Gosse, Philip Henry (1810-1888)

Gosse, Philip Henry (1810-1888)

naturalist and religious writer; b. 6 April 1810 in Worcester, England, second of four children of Thomas Gosse, miniature portrait painter, and Hannah Best, domestic servant; m. first in 1848 Emily Bowes (d. 1857), and they had one son; m. secondly in 1860 Eliza Brightwen; d. 23 Aug. 1888 at St Mary Church, near Torquay, England.
        Philip Henry Gosse was educated at local schools in Poole, Dorset; he especially valued the classical training he received from 1823 to 1824 at a nearby boarding-school in Blandford. “From infancy my tastes were bookish,” he recalled, and so when he left school at 15 his academic interests did not end. He developed a delight for the study of natural history long before his formal education ceased and throughout his life he was an adherent of the natural theology tradition. As well he was influenced by his father’s strong belief in evangelical Christianity, and inherited from him a keen interest in painting and drawing. After quitting school Gosse held a number of odd jobs until 1827 when a clerkship was obtained for him in the counting-house of Slade, Elson and Company in Carbonear, Nfld.
        Arriving in Newfoundland in June 1827, Gosse found a colony divided into two warring classes, merchants and fishermen [see William Carson*]. This tension was exacerbated by the concomitant local and historical hostility between English Protestants and Irish Catholics, each vying for the upper hand in light of the prospect of representative government. Nevertheless, Gosse was able to pursue his chores at the counting-house, outfitting and tallying the catch of the seal fleets in March and April and the cod trade in June and October as well as copying letters and ledgers the rest of the year. This activity left plenty of spare time and Gosse participated in the local intellectual life, which included a book club and a debating society.
        The year 1832 was Gosse’s annus mirabilis. Though his first few years in Newfoundland had been pleasant his life lacked direction. In May 1832 he purchased George Adams’ Essays on the microscope (London, 1787) which served to focus his hitherto diffuse though eager interest in natural history. Then in the next month a letter from home announcing that his sister Elizabeth was on the verge of death stirred his conscience and raised the issue of his relationship with God once again, resulting in an evangelical conversion. Thus Gosse commenced the two activities which dominated the remainder of his life, the study of nature and the practice of evangelical Christianity.
        In November 1832 Gosse began systematically to collect insects and to enter scientific observations in journals. Extracts from his meteorological record were published in the Conception-Bay Mercury. In the following summer he commenced filling a volume (“Entomologia Terrae Novae”) with coloured drawings of butterflies, moths, beetles, and other insects; despite an unusually high level of scientific accuracy, it has remained unpublished. Meanwhile, he had joined the Methodist society in Carbonear, read the theological works of John and Charles Wesley, become a member of the chapel choir, participated in public prayer-meetings, and was eventually persuaded to act as a local preacher with Philip Tocque* and others.
        In June 1835 Gosse left Newfoundland. He had fulfilled the terms of his indenture at the countinghouse, and the mounting tension between the Irish Catholics and English Protestants following the granting of representative government in 1832 was making life unbearable for him. Moreover, he had “pretty well exhausted Entomology in Newfoundland; it was a cold barren unproductive region.” One of Gosse’s close friends, George Edward Jaques, and his wife had heard some “very flaming accounts” about Canada and were intent on moving there. Gosse decided to join them and together they purchased 110 partially cleared acres just north of Compton, Sherbrooke County Lower Canada.
        For the next three years Gosse worked his 60 acre; of the land in the face of constant hardship. Although Compton was situated in an area reputed to be rich agriculturally, the short seasons often forced settlers to work at trades more profitable than farming; in the winter months Gosse taught school to supplement his; income. Jaques and Gosse farmed separately and without the help of agricultural labourers who were in short supply; through inexperience, they grew crop which were sold only with difficulty. In spite of an initial wave of optimism it soon became apparent that the experiment was a failure, and Gosse left the colony in March 1838, spending seven months in Alabama before returning to England early in 1839. Except for an 18-month sojourn in Jamaica he remained in England for the rest of his life.
        During his years in Canada Gosse’s spiritual life was at a low ebb, with nourishment coming only from the irregularly held Methodist services in Compton and the winter prayer-meetings. On the other hand, his scientific pursuits gradually became “from the mere salt, the condiment, of life, almost its very pabulum.” He was often seen in the field collecting insects, and people spoke of him as “that crazy Englishman who goes about collecting bugs.” During his first winter in Canada he had assembled his scientific journals and composed “The entomology of Newfoundland,” apparently the companion to the volume of illustrations. Although excerpts from these journals were subsequently published, Gosse realized that the book itself was unworthy of publication and it remained in manuscript. Modest recognition was given to his scientific pursuits in 1836 when he was elected a corresponding member of two societies to which he sent papers, the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec and the Natural History Society of Montreal. In May 1837, after five years of accumulating data, Gosse decided to bring his observations together into a general work on Canadian natural history. Three years later, The Canadian naturalist: a series of conversations on the natural history of Lower Canada was published in London, with his own illustrations.
        In the years that followed Gosse wrote more than 40 books and pamphlets as well as 230 articles on religious and scientific themes. As a naturalist he is best known for his original, often pioneering, works on invertebrate marine zoology, ornithology, rotifera, and lepidoptera. He was the foremost popularizer of natural history in mid-Victorian England, and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1856. His religious works, in which he was deeply influenced by the Plymouth Brethren, include prophetic, hortative, and exegetical essays, as well as attempts to resolve the conflict between religion and science.
        Gosse made no impact on the religious life of either Newfoundland or Canada. In the history of entomology in Newfoundland, however, he occupies a special place, for in a day when the colony did not possess any men of science, scientific institutions, or even cabinet collections, he was the first person systematically to investigate and to record the entomology of that island. No such status can be assigned to his Canadian investigations, especially since he himself recognized his deficiency in the systematic knowledge of natural history. The Canadian naturalist, presented as a conversation between a father and son, was old-fashioned in format and addressed to a popular rather than to a learned audience. Yet Gosse brought together much accurate and original information about the flora and fauna of the Eastern Townships, focusing his attention on ecology rather than taxonomy, and the book and its illustrations were well received “[F] this book,” Charles James Stewart Bethune* wrote in 1898, “many Canadian entomologists of note received their first lessons, and learned the names of some of our common butterflies and moths.”
Douglas Wertheimer
Gosse was the author of The Canadian naturalist: a series of conversations on the natural history of Lower Canada (London, 1840; repr. Toronto, 1971); “List of butterflies taken at Compton, in Lower Canada,” Entomologist (London), 1 (1840–42): 137–39; “Notes on butterflies obtained at Carbonear Island, Newfoundland, 1832–1835,” Canadian Entomologist (London, Ont.), 15 (1883): 44–51; “On silk produced by diurnal Lepidoptera,” Intellectual Observer (London), 10 (1866–67): 393–94; “The Y-shaped organ of Papilio larvæ,” Hardwicke’s Science-Gossip (London), 8 (1871): 224. For other works by Gosse and a study of his life see D. L. Wertheimer, “Philip Henry Gosse: science and revelation in the crucible” (phd thesis, Univ. of Toronto, 1977).
        National Museums of Canada Library (Ottawa), P. H. Gosse, “Entomologia Terrae Novae,” c.1835. PAC, MG 24, 163. PANL, T. B. Browning papers, Sketchbook of Newfoundland scenes, apparently by William Gosse. S. H. Scudder, “Gosse’s observations on the butterflies of North America,” Psyche (Cambridge, Mass.), 3 (1881): 245–47. R. B. Freeman and Douglas Wertheimer, Philip Henry Gosse: a bibliography (Folkestone, Eng., 1980). E. W. Gosse, Father and son; a study of two temperaments (London, 1907); The life of Philip Henry Gosse, F.R.S. (London, 1890). C. J. S. Bethune, “The rise and progress of entomology in Canada,” RSC Trans., 2nd ser., 4 (1898), sect.iv: 155–65. F. A. Bruton, “Philip Henry Gosse’s entomology of Newfoundland; introductory note,” Entomological News (Philadelphia), 41 (1930): 34–38. T. W. Fyles, “A visit to the Canadian haunts of the late Philip Henry Gosse,” Entomological Soc. of Ont., Annual report (Toronto), 23 (1892): 22–29.
© 2000 University of Toronto/Université Laval

Bibliografia:

The Canadian Naturalist: a series of conversations on the natural history of Lower Canada (1840).

An Introduction to Zoology (1844).

The Ocean (1844), edition of 1874 under the title The Wonders of the Great Deep; or, the physical, animal, geological and vegetable curiosities of the ocean.

The Birds of Jamaica (1847)

The Monuments of Ancient Egypt, and their relation to the Word of God (1847).

Natural History. Mammalia (1848).

Popular Ornithology; containing a familiar and technical description of the Birds of the British Isles (1849).

Illustrations of the Birds of Jamaica (1849).

Natural History. Birds (1849).

The Ancient and Modern History of the Rivers of the Bible (1850).

Natural History. Reptiles (1850).

A Naturalist’s Sojourn in Jamaica (1851).

The History of the Jews from the Christian Era to the dawn of the Reformation (1851).

Natural History. Fishes (1851).

The History of the Jews, from the Christian era to the dawn of the Reformation (1851).

A Text-book of Zoology for schools (1851).

Assyria: her manners and customs, arts and aims. Restored from the monuments (1852).

Popular British Ornithology... (1853).

Naturalist Rambles on the Devonshire Coast (1853).

The Aquarium: an unveiling of the wonders of the deep sea (1854).

Natural History. Mollusca (1854).

A Handbook to the Marine Aquarium: containing Instructions for constructing, stocking, and maintaining a tank, and for collecting plants and animals (1855).

Manual of Marine Zoology for the British Isles (1855-1856).

Tenby (1856).

A Memorial of the Last Days on Earth of Emily Gosse (1857)

Omphalos: an attempt to untie the geological knot. (1857), modern editions in 1998 and 2003.

Life in its Lower, Intermediate, and Higher Forms; or, manifestations of the divine wisdom in the natural history of animals (1857).

Actinologia Britannica: a history of the British Sea-Anemones and Corals. (1858-60).

Evenings at the Microscope: or, researches among the minute organs and forms of animal life (1859).

Letters from Alabama, chiefly relating to Natural History (1859).

The Romance of Natural History (1860-61).

A Year at the Shore (1865).

Land and Sea (1865).

The Revelation. How is it to be interpreted ? (1866).

Imperial Bible-Dictionary (104 articles) (1866)

The Mysteries of God: a series of expositions of Holy Scripture (1884).

Ann Thwaite, Glimpses of the Wonderful: The Life of Philip Henry Gosse, 1810-1888 (London: Faber & Faber, 2002), the definitive biography.

L. R. Croft, "Gosse, Philip Henry (1810–1888)," Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004.

Douglas Wertheimer, "Gosse, Philip Henry," Dictionary of Canadian Biography.

Edmund Gosse, Father and Son (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907); Oxford World Classics edition, 2004.

John Rendle-Short, Green Eye of the Storm (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1998).

Jorge Luis Borges, "The Creation and P. H. Gosse," in Other Inquisitions (trans. Ruth Simms) (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964).

Stephen Jay Gould, "Adam's Navel," in The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987).
da Wikipedia:

Philip Henry Gosse [1] (April 6, 1810 – August 23, 1888) was an English naturalist and popularizer of natural science, virtually the inventor of the seawater aquarium, and a painstaking innovator in the study of marine biology. Gosse is perhaps best known today as the author of Omphalos, an attempt to reconcile the immense geological ages presupposed by Charles Lyell with the biblical account of creation. After his death, Gosse was also caricatured as a despotic and fanatically religious father in Father and Son (1907), the literary masterpiece of his son, poet and critic Edmund Gosse.[2]
Contents
1 Early life
2 Young naturalist and lay preacher
3 Popular nature writer
4 Omphalos
5 Later career
6 Father and Son
7 Select list of Gosse's books
8 Bibliography
9 References

Early life
Gosse was born in Worcester in 1810 of an itinerant painter of miniature portraits and a lady's maid.[3] As a boy he worked in the counting house of George Garland and Sons in the town of Poole, and in 1827 he sailed to Newfoundland to serve as a clerk in the Carbonear premises of Slade, Elson and Co., where he became a dedicated, self-taught student of Newfoundland entomology, "the first person systematically to investigate and to record the entomology" of the island.[4] In 1832 Gosse experienced a religious conversion—as he said, "solemnly, deliberately and uprightly, took God for my God."[5]
In 1835 he left Newfoundland for Compton, Lower Canada where he farmed unsuccessfully for three years, originally in an attempt to establish a commune with two of his religious friends. Nevertheless, the experience deepened his love for natural history, and locals referred to him as "that crazy Englishman who goes about picking up bugs."[6]
In 1838 Gosse taught eight months for Reuben Saffold, a plantation owner, near Pleasant Hill, Alabama.[7] Gosse studied and drew the local flora and fauna as well as recording his negative impressions of slavery, later published as Letters from Alabama (1859).[8]
Young naturalist and lay preacher
Returning to England in 1839, Gosse was hard pressed to make a living, subsisting on eightpence a day ("one herring eaten as slowly as possible, and a little bread").[9] His fortunes began to improve when John Van Voorst, the leading publisher of naturalist writing agreed to publish his Canadian Naturalist (1840).[10] The book was widely praised and demonstrated that Gosse "had a practical grasp of the importance of conservation, far ahead of his time."[11]
Gosse opened a "Classical and Commercial School for Young Gentlemen" while keeping detailed records of his microscopic investigations of pond life, especially cyclopidae and rotifera.[12] He also began to preach to the Wesleyan Methodists and lead a Bible class. Nevertheless, in 1842, he became so captivated by the doctrine of the Second Coming of Christ that he severed his connection with the Methodists and joined the Plymouth Brethren. These dissenters emphasized the Second Coming while rejecting liturgy and an ordained ministry—although they otherwise endorsed the traditional doctrines of Christianity as represented by the creeds of the Methodist and the Anglican Church.[13]
In 1843, Gosse gave up the school to write a An Introduction to Zoology for the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) and to draw some of the illustrations. Writing the work inspired him to further his interest in the flora and fauna of the seashore and also revealed him to be a determined creationist, although this position was typical of pre-Darwinian naturalists.[14]

In October 1844 Gosse sailed to Jamaica, where he served as a professional collector for the churlish dealer Hugh Cuming. Although Gosse worked hard during his eighteen months on the island, he later called this period his "holiday in Jamaica."[15] Gosse's study specialized in birds, and Gosse has been called "the father of Jamaican ornithology." With no racial prejudice, he easily hired black youths as his assistants, and his Jamaican books are full of praise for one of them, Samuel Campbell.[16] For Christian companionship he enjoyed the company of Moravian missionaries and their black converts and preached regularly to the Moravian congregation.[17]
On his return to London in 1846, he wrote a trilogy on the natural history of Jamaica including A Naturalist's Sojourn in Jamaica (1851), which was "written in a congenial style and firmly established his reputation both as a naturalist and a writer."[18]
Popular nature writer
Back in England, Gosse wrote books in his field and out. (One quick volume for the SPCK was Monuments of Ancient Egypt, a land he had never visited and never would.)[19] As his financial situation stabilized, Gosse courted Emily Bowes, a forty-one-year-old member of the Brethren, who was both a strong personality and a gifted writer of evangelical tracts. They married in November 1848, and their union was an extremely happy one. As D. J. Taylor has written, "the word 'uxorious' seems to have minted to define" Gosse.[20] Gosse's only son was born on September 21, 1849, an event Gosse noted in his diary with the words, "E. delivered of a son. Received green swallow from Jamaica"—an amusing conjunction which Edmund later described as demonstrating only the order of events: the boy had arrived first.[21]
Gosse penned a succession of books and articles on natural history, some of which were (in his own words) "pot-boilers" for religious publications. (At the time, accounts of God's creation were considered appropriate Sabbath reading for children.)[22] As L. C. Croft has written, "Much of Gosse's success was due to the fact that he was essentially a field naturalist who was able to impart to his readers something of the thrill of studying living animals at first hand rather than the dead disjointed ones of the museum shelf. In addition to this he was a skilled scientific draughtsman who was able to illustrate his books himself."[23]
Suffering from headaches, perhaps the result of overwork, Gosse and his family began to spend more time away from London on the Devon coast.[24] Here along the sea shore Gosse began serious experimentation with ways to sustain sea creatures so that they could be examined "without diving to gaze on them." Although there had been attempts to construct what had previously been called an "aquatic vivarium" (a name Gosse found "awkward and uncouth"), Gosse published The Aquarium in 1854 and set off a mid-Victorian craze for household aquariums.[25] The book was financially profitable for Gosse, and "the reviews were full of praise" even though Gosse used natural science to point to the necessity of salvation through the blood of Christ.[26] In 1856 Gosse was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, which, because he had no university position or inherited wealth, gave him "a standing he otherwise lacked."[27]
A few months before Gosse was honored, his wife discovered that she had breast cancer. Rather than undergo surgery (a risky procedure in 1856), the Gosses decided to submit to the ointments of an American doctor, Jesse Weldon Fell, who if not a charlatan, was certainly on the fringe of contemporary medical practice. After much suffering, Emily Gosse died on February 9, 1857,[28] entrusting her husband with their son's salvation and thus perhaps driving Gosse into "strange severities and eccentric prohibitions."[29]
Omphalos
In the months following Emily's death, Gosse worked with remarkable diligence on a book that he may have viewed as the most important of his career. Although a failure both financially and intellectually, it is the book by which he is best remembered.[30] Gosse believed that he had discovered a theory that might neatly resolve the seeming contradiction in the age of the earth between the evidence of God's Word and the evidence of His creation as expounded by such contemporary geologists as Charles Lyell.[31] In 1857, two years before the publication of Charles Darwin's, Origin of Species, Gosse published Omphalos: an Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot and thereby created what has been called the Omphalos hypothesis.
In what Stephen Jay Gould has called "glorious purple prose,"[32] Gosse argued that if one assumed creation ex nihilo, there would necessarily be traces of previous existence that had never actually occurred. "Omphalos" is Greek for "navel", and Gosse argued that the first man, Adam, did not require a navel because he was never born; nevertheless he must have had one, as do all complete human beings, just as God must have created trees with rings that they never grew.[33] Thus, Gosse argued that the fossil record—even coprolites—might also be evidence of life that had never actually existed but which may have been instantly formed by God at the moment of creation.[34]
The general response was "as the Westminster Review put it, that Gosse's theory was 'too monstrous for belief.'" Even his friend, the novelist Charles Kingsley, wrote that he had read "no other book which so staggered and puzzled" him, that he could not believe that God had "written on the rocks one enormous and superfluous lie for all mankind."[35] Later mocking journalists would snigger that God had apparently hidden fossils in the rocks to tempt geologists to infidelity.[36]
Omphalos sold poorly and was eventually rebound with a new title, Creation, "in case the obscure one had had an effect on sales." The problem was not with the title, and in 1869 most of the edition was sold as waste paper.[37]

Later career
According to Edmund Gosse, his father's career was destroyed by his "strange act of wilfulness" in publishing Omphalos; Edmund claimed his father had "closed the doors upon himself forever." In fact, during the next three years Gosse published more than thirty scientific papers and four books.[38]
By this time Gosse and his son had moved permanently from London to St Marychurch, Devon. (Gosse refused to use the "St" and even gave his address as Torquay so as not to have anything to do with the "so-called Church of England.")[39] He soon became the pastor and overseer of the Brethren meeting, at first over a stable but shortly, under Gosse's preaching and peacemaking, in finer quarters—which he perhaps financed himself.[40]
During this period, Gosse made a special study of sea anemone (Actiniae) and in 1860 published Actinologia Britannica. Reviewers especially praised the color lithographs made from Gosse's watercolors. The Literary Gazette said that Gosse now stood "alone and unrivalled in the extremely difficult art of drawing objects of zoology so as to satisfy the requirements of science" as well as providing "vivid aesthetic impressions."[41]
In 1860 he also met and married a Quaker spinster, Eliza Brightwen (1813–1900), a kindly, tolerant woman who shared Gosse's intense interest in both natural history and the well-being of his son.[42] Gosse's second marriage was as happy as his first. In 1862 he wrote that Eliza was "a true yoke-fellow, in love, in spirit and in service."[43]
By this time Gosse was "very comfortably off" with the earnings from his books and dividends from his investments, and in 1864 Eliza received a substantial legacy which allowed Gosse to retire from his career as a professional writer and live in "congenial obscurity."[44] The Gosses lived simply, invested some of their income and gave more away to charity, especially to foreign missionaries, including ones sent to the "Popish, priest-ridden Irish."[45]
To Gosse's great grief, his son rejected Christianity—though almost certainly not as early or as dramatically as Edmund portrayed the break in Father and Son. Nevertheless, Henry sponsored the publication of Edmund's early poetry, which gave the younger man entrée to new friends of literary importance, and the two men "came out of the years of conflict with their relationship wary but intact."[46] Henry and Eliza welcomed Edmund's wife to the family and enjoyed visits with their three grandchildren.[47]

Philip Henry Gosse and Edmund Gosse, 1857. Frontispiece of Father and Son.Meanwhile, the ever active Gosse published a book on the fertilization of orchids and exchanged a number of letters on the subject with Darwin.[48] His penultimate enthusiasm was with the genitalia of butterflies about which he published a paper in the Transactions of the Linnean Society[49] But before his death he returned to rotifera, much of his research appearing in a two-volume study by another zoologist.[50]
His wife recalled that Gosse's final illness was triggered by his enthusiasm to adjust his telescope at an open window on a winter night.[51] Gosse had prayed regularly that he might not taste death but meet Christ in the air at his Second Coming, and he was bitterly disappointed when he realized that he would die like everyone else.[52]
Father and Son
After his father's death, Edmund Gosse published a typical Victorian biography, The Life of Philip Henry Gosse (1890). Nevertheless, after reading the latter, the writer George Moore suggested to Edmund that it contained "the germ of a great book," which Edmund Gosse published as Father and Son (F&S) in 1907. It has never gone out of print in more than a hundred years.[53] The reaction of readers to Henry's personality and character as represented in F&S has included phrases such as "scientific crackpot," "bible-soaked romantic," "a stern and repressive father," and a "pulpit-thumping Puritan throwback to the seventeenth century."[54]
Even a modern editor of F&S has rejected this portrait of Philip Henry Gosse on the grounds that his "writings reveal a genuinely sweet character."[55] But the biographer of both Gosses, Ann Thwaite, has established just how inaccurate Edmund's recollections of his childhood were, that Edmund indeed, as Henry James remarked, had "a genius for inaccuracy."[56] Although Edmund went out of his way to declare that the story of F&S was "scrupulously true," Thwaite cites a dozen occasions on which either Edmund's "memory betray[ed] him—he admitted it was 'like a colander'"—or he "changed things deliberately to make a better story."[57]
Select list of Gosse's books
The Canadian Naturalist: a series of conversations on the natural history of Lower Canada (1840).
An Introduction to Zoology (1844).
The Ocean (1844), edition of 1874 under the title The Wonders of the Great Deep; or, the physical, animal, geological and vegetable curiosities of the ocean.
The Birds of Jamaica (1847)
The Monuments of Ancient Egypt, and their relation to the Word of God (1847).
Natural History. Mammalia (1848).
Popular Ornithology; containing a familiar and technical description of the Birds of the British Isles (1849).
Illustrations of the Birds of Jamaica (1849).
Natural History. Birds (1849).
The Ancient and Modern History of the Rivers of the Bible (1850).
Natural History. Reptiles (1850).
A Naturalist’s Sojourn in Jamaica (1851).
The History of the Jews from the Christian Era to the dawn of the Reformation (1851).
Natural History. Fishes (1851).
The History of the Jews, from the Christian era to the dawn of the Reformation (1851).
A Text-book of Zoology for schools (1851).
Assyria: her manners and customs, arts and aims. Restored from the monuments (1852).
Popular British Ornithology... (1853).
Naturalist Rambles on the Devonshire Coast (1853).
The Aquarium: an unveiling of the wonders of the deep sea (1854).
Natural History. Mollusca (1854).
A Handbook to the Marine Aquarium: containing Instructions for constructing, stocking, and maintaining a tank, and for collecting plants and animals (1855).
Manual of Marine Zoology for the British Isles (1855-1856).
Tenby (1856).
A Memorial of the Last Days on Earth of Emily Gosse (1857)
Omphalos: an attempt to untie the geological knot. (1857), modern editions in 1998 and 2003.
Life in its Lower, Intermediate, and Higher Forms; or, manifestations of the divine wisdom in the natural history of animals (1857).
Actinologia Britannica: a history of the British Sea-Anemones and Corals. (1858-60).
Evenings at the Microscope: or, researches among the minute organs and forms of animal life (1859).
Letters from Alabama, chiefly relating to Natural History (1859).
The Romance of Natural History (1860-61).
A Year at the Shore (1865).
Land and Sea (1865).
The Revelation. How is it to be interpreted ? (1866).
Imperial Bible-Dictionary (104 articles) (1866)
The Mysteries of God: a series of expositions of Holy Scripture (1884).
Bibliography
Ann Thwaite, Glimpses of the Wonderful: The Life of Philip Henry Gosse, 1810-1888 (London: Faber & Faber, 2002), the definitive biography.
L. R. Croft, "Gosse, Philip Henry (1810–1888)," Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004.
Douglas Wertheimer, "Gosse, Philip Henry," Dictionary of Canadian Biography.
Edmund Gosse, Father and Son (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907); Oxford World Classics edition, 2004.
John Rendle-Short, Green Eye of the Storm (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1998).
Jorge Luis Borges, "The Creation and P. H. Gosse," in Other Inquisitions (trans. Ruth Simms) (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964).
Stephen Jay Gould, "Adam's Navel," in The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987).
References
1^ Gosse was known to his friends as "Henry" rather than "Philip." Ann Thwaite, Glimpses of the Wonderful: The Life of Philip Henry Gosse, 1810-1888 (London: Faber & Faber, 2002), xix.
2^ One of Edmund's friends called Father and Son "a story of rank cruelty and almost insanity." Virginia Woolf wrote of "the narrowness, the ugliness" of Edmund's upbringing, and "the almost insane religious mania of the father." Quoted in Ann Thwaite, Glimpses of the Wonderful: The Life of Philip Henry Gosse, 1810-1888 (London: Faber & Faber, 2002), xv. There are three portraits of Gosse at the National Portrait Gallery.
3^ Thwaite,5-6.
4^ Douglas Wertheimer, "Gosse, Philip Henry, Dictionary of Canadian Biography.
5^ Quoted in Thwaite, 50.
6^ Thwaite, 58, 67.
7^ Gosse, Philip Henry (1993) [1859]. Letters from Alabama, (U.S.) chiefly relating to natural history (Annotated ed.). Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. pp. 7–21. ISBN 0585323089.
8^ Thwaite, 87.
9^ Twaite, 100.
10^ Twaite, 102. In his son's telling, Gosse "broke down utterly into hysterical sob upon sob, while Mr. Van Voorst, murmuring, 'My dear young man! my dear young man!' hastened out to fetch wine and minister to wants which it was beyond the power of pride to conceal any longer." Edmund Gosse, Life of Philip Henry Gosse (1890), 157.
11^ L. R. Croft, ‘Gosse, Philip Henry (1810–1888)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004
12^ Thwaite, 109-110.
13^ Thwaite, 114. Gosse "denied any connection with Plymouth" and sometimes called himself simply a member of the church of Christ.
14^ Thwaite, 117.
15^ Twaite, 121.
16^ Thwaite, 125, 129. Gosse's insatiable curiosity included trying to eat the birds. He literally ate crow one on occasion and found the breast "well-based and juicy" but "dark, tough, and coarse grained." (136)
17^ Thwaite, 136.
18^ L. R. Croft, ‘Gosse, Philip Henry (1810–1888)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004
19^ Thwaite, 145.
20^ Taylor book review in The Guardian.
21^ Edmund Gosse, Father and Son (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907), 6.
22^ Thwaite, 166.
23^ L. R. Croft, ‘Gosse, Philip Henry (1810–1888)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004
24^ Thwaite, 170-73.
25^ Thwaite, 177-87.
26^ Thwaite, 181
27^ Thwaite, 194.
28^ Thwaite, 194-203. She was buried at Abney Park Cemetery in Stoke Newington.
29^ Thwaite, 201. "It was his son's misfortune to have to face this formidable opponent, burning with the trust Emily had placed in him, a shepherd with one precious lamb to keep safe from the grievous, ravening wolves, the temptations of the world." (204)
30^ John Rendle-Short, Green Eye of the Storm (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1998), 20-21; Thwaite, 209.
31^ Thwaite, 209, 212.
32^ Stephen Jay Gould, The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), 103.
33^ Thwaite, 216. Gosse called these apparent records of non-occurring events "prochronic," meaning "before time."
35^ Rendle-Short, 34-35.
36^ Thwaite, 222-23.
37^ Rendle-Short, 37.
38^ Thwaite, 223. Because of the destruction of this edition, "it is now extremely scarce and valuable."
39^ Thwaite, 228.
40^ Thwaite, 221, 228.
41^ Thwaite, 229-35, 249.
42^ Quoted in Thwaite, 240-41.
43^ L. R. Croft, ‘Gosse, Philip Henry (1810–1888)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004; Thwaite, 248-51, 253.
44^ Quoted in Thwaite, 251.
45^ Thwaite, 258-59, 262.
46^ Thwaite, 260-61.
47^ Thwaite, 278, 282, 287.
48^ Thwaite, 304-08. When Edmund married without introducing his fiancée to his parents neither Henry nor Eliza asked if she were "saved." (285) One of the grandchildren was Philip Henry George Gosse (1879-1959), a naturalist and author of Memoirs of a Camp Follower (1934), a memoir of his experiences in Royal Army Medical Corps in France and Belgium, 1915–1917, and in India, 1917–1918.
49^ Thwaite, 260.
50^ Thwaite, 316. The paper was euphemistically entitled, "On the clasping organs ancillary to generation in certain groups of Lepidoptera.
51^ Thwaite, 317.
52^ Thwaite, 320.
53^ Thwaite, 320, 323. He was buried in Torquay, and his grave was inscribed with a quotation from Revelation 22.20 "Even so, come, Lord Jesus."
54^ Edmund Gosse, Father and Son Michael Newton, ed. (Oxford University Press, 2004), xxix; Thwaite, xvi.
55^ Rendle-Short, 45.
56^ Edmund Gosse, Father and Son Michael Newton, ed. (Oxford University Press, 2004), xvii.
57^ Thwaite, xvi.
58^ Thwaite, xvi-xvii.
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