Edmund Gosse born (1849 - 1928)

About:

Edmund Gosse was born in 1849 in London. into a family of strict Plymouth Brethren. His father Phillip Henry Gosse was an eminent naturalist and writer of zoological literature. He was also a strict follower of the branch of the protestant faith known as the Plymouth Brethren and the young Edmund was brought up according to the strict puritanical edicts of the sect, hearing no fanciful stories, playing no distracting games and receiving much instruction on the word of the Bible. Edmund’s mother died when he seven and there followed a year of strange seclusion during which his father dealt with his grief and financial problems by undertaking a long lecture tour of the British isles, without his son. On the advice of his fellow brethren however, Gosse Sr. decided that this way of life was not very good for the boy and Edmund’s eighth birthday was spent travelling down to a newly purchased villa in Devon with a new and ‘somewhat grotesque’ governess where he would remain for the great part of his childhood.

The stern efforts of his father, his church and the governess to direct young Gosse along a path of scientific endeavour and an eventual post in the church, as is often the way, led him in precisely the opposite direction. Edmund Gosse turned heretically and wholeheartedly to the arts. He became one of the most influential voices in Victorian literary criticism and a minor poet of no mean merit. He began his literary career as a librarian at the British Museum and progressed to becoming translator to the Board of Trade. He was Clark Lecturer in English Literature at Trinity College, Cambridge between 1884 and 1990 and in 1904 became the librarian to the House of Lords - a remarkably influential post whose power he wielded with gusto.

He published biographies of, amongst others, Gray, Congreve, Jeremy Taylor Swinburne and Coventry Patmore and can be held largely responsible for the introduction of Henrik Ibsen’s work to the British public. During the 1880s he became the leading sculpture critic, and received the Legion of Honour and a knighthood in 1925. His most famous work however was the swingeing account he wrote of his youth with Gosse Sr. - Father and Son. Published anonymously in 1907, it was fairly soon publically known whose childhood was being described and it remains one of the most remarkable of autobiographical works.