Father and Son by Edmund Gosse

First published: 1907

Type of work: Autobiography

The Work:

In chapter 1, Edmund Gosse depicts himself as a small child in a staunchly Puritan, middle-class household where stringent worship takes place daily. As he grew, Gosse enjoyed great freedom during the day, and in the evenings he was lovingly included as an equal third party in his parents’ eager, mutually enjoyable discussions of Puritan doctrine.

In chapter 2, Gosse records his life from earliest memory through age six. He emphasizes the dichotomous experience of having loving parents who had no sense of the despairing oppressiveness their religious zeal had on their small son. Some escape from the oppressive worship came when, at age six, Gosse discovered a private duality that brought a “consciousness of self, as a force and as a companion,” one with whom he secretly conversed during worship.

In chapters 3 and 4, Gosse presents events of his seventh year, chief among them his mother’s death. On her deathbed, she extracted from Gosse’s father, Philip, a promise to see that their son Edmund would dedicate himself to their Puritanism. That dedication was to remain an intolerable burden. Adjusting to his mother’s death, Gosse realized that the pain it brought finally allowed his emotions, not merely his intellect, to be stimulated; he felt, for the first time, in touch with his own humanity. His father continued indoctrinating him into Puritan beliefs, leaving no gaps “for nature to fill.”

In chapters 5 and 6, Gosse reviews his eighth and ninth years. On his eighth birthday, he and his father, with a new governess, moved to Devonshire. There, his father became a preacher in a Wesleyan church of Cornish people who retained, intact, the traditions of the eighteenth century. His father saw the new scientific works of Charles Lyell, Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, and others as attacks on those traditions. A renowned naturalist himself, Philip determined to write a book that would reconcile the account in Genesis of a six-day creation with the new scientific accounts of a slower evolution, thus making compatible his religion and natural science. The book failed. Philip assumed an even stricter faith, an even narrower mind. Pondering this, Gosse believed that his father habitually “mistook fear for love.”

In chapters 7 through 9, Gosse relates experiences from his ninth, tenth, and eleventh years, which bring even greater distance between his and his father’s spiritual beliefs. Paradoxically, during this period, his father introduced Gosse to Vergil’s classical works. At ten, Gosse suddenly wanted to be all his father expected, and, for diametrically opposed reasons, the father and son successfully instigated the unprecedented inclusion of a child in the adult affairs of a church. Philip wanted his son “saved” before puberty could assail him; Gosse wanted the power and prestige of being a child prodigy.

“Conversion” brought increased religious accountability to Gosse: He was expected to witness daily and to reject all boyish behavior. Despairingly, Gosse was forced to realize that his father expected him to enter the ministry. He saw himself, inevitably, imprisoned for life in the Puritan system. Nevertheless, he clung to a “hard nut of individuality,” to the duality that allowed him to speak in himself to himself in “inviolable secrecy.” Reading more widely, he realized that, unlike his father’s “saving” faith, his own had intellectual roots.

At eleven, because of his son’s interest in geography, Gosse’s father gave him a novel about the sea that he had enjoyed as a boy. This gift marked a turning point in Gosse’s life, as it opened his imagination and taught him the power of words and books. He attributed the continuing “fortitude” of his individuality to his reading of that book.

In chapters 10 and 11, Gosse covers the events of his eleventh through thirteenth years, including his father’s marriage to Eliza Brightwen and her positive influence upon his life.

In chapter 12, Gosse presents an account of boarding-school years during his fourteenth through seventeenth years. The very bleakness of his school experience allowed the pursuit of his own “moral and mental development,” which taught him to dream, to speculate, and to think for himself. During these years, his father took him to London to an evangelism conference, where a speaker said that William Shakespeare was suffering in hell. Gosse was devastated, for he loved Shakespeare’s works but now would not read them if the writer were “lost.” After the meeting, his father said he thought the man wrong to so judge Shakespeare, who may well have made a profession of faith before he died. This unexpected observation swept a relieved Gosse with love for his father.

At sixteen, however, while home from school, he confronted the narrow views of his father’s faith and his own inability to conceive such a “rigid conception” of God’s mercy. He found incongruous his tenderhearted father’s belief that God would punish human beings forever because of an intellectual error of comprehension.

He still believed, however, in the apocalyptic return of Christ to the earth, which his father preached. In what he calls the “highest moment” of his religious experience, Gosse stood alone in his room at school, praying expectantly that Jesus would return right then and take him to Paradise. When Jesus did not, Gosse knew Christ was not coming and would never come. Then he felt an initial crumbling of the “artificial faith” he had constructed. He knew his and his father’s beliefs would take opposite paths, the “world between [them].”

In the epilogue, Gosse writes of events from his seventeenth through twenty-first years, when he lives on his own in London. His father demanded a constant account of his most private thoughts, rejecting all Gosse’s pleas for some small portion of private soul. On a visit home, a final confrontation with his father ended with Gosse’s denying that his father was responsible for his “secret, most intimate convictions.” Back in London, he received a letter of ultimatum from his father saying that he could make all well between them by repenting and becoming again submissive to his father’s will in matters of faith and thought; otherwise, their fellowship would remain broken. Thus challenged, at twenty-one years of age, Gosse says his conscience rejected his father’s yoke and took a man’s privilege to design his “inner life for himself.”

Three central themes weave their way through the tapestry of Gosse’s spiritual autobiography: dualism, the passing of Victorianism, and the faltering faith that heralded modernity. The tapestry itself is what the writer calls, in his preface, an anecdotal documentary. Dualism, the doctrine of a paradoxically divided nature, runs through the pages. Gosse’s early dualism separated him into companionable halves that would keep each other company, enabling him mentally to escape long hours of religious study and prayer. His father’s dual nature, evidenced variously, is nowhere more significantly shown than by his evident willingness, despite his strict faith, to share forbidden fiction with his son. This sharing introduced Gosse to what became a life’s work in literature. This encouragement of his son’s literary interests, at significant moments of need, ultimately resulted in the divergence of their respective beliefs.

With his focus on the experience of having the fading religious concepts and practices of Puritanism thrown against his own spiritual development, Gosse reveals himself to be a true child of that transitional, Western age wherein faith went awry as the nineteenth century became the twentieth. Sweeping new scientific “truths” stunned those who were comfortable with the old doctrines. Indeed, Gosse (symbolic of the growing Victorian tendency to embrace modernity) paralleled his developing, differing insights with the self-satisfied confidence his father (symbolic of the traditions from which modernity broke) held toward Puritan dogma.

Of all that lay buried in the passing of the Victorian age, religious faith proved the most traumatic loss. That loss is keenly analyzed in Gosse’s autobiography through the schism that grew between father and son as their respective faiths diverged. This schism reflects the rushing changes of modernity that swamped people’s long-held spiritual belief in absolute, unchanging truths. In this time of the scientific investigations of Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin, the socio-philosophical revolutions of Georg Hegel and Karl Marx, and the psychological insights of Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, intellectual advancements challenged and frightened those whose understanding was built on an uninvestigated faith of fear.

Unhappily, it was also the period when traditional faith, failing the challenge, gave way in many people’s minds—not from new truths but because the old faith was based on a narrow human perspective, fraught with human pride, and could not maintain its limited understanding against those truths. In this, the father proves the son’s suspicion that, in spite of his tenderness, his faith in Divine Providence is built on fear, not love. As Gosse (and modernity) said, such fearful faith cannot say, simply, “I don’t know,” although biblical text confirms that the only answer faith can give to unanswerable paradoxes is exactly that. The faith based on fear falls apart in the face of these paradoxes.

Late twentieth century critics challenged the validity of Gosse’s masterpiece, saying perhaps his father had reason to fear his son’s lifestyle in London, since he evidently went to parties with young women. Gosse, however, states in the 1907 autobiography that his father never concerned himself with the son’s physical actions or attitudes, trusting him implicitly in those areas. Rather, his father was concerned with the matter of “insidious infidelity,” which Gosse is careful to connect with his father’s fear that new intellectual views that reached fruition in the modern age would lead him astray. His father’s worst fears were right, but his son, too, was right: Every person and every generation have the right to grapple with new beliefs, weighing them against the old verities and truths.

Gosse’s autobiography is an important work, particularly so for generations at the crossroads of a new century—or a new millennium. The postmodern writer Robert Coover, for example, said that late twentieth century Fundamentalism’s inflexible dogma is the cause of “about 90 percent” of society’s “unnecessary pain,” because it demands rigid acceptance of its dogma as society’s only truth. Such demands were not a new phenomena, even in Gosse’s age; the Jews of the first century, likewise, rejected new ideas that did not conform to their rigid interpretation of Scripture.

Having access to all necessary truth, the Jews, the Victorians, and the Fundamentalists evidence the same “congenital lack” of what Gosse called “that highest modesty,” which enables people to admit, “I do not know,” when confronted by the wideness of God’s many truths of grace. Such inability robs people of imagination and thereby erases the hope of a silencing awe. Such awe alone affirms the possibility of the “impossible.” As Gosse pointed out, his father could not countenance the potential of truth to have “two forms, each of them indisputable, yet each antagonistic to the other.” Such, of course, is the supreme dualism that begs the age-old, paradoxical question of faith: How can a holy God dwell in human flesh? A saving faith, which must wait to see, really has only one answer: “I don’t know.” Certainly, as Gosse concludes, each person has the right to a mind—and a faith—of his or her own. As his life proves, to deny that right robs a person of what Scripture calls “the substance of things hoped for,” which is faith itself.

Bibliography

Amigoni, David. “Edmund Gosse’s Cultural Evolution: Sympathetic Magic, Imitation, and Contagious Literature.” In Colonies, Cults, and Evolution: Literature, Science, and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Writing. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Amigoni’s analysis of Father and Son and other works of nineteenth century literature demonstrates how these works were influenced by the evolutionary writings of Charles Darwin and other scientists.

Mattheisen, Paul F., and Michael Millgate, eds. Transalantic Dialogue: Selected American Correspondence of Edmund Gosse. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1965. The introduction gives insight into Gosse’s relationship with American writers. Contains assorted references to Father and Son, including America’s favorable response. Includes an extensive index with almost seven pages of autobiographical references.

O’Gorman, Francis. “Romance and Victorian Autobiography: Margaret Oliphant, Edmund Gosse, and John Ruskin’s ’Needle to the North.’” In A Companion to Romance: From Classical to Contemporary, edited by Corinne Saunders. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2004. This history of romance literature includes an analysis of the influence of this genre on Father and Son.

Porter, Roger J. “Conflict and Incorporation: Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son.” In Self-Same Songs: Autobiographical Performances and Reflections. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. Examines a range of autobiographical literature, including Father and Son, analyzing the various techniques used to create these books and the authors’ motivations for writing them. Porter demonstrates how writing an autobiography allows authors not only to discover their self-identities but also to change their lives.

Thwaite, Ann. Edmund Gosse: A Literary Landscape, 1849-1928. 1984. Reprint. Stroud, England: Tempest, 2007. Provides a balanced study of the pros and cons of Gosse’s life and work. Thwaite began the work to discover what happened after Gosse’s twenty-first year, when Father and Son ended. She covers Churton Collins’s notorious attacks on Gosse’s literary criticism, and she emphasizes Gosse’s far-reaching influence in England.

Woolf, James D. Sir Edmund Gosse. New York: Twayne, 1972. An introductory overview of Gosse, providing an array of Gosse’s criticism. Emphasizes Gosse’s views on Christianity relative to his religious focus in the early part of Father and Son. Provides extensive editorial notes to the text.