In Ann Thwaite, however, he has found a biographer with that fine combination of gifts, and her thoroughly researched and crisply written book - though it is not likely to send readers searching for second-hand copies of Gosse's many works - explains why his very name fails to ring a bell today except, perhaps, for the suspicion of his having been an accomplice of Thomas J. Had Gosse gone on to write a full autobiography, Father and Sonrst chapters, but it is doubtful that a narrative of the rest of his long life would have even approached the candor and psychological acuteness of that testament of his agonized youth. It was a confrontation that occurred time after time in Victorian England, but what distinguished it from all the others was that 19 years after his father's death, Edmund purged his memories of it in a poignant memoir, Father and Sonas a classic document of the conflict between traditional religious belief - in this case, born-again Christianity - and modernism. Philip Gosse tried ceaselessly to impose his religious conviction and moral strictness on his only son, whose awe of him was matched only by his stubborn intellectual honesty. As a member of an obscure fundamentalist sect, the Plymouth Brethren, he countered the evolutionary 'testimony of the rocks' with the assertion that when God made the Earth in a single instant, he equipped nature with a hidden supply of ready-made fossils in order, some said, to test men's faith.

His method as a pioneer marine biologist earned Darwin's approval, and his books for the mid-Victorian lay audience earned him considerable fame. His most recent book is The Shows of Lond August 5, 1984ĮDMUND GOSSE's father belonged to a breed almost extinct today: he was a reputable scientist who was also a creationist. ALTICK is Regents' Professor of English Emeritus at Ohio State University.

Father and son gosse