'Father and Son' Summary

As Michael Newton, Lecturer in English, University College London, has written, the book is "a brilliant, and often comic, record of the small diplomacies of home: those indirections, omissions, insincerities, and secrecies that underlie family relationships." "Brilliantly written, and full of gentle wit," the book is "an unmatched social document, preserving for us whole the experience of childhood in a Protestant sect in the Victorian period. Above all, it is one of our best accounts of adolescence, particularly for those who endured...a religious upbringing." 

Although Edmund Gosse prefaces the book with the claim that the incidents described are sober reality, a modern biography of Philip Henry Gosse by Ann Thwaite presents him not as a repressive tyrant who cruelly scrutinized the state of his son's soul but as a gentle and thoughtful person of "delicacy and inner warmth," much unlike his son's portrait. Biographer and critic D. J. Taylor described Gosse's own portrayal of his father as "horribly partial" and noted that, in Thwaite's work, "the supposedly sequestered, melancholic pattern of Edmund Gosse's London and Devonshire childhood is repeatedly proved to have contained great affection, friends, fun and even light reading."