Father and Son

Father and Son is a memoir by poet Edmund Gosse, which he subtitled "a study of two temperaments." The book describes Edmund's early years in a Plymouth Brethren home. His father, Philip Henry Gosse, was an influential, though largely self-taught, invertebrate zoologist and student of marine biology who, after his wife's death, took Edmund to live in Devon. The book focuses on the father's response to the new evolutionary theories, and Edmund's gradual rejection of both his father and his father's fundamentalist religion.