THE Oedipal dimension of the Edwardians’ reaction against their Victorian precursors is familiar territory. Alongside Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians are two classic expressions of inter-generational tension: Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh and Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son (1907). Victorian religious practices fare badly in all these books, and particularly the fundamentalist beliefs that shaped the life of Philip Henry Gosse FRS (1810-88), as described by his literary son Edmund, whose famous work was received as a true account of a sad relationship.
For most modern readers, it was Ann Thwaite’s lavishly illustrated life of “Henry” Gosse, Glimpses of the Wonderful (Faber, 2002), which turned the tables, portraying the David Attenborough of the 19th century as a loving father. Like Darwin, with whom he collaborated from time to time, Gosse pêre was an observer, always peering down his microscope.
Thwaite is also a close observer, having the gift of imagination which the best biographers share with novelists. She is amused and charmed by Gosse’s idiosyncrasies, as he wades chest-high into deep rock pools in Devon, fully clothed, or receives soggy marine specimens from the postmen, sent in by volunteers at his request. Fascinating as his many books are, her interest is in the man.
Thwaite was indebted to Douglas Wertheimer and R. B. Freeman for their bibliography of P. H. Gosse published in 1980. It allowed her to write “a book rather shorter than might otherwise have been the case” (387 pages). Wertheimer does not acknowledge Thwaite in his life of the naturalist, a rewriting of earlier work, now published by a network dedicated to work related to the “Brethren”, or simply “Christians”, as they called themselves in the early 19th century. On many of the book’s 716 pages there are as many words in the footnotes as in the main text. The Select Bibliography, printed in small type, like the footnotes, runs to 27 pages (Thwaite is listed).
Described on the cover as a biography and “the definitive account”, Wertheimer’s book is, in fact, an exhaustive documentary study on the mind of Gosse. As such, it works perfectly well, describing the scientist who spent two decades in the field in Newfoundland, Canada, Alabama, Jamaica, and Britain before rubbing shoulders with the scientific elite in London, inventing the aquarium, and thrilling his readers with beautifully illustrated books, such as a three-volume study on rotifera, microscopic aquatic animals.
A non-Darwinian scientist, he challenged the evolutionary theory on scientific grounds, contested the assumptions of uniformitarian geologists, and urged his Christian readers to join him in this rather than risk destroying their faith.
In an arresting opening chapter, Wertheimer takes us to Hackney one summer evening in 1843, when Gosse, a devout Methodist, joined a scripture reading group of Brethren. Gosse recorded that he “learned a great truth” that night, namely that the Heavenly Citizenship precluded a serious involvement in a citizenship of earth. At about the same date, he was one of an informal group of men who met in Room IV of the British Museum, the Insect Room.
Wertheimer’s argument is that, in the years after 1843, Gosse’s life was “dominated by the magnetic forces represented by the Hackney Brethren and the Bloomsbury naturalists”. From the one pole he drew his religious ideals — the place of sin and redemption, the “iron-clad faith in One Book”, the importance of evangelism and “the teaching of the Sure-Word of Prophecy” — while from the other came the stimulus for scientific field work and disciplined study.
Unlike Faraday, who kept his experiments separate from his Sandemanian observances, Gosse treated religion and science as inseparable. As one contemporary commentator put it, “we cannot detect where the one ends and the other begins, so beautifully are they woven together in his works.”
Gosse’s most notorious publication, now a laughing stock, is Omphalos (1857), a book which was ignored by reviewers who raved about his other works. When Adam, the first human, was created, he displayed a navel (omphalos), even though he had never been born. At some point, so the theory goes, matter had come into existence (and was not eternal) and species were unchanged through time (and had not evolved one from the other). Much theorising about the synchronic and the diachronic ensues. Fossils, he argued, had to be situated in the rocks, “not to puzzle the philosopher, but because they are inseparable from the condition of the world at the selected moment of irruption into its history”. “All organic nature moves in a circle,” he believed
Clearly, he should have stuck to his microscopic observations, but his faith would not let him. For those who want to know more about Gosse the scientist, Wertheimer is your man. As a self-proclaimed outsider, this “modern Orthodox” Jewish scholar also offers extended explanations of the doctrines that Gosse preached among the Brethren. But the spirituality of Gosse and his fellow Brethren finally eludes him.
Dr Wheeler is a former lay canon of Winchester Cathedral. His latest book is William Ewart Gladstone: The heart and soul of a statesman (OUP) (Books, 11 April).
Philip Henry Gosse: A biography
Douglas Wertheimer
Brethren Archivists and Historians Network £30*
(978-1-7391283-2-6)
*available from brethrenhistory.org
