Father and Son
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Father and Son
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Narrated by:
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Geoffrey Palmer
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By:
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Edmund Gosse
About this listen
Everyone has a swipe at their parents and the way they were brought up at some point in their lives; very few of us exact revenge to the extent that Edmund Gosse did upon his father in this superbly funny, agonising account of a very strange childhood.
The subtitle of the book is A Study of Two Temperaments, and these were temperaments not destined to get on. Gosse, Sr. was an eminent naturalist and zoologist and a keen follower of the Plymouth Brethren. Gosse, Jr. had a natural leaning towards the arts and would grow up to be one of Victorian England's leading literary figures. The battle lines were drawn.
Throw into the picture the struggle already taking place within Gosse, Sr. (and most of the rest of the country) to reconcile his faith with the new theory of evolution as expounded by his fellow naturalist, Charles Darwin, and backed up by his own zoological studies, and you have the makings of a seriously entertaining fight.
This is a beautifully wry description of the attempt of a son to extricate himself from the vast influence of his father. Much has been made of Edmund Gosse's (possibly necessary) adjustment of the facts, but you can understand his need to speak out a bit when the entry in his father’s journal for the day of his birth reads, 'E. delivered of a son. Received green swallow from Jamaica'.
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Outstanding
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'Father and Son' is his account of his childhood and his gradual questioning of the fundamentalist religion of his parents. All of which might make this book sound like a misery memoir, and yet nothing could be further from the truth. This is a charming, fascinating and insightful account of Victorian life in the mid-18th century with numerous wonderful little details.
'Father and Son' is subtitled “A Study of Two Temperaments” and this signals the approach of Edmund Gosse. He retained enormous respect and affection for his father but ultimately there was to be no way for the different personalities to be true to themselves and reconcile their differences.
It's beautifully written and, as I suggest, absolutely riveting, complete with numerous funny and idiosyncratic memories from a childhood spent both in Islington and, from around age 6, in Ilfracombe in Devon, then, as now, a small and sleepy backwater.
I listened to Father and Son (1907) narrated by the peerless Geoffrey Palmer, and courtesy of Audible. Incredibly, this wonderful experience only set me back three British pounds. What a bargain. It's a wonderful book.
5/5
Beautifully written and absolutely riveting
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Born into a family of eminent Plymouth Brethren he is, from birth, relentlessly conditioned to believe himself to be one of the elect by loving but narrowly overbearing parents. Alienated from his peers by a perceived, inherited, elevated status, he spends his young life tottering on the edge of a nervous breakdown as he strives to make sense of a world defined by rigid dogma coupled with a pious lack of imagination. Indeed, growing up in a house where any work of literary fiction is condemned as a wilful act of deceit he is condemned to grow in a cultural, social and existential vacuum.
When his mother dies of cancer he is left in the care of his grieving Zoologist father who is going through his own crisis as he strives to develop a theory to disprove the teachings of Darwin.
There is early rebellion when young Edmund wilfully worships a chair (a wooden idol) only to find that a wrathful God does not strike him down as he's been led to believe. There is an almost messianic pride when, at his father's prompting, he is elevated to become one of the elect (a position reserved only for adults) while still a mere child. There is confusion and wonder when he discovers the mystical power of poetry which further erodes the vice like grip of his fathers religious dogma.
At the age of sixteen he finds himself 'still but a bird fluttering in the network of my fathers will and incapable of the smallest independent action' and slowly realizing that he and his father 'walked in opposite hemispheres of the soul with the thick of the world between us.'
This is a beautiful, sometimes wryly funny - but immensely sad childhood reflection, written without a hint of self pity. It tenderly evokes a world long gone through the eyes of a sensitive child in an impossible situation. It is, above all, the testimony of a butterfly pinned to a page in his father's book, gradually understanding the nature of his dilemma and struggling to fly free from his father's page.
Geoffrey Palmer's narration is faultless.
One of the great Autobiographies.
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Wonderful reading of a tender and funny memoir
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Gosse writes about his relationship with his brethren minister father and mother. In ~1857 his mother dies when he still a young child, and the book concludes when he is a young man trying to break away from his overweening father. Fascinating detail with some humour.
Enjoyed a lot
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