Edmund Gosse

His translations of Henrik Ibsen helped to promote that playwright in England, and he encouraged the careers of Sarojini Naidu, Toru Dutt, W. B. Yeats and James Joyce.

[citation needed] His childhood was initially happy as they spent their summers in Devon, where his father was developing the ideas that gave rise to the craze for the marine aquarium.

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] Gosse started his career as assistant librarian at the British Museum from 1867 alongside the songwriter Theo Marzials,[5] a post which Charles Kingsley helped his father obtain for him.

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 Henrik Ibsen and Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson in the Cornhill Magazine.

He became acquainted with Alfred, Lord Tennyson and friends with Robert Browning, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Thomas Hardy and Henry James.

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[7] and enabled him to marry and start a family.

[8] He made a successful American lecture tour in 1884 and was much in 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) with an interest spurred on by his intimate friendship with the sculptor Hamo Thornycroft.

He wrote for the Sunday Times, and was an expert on Thomas Gray, William Congreve, John Donne, Jeremy Taylor, and Coventry Patmore.

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.

[6] They were married more than 53 years and they had three children: Emily Teresa ("Tessa") (1877-1951),[14] Philip Henry George (1879–1959) who became a physician (but is probably best known as the author of The Pirates' Who's Who (1924)[15][16]) and Laura Sylvia (1881-1968), who became a well-known painter.