His father, Philip Henry Gosse, was an influential and largely self-taught invertebrate zoologist and student of marine biology who, after his wife's death, took Edmund to live in Devon.

[2] Michael Newton, a Lecturer in English at University College, London, has called the book "a brilliant, and often comic, record of the small diplomacies of home: those indirections, omissions, insincerities, and secrecies that underlie family relationships".

"[B]rilliantly written, and full of gentle wit," the book is "an unmatched social document, preserving for us whole the experience of childhood in a Protestant sect in the Victorian period.

[8] A bibliographical description of the editions and impressions of the book (sixty-two in all) includes information on translations into Arabic, French, German, Italian, Japanese (partial), Spanish and Swedish.

[9] Source: Library of Congress Dennis Potter said this book inspired his 1976 television drama Where Adam Stood, starring Alan Badel as Philip Gosse.