Edmund Gosse

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Edmund Gosse (1886), portrait John Singer Sargent

Sir Edmund William Gosse (born September 21, 1849 in London , England ; † May 16, 1928 there ) was an influential British literary historian , writer and critic . He was in the 1925 knighthood raised.

Life

Edmund Gosse was the only child of the naturalist Philip Henry Gosse . He grew up in a strictly religious household. After the early death of his mother, his father sent him at the age of eight years in a boarding school near Torquay ( county Devon ). There Gosses interest in literature developed. At the age of 18, he broke away from his father's influence.

In 1865 Gosse got a job as a library worker at the British Museum Library . He carried out this activity until 1875. Between 1872 and 1874 Gosse made several trips to Denmark and Norway, during which he met Frederik Paludan-Müller and Hans Christian Andersen . In the following years he translated Scandinavian literature into English, especially works by Henrik Ibsen . In 1875, Gosse became a translator for the government department's Board of Trade ; a well-paid job that he did for 30 years and that gave him time for his writing.

Gosse taught English literature at Trinity College (Cambridge) from 1885 to 1890 . In 1884 he made a successful lecture tour through the USA and was very popular as a speaker and as a member of various committees. Between 1904 and 1914 Gosse was chief librarian at the House of Lords Library . In 1922 he took over the vice-presidency of the world's largest independent lending library, the London Library .

Among other things, he wrote regularly for the Sunday Times . Together with William Archer and Bernard Shaw , Gosse wrote probably most of the literary reviews of this time in the English-speaking world. He supported young authors, for example the two Irish writers William Butler Yeats (1910) and James Joyce (1915), who were only able to continue their careers with his financial help. The promotion of young British writers he continued from 1918 as a jury member in the committee for the award of the Hawthornden Prize .

Gosse is considered one of the most prolific and influential figures in English literature of the late Victorian and Edwardian ages . He worked in various genres - as a poet, playwright, translator, biographer, essayist , critic, literary historian and bibliophile . The autobiographical novel Father and Son (1907) is one of his best-known works today . In it he describes his growing resistance to the religious expectations of his father, who rejected the new evolution theories of his scientific colleague Charles Darwin , and the fundamentalist contradictions of the Victorian era.

Furthermore, Edmund Gosse was the literary editor of the Encyclopædia Britannica (1911). With 40,000 entries, this 11th edition is now in the public domain in the Anglo-American region and serves in particular as a basis for many articles on the English-language Wikipedia and as an often-cited source .

Private

As a teenager , Edmund Gosse was a close friend of Robert Louis Stevenson , who from 1879 always lived in the house of the Gosse family during his stays in London. In addition, Gosse cultivated personal friendships with:

In later life he maintained close contacts with Siegfried Sassoon , the nephew of his lifelong friend Hamo Thornycroft . Although Gosse, by his own admission, felt drawn to men throughout his life, he had been married to Ellen Epps (1850–1929) since 1875. In 1907 his wife inherited a sizable fortune from her uncle James Epps, a successful cocoa producer. Gosse described his 50-year marriage, which resulted in three children, as happy regardless of his homosexual tendencies.

Awards (selection)

literature

  • Arthur Christopher Benson : The Poetry of Edmund Gosse. In: Essays. William Heinemann, 1896, pp. 292-309.
  • Ann Thwaite: Edmund Gosse. A Literary Landscape, 1849-1928. Oxford Paperbacks, 1985.

Left

Commons : Edmund Gosse  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Sir Edmund Gosse Encyclopaedia Britannica, accessed January 28, 2019
  2. ^ Edmund Gosse Oxford Bibliographies, accessed January 28, 2019
  3. ↑ Gillian Thomas: A Position to Command Respect. Women and the Eleventh Britannica. Scarecrow Press, 1992, p. 3.
  4. ↑ Denis Boyles: Everything Explained That Is Explainable. On the Creation of the Encyclopaedia Britannica's Celebrated Eleventh Edition, 1910-1911. Knopf, 2016, Prologue, pp. X – xi.
  5. ↑ Ann Thwaite: Edmund Gosse. A Literary Landscape, 1849-1928. Oxford Paperbacks, 1985.
  6. ↑ Nicholas C. Edsal: Toward Stonewall. Homosexuality and Society in the Modern Western World. University of Virginia Press, 2003, p. 106.
  7. ^ Robert Aldrich, Garry Wotherspoon: Who's who in Gay and Lesbian History. From Antiquity to World War II. Psychology Press, 2002, p. 222.
  8. ^ Gosse, Edmund William . In: John Archibald Venn (Ed.): Alumni Cantabrigienses . A Biographical List of All Known Students, Graduates and Holders of Office at the University of Cambridge, from the Earliest Times to 1900. Part 2: From 1752 to 1900 , Volume 3 : Gabb – Justamond . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1947, pp. 98 ( venn.lib.cam.ac.uk Textarchiv - Internet Archive ).
personal data
SURNAME Gosse, Edmund
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Gosse, Sir Edmund William (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British literary historian, writer and critic
DATE OF BIRTH September 21, 1849
PLACE OF BIRTH London , England
DATE OF DEATH May 16, 1928
Place of death London , England