Father and Son

At birth Edmund Gosse was dedicated to the service of the lord . His parents were Plymouth Brethren. After his mother’s death Gosse was brought up in stifling isolation by his father, a marine biologist, whose faith overcame his reason when confronted by Darwin’s theory of evolution. Father and Son is the record of Gosse’s struggle to fashion his inner life for himself - a record of whose full and subversive implications the author was unaware, as Peter Abbs notes in his introduction.