Woolf agreed, speaking of the 'almost insane religious mania of the father'. This, without question, was a book about the grim oppression of a life-denying father and the admirable resilience of a persecuted son.

LRB 19 September 2002 | PDF Download