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The Gosse family themselves belonged to a species quite as obscure as some of the marine fauna that Philip Henry was to spend much of his life examining. By far the greatest achievement of Ann Thwaite's excellent biography, consequently, is to reclaim Gosse for the Victorian pantheon, emphasising his achievements and, psychological quirks aside, the curious attractiveness of his personality.
#Sins of the father poem professional
Colleagues did not have to wait for the proof of carbon dating to laugh him off the professional stage. The earnest spirit that set down Omphalos (1857) - an attempt to reconcile science and religion by among other things suggesting that the fossils were a part of God's more or less instantaneous creation - was a figure of ridicule. In Father and Son (1907) Edmund Gosse left an epic portrait of his evangelical father as a God-haunted neurotic, declining to celebrate Christmas Day and abominating the Christmas pudding smuggled in to his son by the servants as "flesh offered to idols." (Peter Carey uses this incident in Oscar and Lucinda, the first part of which draws heavily on the younger Gosse's account.) More than a century after his death, most of what remains of Gosse in the public mind makes him seem either sinister or absurd. The beliefs endured, but the dreadful implications of evolutionary theory hung over his later life like a shroud. Born into the age of Lyell and Darwin, on the other hand, where the secrets of the rocks were no longer secret and man had not been created but only descended, he was made miserable by a world in which science and his own private beliefs moved ever further apart. As an 18th-century country parson, or more probably a dissenting minister, pottering around his parish and devoting his leisure to the contents of the local rock pool, he would, you feel, have been perfectly happy. PH Gosse's tragedy - and that is not too strong a word - was that he arrived on the planet a couple of generations too late. Glimpses of the Wonderful: The Life of Philip Henry Gosse 1810-1888