Page "Philip Henry Gosse" Paragraph 30

Even a modern editor of Father and Son has rejected this portrait of Philip Henry Gosse on the grounds that his " writings reveal a genuinely sweet character.

" The biographer of both Gosses, Ann Thwaite, has established just how inaccurate Edmund's recollections of his childhood were, that Edmund indeed, as Henry James remarked, had " a genius for inaccuracy.

" Although Edmund went out of his way to declare that the story of Father and Son was " scrupulously true ," Thwaite cites a dozen occasions on which either Edmund's " memory betray him — he admitted it was ' like a colander '"— or he " changed things deliberately to make a better story.

" Thwaite argues that Edmund could only preserve his self-respect, in comparison to his father's superior abilities, by demolishing the latter's character.