Sir Edmund William Gosse CB (21 September 1849 – 16 May 1928) was an English
poet, author and critic; the son of
Philip Henry Gosse and
Emily Bowes.
Career
Gosse worked as assistant librarian at the
British Museum from 1867 alongside the songwriter
Theo Marzials, and in 1875 became a translator at the
Board of Trade, a post which he held until 1904. From 1904 to 1914 he was chief Librarian of the
House of Lords Library. In the meantime, he published his first volume of poetry,
On Viol and Flute (1873) and a work of criticism,
Studies in the Literature of Northern Europe (1879). Gosse and
Robert Louis Stevenson first met while teenagers, and after 1879, when Stevenson came to London on occasion, he would stay with Gosse and his family. He became acquainted with the
pre-Raphaelites, and with
Thomas Hardy,
Alfred Lord Tennyson and
Algernon Swinburne.
He became, in the 1880s, one of the most important art critics dealing with sculpture (writing mainly for the
Saturday Review) with an interest spurred on by his intimate friendship with the sculptor
Hamo Thornycroft. Gosse would eventually write the first history of the renaissance of late-Victorian sculpture in 1894 in a four-part series for the
Art Journal, dubbing the movement the
New Sculpture.
From 1884 to 1890 Gosse lectured in English literature at
Trinity College, Cambridge, despite his own lack of academic qualifications.
Cambridge University gave him an honorary MA in 1886, and Trinity College formally admitted him as a member, 'by order of the Council', in 1889. From 1904, he was librarian of the
House of Lords, where he exercised considerable influence. He wrote for the
Sunday Times, and was an expert on
Thomas Gray,
William Congreve,
John Donne,
Jeremy Taylor, and
Coventry Patmore. He can also take credit for introducing
Ibsen's work to the British public. Gosse and
William Archer collaborated in translating
Hedda Gabler and
The Master Builder; those two translations were performed throughout the 20th century. Gosse and Archer, along with
Shaw, were perhaps the literary critics most responsible for popularising Ibsen's plays among English-speaking audiences.
His most famous book is the
autobiographical Father and Son, about his troubled relationship with his
Plymouth Brethren father, Philip, which was dramatised for
television by
Dennis Potter. Historians caution, though, that notwithstanding its literary excellence, Gosse's narrative is often at odds with the verifiable facts of his own and his parents' lives. In later life, he became a formative influence on
Siegfried Sassoon, the nephew of his lifelong friend, Hamo Thornycroft. Sassoon's mother was a friend of Gosse's wife, Ellen. Gosse was also closely tied to figures such as
Algernon Charles Swinburne,
John Addington Symonds, and
André Gide.
After Gosse's mother died of breast cancer, his father married in 1860 the deeply religious Quaker spinster Eliza Brightwen (1813-1900), whose brother Thomas tried to encourage Edmund to become a banker and whose brother George was the husband of Eliza Elder Brightwen (1830- 1906), a naturalist and author, whose first book was published in 1871. After Eliza Elder Brightwen's death, Edmund Gosse arranged fot the publication of her two posthumous works
Last Hours with Nature (1908) and
Eliza Brightwen, the Life and Thoughts of a Naturalist (1909), both edited by W. H. Chesson, and the latter book with an introduction and epilogue by Gosse.
Works
Published verse
- In Russet and Silver (1894)
- Hypolympia, or the Gods on the Island (1901), an "ironic phantasy," the scene of which is laid in the 20th century, though the personages are Greek gods, is written in prose, with some blank verse.
Critical works
- Seventeenth Century Studies (1883)
- The Jacobean Poets (1894)
- Life and Letters of Dr John Donne, Dean of St Paul's (1899)
- Jeremy Taylor (1904, "English Men of Letters")
- Life of Sir Thomas Browne (1905)
- Life of Thomas Gray, whose works he edited (4 vols., 1884)
- A History of Eighteenth Century Literature (1889)
- History of Modern English Literature (1897)
- Vols. iii. and iv. of an Illustrated Record of English Literature (1903-1904) undertaken in connection with Dr Richard Garnett.
Autobiography
Popular culture
