"Father and Son" is widely reckoned as the most brilliant work of Edmund Gosse whose delicate use of English, no doubt, partly accounted for his literary success. To attach too much literary importance to the book may, however, obscure its main purpose, which is an attempt of the writer to vindicate his attitude towards his father. The attempt failed, to put it mildly.

Gosse lived in an age when people held very high standard of propriety; any departure from rules of behaviour would be seen as an offence. But conflicts between fathers and sons, or between their respective thoughts, are as common nowadays as they were in ancient times. Gosse revealed in his book the differences between his father and himself mainly in their beliefs as to how life should be lived. The book caused a sensation upon release not because of the revelation but because of the daring publication of the differences - Gosse did as people at that time were not bold enough to do. As such differences were common, though they might not be voiced, many people shared the writer's experience and the book became instantly popular.

Nevertheless, to explain the success of the book in so few words as those said above will not do justice to Gosse. It is, in Bernard Shaw's words, one of those immortal pages in English literature. These might be extravagant words. Even so, Gosse, indeed, earned himself a place in English literature by such a bold attempt as mentioned earlier. But the attempt need not have been made - two men of widely different ages look at each other from different angles; the gap between them is only natural; it need not be alluded to nor elucidated. Any attempt which need not have been made cannot succeed.

Edmund Gosse's FATHER AND SON is legitimately considered one of the highpoints of Victorian autobiography. As has been noted by others, the book recounts the relationship between Edmund Gosse and his father, a member of the Christian sect generally known as Plymouth Brethren, but who was also a member of the Royal Society and one of the foremost marine biologists of his time. The narrative tends to break down into a number of definite segments: the author's birth until the death of his mother; life with his father until the time of the publishing of Darwin's THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES; the move of the Gosses to the coast of England; and young Gosse's schooling and gradual growth away from the religious teachings and expectations he had received from his parents.

A number of powerful impressions evolve over the course of the telling. First and foremost, one is left with an impression of how overwhelmingly Gosse's childhood was stripped of nearly all fun by his parents' puritanical and stern religion. Gosse's father is presented not as a cruel, vicious, and hypocritical. Instead, he is shown as a caring parent, a completely earnest practitioner of his religion, but fanatically concerned to eliminate all activities that do not lead to increased religious devotion and moral seriousness. Unfortunately, this resulted for Gosse in a childhood from which all possibility of play and fun and delight had been eliminated. Near the end of the book, I was left wondering if Gosse would have been inclined to leave Christianity if he had just had more fun as a kid.

The section of the book dealing with his father's reaction to Darwin's ORIGIN OF SPECIES was for me the most interesting part of the book. His father's scientific standing was such that Darwin actually contacted him before the publication of his theories, and asked his response. Gosse notes that his father instantly understood that the scientific evidence clearly supported Darwin's theory. His reading of Genesis, however, indicated to him that the world was created in six days, which precluded the scenario articulated by Darwin. He therefore concluded that god created the earth in six days, but in so doing implanted fossils and geologic strata into the earth. In this way, his father was able to explain both the apparent evidence for eons long development of the earth and homo sapiens and yet retain his belief in the belief that Genesis taught a six day literal creation.

There are any of a number of reasons to read this work. It is a classic autobiography, an important source for one response to the reception of Darwin, and a magnificent evocation of puritanical religious life during the Victorian age. Most of all, it is a disturbing account of the distortive effect that intolerant and narrow-minded religious upbringing can have on an individual.

There are few works of autobiography that lay bare the author's soul as convincingly and seeringly as this. In an astonishing tour de force Edmund Gosse, by then a substantial Edwardian homme des lettres, remembers his childhood and adolescence in his father's house and his indoctrination into a Victorian, evangelical, creationist, scientific, wilfully unliterary way of life and his growth out of this via Shakespeare, Marlowe and some decidedly morbid poems. What is so astounding about this book is the kindness with which Gosse remembers his past which is always present and never tempered with dishonesty. There are moments when we cannot but find fault with Gosse senior (when he writes to his son in London invoking his mother's memory to try and force him back to the brethren) but with the Edmund Gosse painting so loving a picture of him we could never see him as, for example, the father of Samuel Butler's "The Way of All Flesh" (a great and loosely autobiographical novel which is often metioned alongside "Father and Son" as expressing the same painful differences between the evagelical Victorians and their children) - that is desicated, corrupted, and malicious. There is one killingly funny moment where Edmund Gosse reads from Marlowe's "Hero and Leander" to his stepmother and the idea of the straight laced little saint reading aloud about Leander "His bodie was as straight as Circes wand,/ Jove might have sipt out Nectar from his hand./ Even as delicious meat is to the tast,/ So was his necke in touching, and surpast/ The white of Pelops shoulder." to the god fearing wife of his god fearing father, minister to the brethren, and not expecting a strange reaction, is as bizarre as it is amusing. A most endearingly human work most warmly recommended.