Sir Edmund Gosse: An Annotated Bibliography of Writings About Him

126 SIR EDMUND GOSSE: AN ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WRITINGS ABOUT HIM By James D. Woolf (Indiana University, Fort Wayne) Introduction For biographical information on Sir Edmund Gosse, one may turn to the annotations of writings by Evan Charteris, the critic's chief biographer. However, an introduction to salient events in the literary career of Gosse, abundant details about which may also be found in the annotations, should be useful to the reader. The change from the Puritan-oriented culture of his youth to a literary -oriented one, which occurred between his twentieth and twentythird years (about 1870 to 1873), is the most climactic event in his career; psychological, cultural, and literary factors involved in the evolution are expressed best by Gosse himself in the autobiographical parts of Father and Son (1907). From associations with Pre-Raphaelite-inspired young men with whom he worked In the British Kuseum and from admiration for Swinburne, Rossetti, and Morris, Gosse probably was motivated to become a poet (Walter Pater Judged him an excellent secondary poet of the period). Although he belongs historically with the School of Lang of the 1870's, a branch of the Pre-Raphaelltes, his concern with the religion-science conflict makes his poetry of central importance , as George Salntsbury points out. His practice as a poet was nearly over by the 1890*s, but his practice as a critic, which also began in the 1870*s, prevailed to the end of his life. As a critic, Gosse belongs with a group of late Victorian practitioners who centered around Pater and who were inspired importantly by French criticism. In Gosse's career as critic, his tenure of duty as Clark Lecturer at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 188^ to 1889, was a turning point. In such a position, his lack of formal university training and the cultural deprivations of the Puritan environment of his youth were definite handicaps. At any rate, the literary critic Churton Collins, envious of Gosse's newly-won position, attacked him for professorial incompetency; but the Collins scourge (he had previously attacked Tennyson, Swinburne, and Symonds!) was destined to become a maturing experience. Subsequently, Gosse became more careful with literary data and more wary of his competitors (T. Earle Welby shows astute Insight into the psychology of Gosse at this Juncture). With his Life of Donne (1899), Gosse earned an important place in the history ofEnglish criticism as initiator of the vogue of the Modern Donne; Grosart had laid the foundation with his edition of Donne's poetry in the 1870*s; and Grierson got the vogue fully under way with his famous edition of 1912. In 1907, Gosse published , according to general critical opinion, his best work Father and Son, a biography of his father interwoven with auto- 127 biography; the book places him with Froude and Strachey as important innovators in biosraphy and exhibits him as an astute analyst of the mid-Victorian conflict of relisrion and science. As prospective biographer of Swinburne, Gosse had much business association with Thomas J. Wise, the book dealer, who purchased the Swinburne manuscripts at the poet's death in 1909. As early as the 1890's, when Gosse wrote an essay on Krs. Brownino·, he had associations with Wise, the manuscript fabricator. But records and judgments of experts and scholars - John Carter, Graham Pollard, Wilfred Partington, Vi. G, Raymond - sucff-est that Gosse was innocent of complicity with Wise: the critic was enthusiastic for literary history and criticism; the book dealer operated from less noble motives. Gosse's Life of Swinburne (1917) is a literary landmark and a hisrh point in his career. From about I9I8 to his death in I928, he was an eminently popular literary critic and especially noted as a master of the journalistic causerie. In the annotations, I have used the abbreviations EG for Edmund Gosse and 'easily recognizable partial titles for Gosse's works (es-, Father for Father and Son, Gossip for Gossip in a Library, Diversions for Diversions of a Kan of Letters, Leaves for Leaves and Fruit, Russet for In Russet and Silver). I wish to thank the Head Librarian and the Reference Librarian at Memphis State University for obtaining documents for...