Edmund Gosse Collection (VMF065), 1892-1912 | MSS Manuscripts

Gosse, Edmund (1849-1928)

Sir Edmund William Gosse (September 21, 1849 – May 16, 1928) was an English poet, author and critic.  He started his career as assistant librarian at the British Museum from 1867. An early book of poetry published with a friend John Arthur Blaikie gave him an introduction to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Trips to Denmark and Norway in 1872–74, where he visited Hans Christian Andersen and Frederik Paludan-Müller, led to publishing success with reviews of Ibsen and Bjørnson in the Cornhill Magazine. He was soon reviewing Scandinavian literature in a variety of publications.

In the meantime, he published his first solo volume of poetry, On Viol and Flute (1873) and a work of criticism, Studies in the Literature of Northern Europe (1879). In 1875, Gosse became a translator at the Board of Trade, a post which he held until 1904 and gave him time for his writing and enabled him to marry and start a family.

From 1884 to 1890, Gosse lectured in English literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, despite his own lack of academic qualifications. Cambridge University gave him an honorary MA in 1886, and Trinity College formally admitted him as a member, 'by order of the Council', in 1889. He made a successful American lecture tour in 1884 and was in much demand as a speaker and on committees as well as publishing a string of critical works as well as poetry and histories.

He became, in the 1880s, one of the most important art critics dealing with sculpture (writing mainly for the Saturday Review). Gosse would eventually write the first history of the renaissance of late-Victorian sculpture in 1894 in a four-part series for the Art Journal, dubbing the movement the New Sculpture.

In 1904, he became the librarian of the House of Lords Library, where he exercised considerable influence till he retired in 1914. He wrote for the Sunday Times, and was an expert on Thomas Gray, William Congreve, John Donne, Jeremy Taylor, and Coventry Patmore. He can also take credit for introducing Ibsen's work to the British public. Gosse and William Archer collaborated in translating Hedda Gabler and The Master Builder; those two translations were performed throughout the 20th century.

His most famous book is the autobiographical Father and Son, about his troubled relationship with his Plymouth Brethren father, Philip. Published anonymously in 1907, this followed a biography he had written of his father as naturalist, when he was urged by George Moore among others to write more about his own part. Historians caution, though, that notwithstanding its psychological insight and literary excellence, Gosse's narrative is often at odds with the verifiable facts of his own and his parents' lives.