Philip Henry Gosse

Abstract

THE second son of Thomas and Hannah Gosse, Philip Henry, was born in Worcester on April 6, 1810, A couple of years afterwards his parents went to reside at Poole, where Philip Henry's love for natural history appears to have been very early awakened. From his Aunt Bell he learned of the metamorphosis of insects, the name of our common red sea anemone, and she even suggested to the boy that he should try to keep sea anemones alive in vessels of fresh sea-water; this Aunt Bell was the mother of the well-known Prof. Thomas Bell, the the latter of whom was some eighteen years Gosse's senior. Thomas and Hannah Gosse belonged to two different orders of being. From a physical standpoint, we read of the father that he was a grey and withered man, who never smiled, who had no push in him, no ambition, and no energy; while the mother was a very handsome and powerfully built woman, with a pastoral richness of nature, like a Sicilian shepherdess of the olden times. Both parents did their duty, each after their light, to each other and to their offspring; but the artist father, the at one time pupil of Sir Joshua Reynolds, the man who had stored up in his brain masses of artistic and literary information, the man of pure conduct and pious habits, met with but little sympathy and but little appreciation from his splendid wife, and yet we read that he died in his eightieth year “entirely tranquil.” This mother, too, was a good mother; she looked well after the education of her children, and the aptitude for learning which her second son, Philip Henry, showed, induced her to make peculiar sacrifices for his advantage, so that in 1823 she got him admitted into the Blandford School, where he acquired a fair knowledge of the rudiments of both Latin and Greek.

The Life of Philip Henry Gosse, F.R.S.

By his son, Edmund Gosse of Trinity College, Cambridge. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, and Co., Ltd., 1890.)

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