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Edmund Gosse
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Sir Edmund William Gosse C.B. (21 September 1849 – 16 May 1928) was an English poet, author and critic, the son of Philip Henry Gosse and Emily Bowes.
nd's mother, Emily, a writer of popular Christian tracts, died when he was seven years old, leaving Edmund and his father as close companions during his early years. Philip Gosse remarried in 1860, and he became close to his stepmother also.
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Encyclopedia
Sir Edmund William Gosse C.B. (21 September 1849 – 16 May 1928) was an English poet, author and critic, the son of Philip Henry Gosse and Emily Bowes.
Early life
Edmund's mother, Emily, a writer of popular Christian tracts, died when he was seven years old, leaving Edmund and his father as close companions during his early years. Philip Gosse remarried in 1860, and he became close to his stepmother also. The strict religious upbringing Edmund experienced in his early years did not make a lasting impression.
Career
On moving to London (as depicted at the close of his autobiography, Father and Son), Gosse took up lodgings in Tottenham after his father had organised these for him. During this time he attended the Plymouth Brethren meeting house Brook Street Chapel, Tottenham, where he spent a number of years as a Sunday School teacher. He worked as assistant librarian at the British Museum from 1867, and in 1875 became a translator at the Board of Trade, a post which he held until 1904. 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. 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.
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.
Works
Published verse
- Madrigals, Songs, and Sonnets (1870), co-author John Arthur Blaikie
- On Viol and Flute (1873)
- King Erik (1876)
- New Poems (1879)
- Firdausi in Exile (1885)
- In Russet and Silver (1894)
- Collected Poems (1896)
- 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
- English Odes (1881)
- Seventeenth Century Studies (1883)
- Life of William Congreve (1888)
- 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.
- French Profiles (1905)
Autobiography
Popular culture
External links
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