On almost every page the reader is invited to sympathise with the fragile and tender feelings of a young boy who is denied any form of natural enjoyment, but is exhorted to prepare himself for Judgement Day. The son feels oppressed, lonely, burdened with anxiety and self-doubt, and he is denied the pleasures and innocence of a normal childhood. The father is a strict, authoritarian, and evangelical Christian who wishes to control and mould a son entirely in his own image. It’s sad because his story details the terrible struggle between two people who obviously love each other dearly, but in ways which are completely different and even antagonistic. It has the appearance of an autobiography, but author Edmund Gosse stresses more than once that it’s a ‘study of two temperaments’, by which he means the relationship between him and his father, Philip Gosse. A child pulled between religion, science, and poetryįather and Son (1907) is a profoundly sad book which details the struggle between religious belief and scientific rationalism in the middle of the nineteenth century.
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