Father and Son

A Study of Two Temperaments

Edmund Gosse 1907

This memoir traces a boy's childhood under a deeply religious father in Victorian England. His father studies sea creatures while defending a literal reading of the Bible.

286 pages 5h 33m reading time

One of the great English memoirs, and often called the first modern autobiography in English.
Shows how a child slowly learns to think for himself, even when it means breaking from a parent he loves.
Treats both father and son with fairness and even humor, showing their split as a clash between two ways of seeing the world rather than a story of good against evil.
It gives a close, personal picture of the fight between religion and science in the years after Darwin, and it is still read as a key record of that time.
Its honest, unsentimental look at family life helped shape the way later writers wrote about their own childhoods.

Published without his name

The book first came out anonymously, though readers soon worked out that Gosse had written it.
A friend's suggestion

The novelist George Moore urged Gosse to turn the story of his unusual childhood into a book.
Second try at his father

Years earlier, Gosse had written a respectful life of his father that left out this private story.
Drawn from a mocked theory

It recalls his father's book claiming God made rocks with fossils already inside them, an idea readers laughed at.