Philip Henry Gosse
Philip Henry Gosse FRS (/ɡɒs/; 6 April 1810 – 23 August 1888), known to his friends as Henry,[1] was an English naturalist and populariser of natural science, an early improver of the seawater aquarium, and a painstaking innovator in the study of marine biology. Gosse created and stocked the first public aquarium at the London Zoo in 1853, and coined the term "aquarium" when he published the first manual, The Aquarium: An Unveiling of the Wonders of the Deep Sea, in 1854. His work was the catalyst for an aquarium craze in early Victorian England.[2]
Philip Henry Gosse
6 April 1810
23 August 1888 (aged 78)
Marine biology, aquarium pioneer, Omphalos ("last Thursdayism")
Gosse
Gosse was also the author of Omphalos, an attempt to reconcile the geological ages presupposed by Charles Lyell with the biblical account of creation. After his death, Gosse was portrayed as an overbearing father of uncompromising religious views in Father and Son (1907), a memoir written by his son, Edmund Gosse, a poet and critic,[3] although it has since been said that "Gosse’s testimony concerning his father falls short".[4]
Early life[edit]
Philip Henry Gosse was born in Worcester in 1810, second of four children of Thomas Gosse (1765-1844), a mezzotint engraver and itinerant painter of miniature portraits, and Hannah (née Best), a lady's maid before her marriage. He spent his childhood mostly in Poole, Dorset, where his aunt, Susan Bell, taught him to draw and introduced him to zoology. She had similarly taught her own son, Thomas Bell, who was 18 years older and later became a great friend to Gosse.[5][6]
At 15, he began work as a clerk in the counting house of George Garland and Sons in Poole. In 1827 he sailed to Newfoundland to serve as a clerk in the Carbonear premises of Slade, Elson and Co. There he became a dedicated, self-taught student of Newfoundland entomology, "the first person systematically to investigate and to record the entomology" of the island.[7] While living in Carbonear, he wrote and illustrated an "exquisite" volume, never published, the "Entomologia Terra Novae".[8] In 1832 Gosse experienced a religious conversion and, as he described it, "solemnly, deliberately and uprightly, took God for my God."[9]
In 1835 he left Newfoundland for Compton, Lower Canada (Quebec), where he farmed unsuccessfully for three years. He originally tried to establish a commune with two of his religious friends. The experience deepened his love for natural history, and locals referred to him as "that crazy Englishman who goes about picking up bugs."[10] During this time he became a member of the Natural History Society of Montreal and submitted specimens to its museum.[11]
In 1838 Gosse taught for eight months for Reuben Saffold, the owner of Belvoir plantation, near Pleasant Hill, Alabama.[12] In this period, planters often hired private tutors to teach their children. Gosse also studied and drew the local flora and fauna, assembling an unpublished volume, Entomologia Alabamensis, on insect life in the state.[13] The cotton plantation was in the Black Belt of Alabama, and Saffold held numerous enslaved labourers. Gosse recorded his negative impressions of slavery, later published as Letters from Alabama (1859).[14]
Omphalos[edit]
In the months following Emily's death, Gosse worked with remarkable diligence on a book that he may have viewed as the most important of his career. Although a failure both financially and intellectually, it is the book by which he is best remembered.[37] Gosse believed that he had discovered a theory that might neatly resolve the seeming contradiction in the age of the earth between the evidence of God's Word and the evidence of His creation as expounded by such contemporary geologists as Charles Lyell.[38] In 1857, two years before the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, Gosse published Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot and thereby created what has been called the Omphalos hypothesis.
In what Stephen Jay Gould has called "gloriously purple prose",[39] Gosse argued that if one assumed creation ex nihilo, there would necessarily be traces of previous existence that had never actually occurred. "Omphalos" is Greek for "navel", and Gosse argued that the first man, Adam, did not require a navel because he was never born; nevertheless he must have had one, as do all complete human beings, just as God must have created trees with rings that they never grew.[40] Thus, Gosse argued that the fossil record—even coprolites—might also be evidence of life that had never actually existed but that may have been instantly formed by God at the moment of creation.[41]
The general response was "as the Westminster Review put it, that Gosse's theory was 'too monstrous for belief.'" Even his friend, the novelist Charles Kingsley, wrote that he had read "no other book which so staggered and puzzled" him, that he could not believe that God had "written on the rocks one enormous and superfluous lie for all mankind."[42] Journalists later sniggered that God had apparently hidden fossils in the rocks to tempt geologists to infidelity.[43]
Omphalos sold poorly and was eventually rebound with a new title, Creation, "in case the obscure one had had an effect on sales." The problem was not with the title. In 1869 most of the edition was sold as waste paper.[44]
Father and Son[edit]
After his father's death, Edmund Gosse published a typical Victorian biography, The Life of Philip Henry Gosse (1890). After reading it, the writer George Moore suggested to Edmund that it contained "the germ of a great book." Edmund Gosse revised his material and first published his notable memoir anonymously as Father and Son in 1907. It has never gone out of print.[62] The reaction of readers to Henry's personality and character, as represented in Father and Son, has included phrases such as "scientific crackpot", "bible-soaked romantic", "a stern and repressive father", and a "pulpit-thumping Puritan throwback to the seventeenth century".[63]
A modern editor of Father and Son has rejected this portrait of Philip Henry Gosse, on the grounds that his own "writings reveal a genuinely sweet character."[64] Ann Thwaite, the biographer of both Gosses, has established just how inaccurate Edmund's recollections of his childhood were. Henry James remarked that Edmund Gosse had "a genius for inaccuracy".[65] Although Edmund went out of his way to declare that the story of Father and Son was "scrupulously true," Thwaite cites a dozen occasions on which either Edmund's "memory betray[ed] him (he admitted it was 'like a colander')", or he "changed things deliberately to make a better story."[66] Thwaite argues that Edmund could only preserve his self-respect, in comparison to his father's superior abilities, by demolishing the latter's character.[67] Nearly a century after Gosse’s death, a study based on his published remarks and writings about his father concluded that in varying degrees, they are “riddled with error, distortion, contradictions, unwarranted claims, misrepresentation, abuse of the written record, and unfamiliarity with the subject."[4]
In popular culture[edit]
Dennis Potter adapted Father and Son as the television play Where Adam Stood, first broadcast on BBC One in 1976. Gosse was played by Alan Badel.
Father and Son was also adapted for BBC Radio 4 in 2005 by Nick Warburton. Roger Allam played Gosse and Derek Jacobi played Edmund.
Ann Lingard's novel Seaside Pleasures (2014) explores the relationship between Gosse and his wife Emily from the point of view of a female student in his shore-class.
Commemoration[edit]
In 2021, a blue plaque was placed at Poole United Reformed Church where Gosse worshipped as a young boy. In November 2022, a sea-life mural dedicated to Gosse was unveiled in Poole Town Centre.[68]
