Book description
'This book is the record of a struggle between two temperaments, two consciences and almost two epochs.'
Father and Son stands as one of English literature's seminal autobiographies. In it Edmund Gosse recounts, with humour and pathos, his childhood as a member of a Victorian Protestant sect and his struggles…
Why read it?
1 author picked Father and Son as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
I loved this book because it ties in with an obsession of mine, the interface between modernity and the past.
It is the autobiography of Edmund Gosse, who grew up with strict, devout parents (even by mid-19th-century standards). However, the father was a biologist just at the time Darwin’s Origin of Species was published. I was intrigued by Gosse’s growing awareness that his parents’ worldview was so out of sync with the times, just as I was fascinated by the father’s anguish as his faith pulled him one way and his reason another.
Gosse’s description of the passing of a…
From Nicholas' list on to understand (and survive) modernity.
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