Thursday, February 16th 2012
I have just finished reading a book which interested me greatly. Given that, although it is available in copyright-free ebook versions, the book can also be bought in a variety of paper editions, I deduce that many other readers have found it as gripping as I did.
Cutting to the chase, the book in question is Father and Son: a study of two temperaments by Edmund William Gosse. The author, the son of naturalist Henry Philip Gosse and his first wife Emily Bowes, lived from 1849 to 1928 and was knighted for his services to letters in 1925. A poet and critic, Edmund held a number of posts including librarian work (at the British Museum and, later, the House of Lords), lecturer (Trinity College, Cambridge) and translator for the Board of Trade. While his critical works on literature and writers are not much read today, his autobiographical memoir, Father and Son, published in 1907 when the author was 58, continues to attract interest and is considered his major work by many.
Edmund’s parents were members of a religious persuasion known to themselves as the Brethren and often called the Plymouth Brethren by others. The book tells of his upbringing under the strict religious regime of the Brethren, the intense psychological pressure to which he was subjected because his parents early decided that his life was to be entirely dedicated to Christ, and how he was finally driven to rebel against his conditioning and escape to become his own man.
Slight as the story is, the psychological stress creates a continuing dramatic tension which carries the reader through the whole work to its abrupt conclusion.
The book had special relevance to me because in my teens I associated with a group of Plymouth Brethren and was a full and committed member of the church’s youth group. I have already alluded to that period of my life in two posts, To be an atheist… and Remembering the Brethren.
My experiences came nowhere near to being as traumatizing as Edmund’s. In fact, as I made clear in my posts, I enjoyed my time with the Brethren, whom I found to be tolerant and kindly folk. Perhaps I was lucky to happen upon such a friendly bunch because one does hear of people suffering very different experiences in other cases.
Looking back, I can say that, like Edmund, I was too drawn into a state of what might be called “ultra-religiosity” though, in my case, this was achieved by my willingness to be part of a group of people whom I liked and admired, and not by coercion and regimentation as in the case of the author of Father and Son. Likewise, I was eventually driven to break from the group when the very intensity of the experience became counter-productive and made me realize that this kind of life was not for me.
Please understand that I am not trying to say that my experience was anything like that of Edmund Gosse. I merely frequented the foothills of his mountain, so to speak, but it did give me insight into the life that he describes, the thinking that drove his father, the awful narrowness of vision evinced by the latter and the demands made on both father and son by the father’s position as leader of the religious community to which they belonged and role as self-appointed saviour of lost souls.
Certain factors make the author and his book remarkable. First is the unusual intelligence and skill of self-analysis evinced by the boy from an early age. Second, his sensitivity to life and the world around him and his later fascination with books and literature. Third, his remarkable memory that enables him not only to remember important events in his childhood but also the order in which they occurred and, with reasonable accuracy, his age at the time when they occurred. One reference that I read suggested that the account was not entirely truthful. I do not know what the writer meant by that but what I can say is that, whether or not all the events are recounted with with strictest accuracy, the book is so persuasive that I feel we can say that as a whole it is true.
There can be few books that illustrate so well the emotional and psychological damage that is done to children by being brought up under a strict religious regime. The percentage of those who break away from its conditioning and regain some sort of a life of their own must be small, while the percentage of those who escape without being marked in some way for the rest of their lives is probably so small as to be virtually zero. (While I myself broke away from my religious conditioning, I would say I am one those who remain in some sense marked by it, if only by a hostility to all forms of irrational belief.)
Two things, it seems to me, proved to be the saving grace of Edmund Gosse. The first was his remarkable intelligence, already noted, and the second was the endless and obsessive sermonizing and catechising to which his father – with the best intentions in the world – continually subjected him and which, finally, produced revulsion and rejection and thereby, independence of thought.
I don’t doubt that while unbelievers like me will see the father’s ultimate failure as the son’s triumphal escape, at least some religious believers will see it as another sort of failure, that of a well-intentioned but inept apostle clumsily provoking a soul to turn its back on grace and salvation.
The book is well written. The story never loses interest, never becomes boring, despite the minuteness of the detail. The language shows its origins in 19th century stylistics but within that is vigorous, clear, elegant and at times poetic. It is a pleasure to read and conveys, to me at least, utter conviction.
If you would like to read this book yourself, a quick look at Amazon with show that it is easily available in moderately priced paper editions, and if you have an ereader you can obtain it free in ebook form from Project Gutenberg and from Amazon’s Kindle store.
More details of the life of Edmund Gosse can be obtained from sites such as the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Wikipedia and Spartacus Educational and many more.
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