Sir Edmund William Gosse

Sir Edmund William Gosse , 1849-1928, English biographer and critic. He was lecturer in English literature at Trinity College, Cambridge (1884-90) and librarian of the House of Lords (1904-14). Although he wrote with enthusiasm and wit, his scholarship was often inaccurate and thus much of his critical work has been superseded. He did, however, introduce English readers to Ibsen and other Scandinavian writers as well as to some modern French writers and painters. Among the many biographies he wrote were those of Gray (1882), Donne (1899), Sir Thomas Browne (1905), Ibsen (1907), Swinburne (1917), and Congreve (rev. ed. 1924). Father and Son (1907), his best work, describes his relationship with his father, Philip Henry Gosse (1810-88), an English naturalist and author of zoological works, whose biography Edmund had written (1890). Included among Edmund's several volumes of verse are On Viol and Flute (1873) and New Poems (1879). He was knighted in 1925.

Bibliography: See his essays on Scandinavian poetry and Studies in the Literature of Northern Europe (1879); his correspondence with A. Gide, 1904-28 (ed. by L. F. Brugmans, 1959); his diary, ed. by R. L. Peters and D. G. Halliburton (1966); biography by J. D. Woolf (1972).

Gosse, Sir Edmund William (1849–1928), the son of Philip Henry Gosse (1810–88), eminent zoologist and fanatical fundamentalist Christian, his relations with whom he describes in Father and Son (1907), his masterpiece. This is in Gosse's own words ‘the record of a struggle between two temperaments, two consciences and almost two epochs’. Gosse was a transcriber at the British Museum and in 1875 became a translator at the Board of Trade. He made early acquaintance with the Pre-Raphaelites. Much of his early critical work was devoted to Scandinavian literature and he was the first to introduce Ibsen's name to England. A successful lecture tour of America in 1884–5 was followed by Churton Collins's attack on his published lectures From Shakespeare to Pope, an indictment of his carelessness which shadowed the rest of his life. His books include lives of Gray (1882), Congreve (1888), P. H. Gosse (1890), Donne (1899), Jeremy Taylor (1904), Patmore (1905), Ibsen (1907), and Swinburne (1917), as well as collections of poems and critical essays. His close friends included Swinburne, R. L. Stevenson, H. James, and Hardy. From 1904 he was librarian of the House of Lords and exercised considerable power and influence.