Father and son : a study of two temperaments / by Edmund Gosse.

  • Edmund Gosse
Date:
1910
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Father and son : a study of two temperaments / by Edmund Gosse. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

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    able to express. Even now [at the age of twenty- nine], tho1 watched, prayed and striven against, that is still the sin that most easily besets me. It has hindered my prayers and prevented my improvement, and therefore has humbled me very much.” This is, surely, a very painful instance of the repression of an instinct. There seems to have been, in this case, a vocation such as is rarely heard, and still less often wilfully disregarded and silenced. Was my Mother intended by nature to be a novelist ? I have often thought so, and her talents and vigour of purpose, directed along the line which was ready to form “ the chief pleasure of her life,” could hardly have failed to conduct her to great success. She was a little younger than Bulwer Lytton, a little older than Mrs. Gaskell—but these are vain and trivial speculations ! My own state, however, was, I should think, almost unique among the children of cultivated parents. In consequence of the stern ordinance which I have described, not a single fiction was read or told to me during my infancy. The rapture of the child who delays the process of going to bed by cajoling “ a story ” out of his mother or his nurse, as he sits upon her knee, well tucked up, at the corner of the nursery fire— this was unknown to me. Never, in all my early childhood, did any one address to me the