The naturalist of the sea-shore; the life of Philip Henry Gosse

Front matter

(Sreat Xives & Events

ALFRED LORD TENNYSON

A STUDY OF HIS LIFE AND WORK

Preface

Although my father never made any direct reference to the subject, the condition of his papers left us without doubt that he had contemplated the probability of the publication of a memoir. We found that he had arranged his diaries, notes, and correspondence in strict order, and as though with a view to their use as biographical material. In 1868 he became greatly interested in all that reminded him of his early life. He paid a visit to the haunts of his childhood, he wrote to such persons as were likely to recall the events in which he was interested, and he amassed a great quantity of anecdotes and memoranda. As is usually the case with the autobiographies of elderly persons, his interest in the task dwindled when he had passed the period of childhood ; but it did not quite cease until it had reached the point where existing letters, and an unbroken series of diaries, took up and completed the tale. The biographer, therefore, has had the rather unusual good fortune of being evenly supplied with material, and of having no gaps to leap over.

The subject of this memoir was a man of very singular character. He was less in sympathy with the literary and scientific movement of our age than, perhaps, any writer or observer of equal distinction. It was very curious that a man should write a long series of popular books, and

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PREFACE.

should add in many directions to the sum of exact knowledge, and at the same time have so little in common with his contemporaries as my father had. I hope that in the course of this narrative the salient points of a remarkable mental constitution, of a peculiarly isolated mind, will be found to have been so illuminated as to permit the reader to form for himself a portrait of the man. I have not concealed or manipulated any of his peculiarities. My only endeavour has been to present my father as he was, and in so doing I have felt sure of his own approval. He utterly despised that species of modern biography which depicts what was a human being as though transformed into the tinted wax of a hairdresser’s block. He used to speak with strong contempt of “ goody-goody lives of good m en.’ He was careless of opinion, and he lived rigidly up to a private standard of his own. I have taken it to be the truest piety to represent him exactly as I knew him and have found him.

For various statements in the earlier pages I am indebted to the still unpublished autobiography of my grandfather, Mr. Thomas Gosse, and to the memory of my venerable uncle, Mr. William Gosse. Among those whom I have to thank for their kindness in helping me to produce this volume, I must mention two friends in particular, Mr. Francis Darwin, F.R.S., who has allowed me to print a number of very interesting letters from his father ; and Mr. Arthur E. Shipley, Fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge, who has very kindly revised the zoological portions of the text.

Appendix I.

Appendix II.

THE LIFE OF

PHILIP HENRY GOSSE, F.R.S.

Chapter I. Childhood

1810-1827.

ARLY in the spring of 1807 a middle-aged gentleman

-J— ' arrived in Worcester by the Bath coach, and proceeded to modest lodgings, where he was already well known and highly respected. He was a man of a somewhat rueful countenance, whose well-made, thread-bare clothes indicated at the same time a certain past quality and an obvious state of present impecuniosity. He was tall and thin, his hair was prematurely whitening above a dark complexion, and his grave and gentle features very rarely relaxed into a smile. The simple wallet which comprised all his worldly possessions contained, beside his slender store of clothes and necessaries, little except a Bible, and a Theocritus in Greek, which never quitted him, but formed, at the darkest moments of his career, a gate of instant exit from the hard facts of life into an idyllic world of glowing pastoral antiquity. His one other and most indispensable companion was a box, containing colours,

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THE LIFE OF PHILIP HENRY GOSSE.

a bundle of five brushes, and some leaves of ivory, for he was a perambulating miniature-painter.

This was Mr. Thomas Gosse, father of the subject and

grandfather of the writer of the present memoir. Born in

1765, he had been the eleventh of the twelve children of

William Gosse, a wealthy cloth manufacturer of Ringwood,

in Hampshire. The family had been leading citizens of

that town, and had always been engaged in the same

industry since the reign of Charles II., legend attributing

to the race a French origin, and an advent into England

at the Restoration. The name appears to have no direct

or recent relation with Goss, a frequent name in the west

of England ; but to mark kinship with the southern French /

family, from which Etienne Gosse, the author of Le Medisant , sprang at the close of the eighteenth century. Mr. William Gosse had been not a little of a local magnate, and had served, by virtue of some Welsh estates, as High Sheriff of Radnorshire. But the earliest introduction of machinery had struck heavily at the woollen manufacture, and he died in 1784, at the age of seventy, an impoverished though not a ruined man.

Of the divided remnant of the father’s fortune, Thomas Gosse had, by 1807, long spent the last penny of his trifling share. He had been trained, at his own passionate request, to be an artist, had worked at the schools of the Royal Academy under Sir Joshua Reynolds, and for twenty years had lived precariously as a mezzotint engraver, first under Anker Smith, A.R.A., then under William Ward, A.R.A., and at length independently. But he had no push in him, no ambition, and no energy. He was of a solitary and retiring disposition, and incapable of any business exertion. At last, in the summer of 1803, he had ceased to follow engraving. The fashion for mezzotints was everywhere on the decline, and their

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place was being taken by the highly finished miniatures on ivory of which Cosway had been the most famous executant in the previous generation. The fashion had now filtered down to the lower middle class, and it was become the practice for artists not of the highest rank to go round the country from town to town, staying long enough in each place to paint the heads of such clients as they met with. Thomas Gosse, who had worked under Edward Penny, R.A., had preserved something of the dry manner of that pupil of Hudson’s, but had learned from his own long practice in mezzotint engraving to draw with accuracy. Never inspired or in any way first-rate, his miniatures are nevertheless fairly accomplished, and the best of them possess a certain delicate charm of colour. But he had no introductions, he shrank with extreme timidity from any advertisement of himself, and during the first years of his new profession he sank lower and lower into the depths of genteel poverty. When he entered Worcester in 1807, the fortunes of the gentle, melancholy, unupbraiding man were at their nadir. He was in his forty-third year, and he was ready to despair of life.

In his perambulations he had several times visited the city of Worcester, for which he professed a special partiality. His particular patrons and friends were a Mr. and Mrs. Green, people of wealth and education, at whose table the miniature-painter, with his tags of Theocritus and his Parson Adams’ manner, was always welcome. On this occasion he met for the first time a fresh inmate of their establishment, a Miss Hannah Best, a very handsome and powerfully built girl of twenty-six, who occupied an ambiguous position, half lady’s-maid, half companion, in the Green household. The fact was that she had run away from her own home to escape the tyranny of her mother.

THE LIFE OF PHILIP HENRY GOSSE.

Her father, Philip Best, of Titton Brook, near Stourport, was a yeoman, who cultivated his paternal acres, and added to his income occasionally by working for hire under neighbouring farmers. His wife, the mother of Hannah Best, was a virago of a bygone type. She was a thorough shrew, who kept her children, and for that matter her husband, in wholesome awe of her tongue and hand. Even when her daughters were grown women, Mrs. Best would scruple not, when her temper was aroused, to whip off her high-heeled shoe and apply personal chastisement in no perfunctory fashion. It was while smarting under one of these humiliating inflictions that Hannah Best had fled to an asylum in the house of Mrs. Green, in Worcester.

The beauty, the strength, the pastoral richness of the nature of Hannah Best produced an instant and extraordinary effect on Thomas Gosse. She was one of his Sicilian shepherdesses come to life again. Theocritus himself seemed to have prophesied of this beautiful child of a race of neatherds. Like another daughter of Polybotas, she had but just come from piping to the reapers on the Titton farm. He fell violently in love, for the first time in his life. Hannah Best, when he proposed, was startled and repelled. This grey and withered man, who never smiled, without fortune, without prospects — what sort of husband was that for her ? But Mr. and Mrs. Green, glad perhaps to have an embarrassing knot thus opportunely cut, presented other views of the matter to her. He was a gentleman and a man of education, such as Hannah could not hope otherwise to secure ; he was a man of pure conduct and pious habits ; he would doubtless thrive when once her strength of purpose and practical good sense should supply a backbone to his character. Not enthusiastically, she consented to marry him, and after a fashion

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she learned to love him. Love or no love, she made for nearly forty years an ideal mainstay and central standard of his family life. They were married at the parish church of St. Nicholas, in the city of Worcester, on July 15, 1807.

He had taken to a nomadic life, and where he wandered she was bound to wander. They began a desperate flight from town to town, equalled only in discomfort by the hurried and incessant pilgrimages of the parents of Laurence Sterne. The first movement was to Gloucester, where no one could be found to sit for a portrait. In a panic, the couple presently fled to Bristol, where they lodged for a few months, near the Hot Wells, Thomas Gosse painting “ valetudinary ” and other ladies and teaching drawing with tolerable success. On April 24, 1808, a son, William, who still survives, was born to them in Bristol. After shifting out to Clifton, and then in again to Bristol itself, they came to the conclusion that business was exhausted in that neighbourhood, and in January, 1810, shifted again, • this time back to Worcester ; thence to Upton-on-Severn, thence to Evesham, and back once more to Worcester, just in time for the auspicious incident to take place of which the previous lines are but the necessary prologue.

Philip Henry Gosse, the second child of Thomas and Hannah Gosse, was born in lodgings over the shop of Mr. Garner, the shoemaker, in High Street, Worcester, on April 6, 1810. Short rest was given to the unfortunate mother, for in July the family, now four in number, made yet another migration, this time to Coventry, where they took lodgings in West Orchard. For some months Coventry proved to be a capital centre, and Mr. Gosse had plenty of business, but in December of the same year they were off again, and now to Leicester. Mrs. Gosse,

THE LIFE OF PHILIP HENRY GOSSE.

however, was by this time weary of such an aimless life, such incessant pitching of the tent a day’s march further on. She swept aside the objections of her husband’s gentility, and determined to see whether she could not bring grist to the mill. While Mr. Gosse was away painting his portraits, she obtained permission to turn the front room of their lodgings into a shop. She was “ at the expense of a large and finely sashed bow-window,” and this she stocked with groceries. The consequence was that, when her husband made his next proposal that, as usual, they should move on, she declined to leave Leicester, and allowed him to start on a professional tour through the east of England alone. She was, however, in spite of her energy, unskilled in the arts of shopkeeping, and when he returned, she easily agreed to make one more flitting — as far as she was concerned, the final one.

Three of Thomas Gosse’s elder sisters had married well, and were all domiciled at Poole, in Dorsetshire. In the autumn of 1811 he went thither to visit them, and was struck by the advantages that might accrue from settling in the neighbourhood of these three well-to-do establishments. His visit to Poole, moreover, was attended by the exhibition in the heavens of a comet of unusual splendour, and this imposing spectacle impressed his wife as an omen of favourable import. Thomas Gosse passed the winter in visiting his three sisters in turn, was encouraged by them all to come to reside in Dorset, and in May, 1812, returned to Leicester to prepare for the final flitting. The family set out by stages in the coach, their furniture following them by waggon. They spent a few days at Titton Brook with the grand-parents, and on this occasion my father formed his earliest durable recollection of a scene. He was two years and one month old at the time, and his record of the fact may be given as the first example of the

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astonishing power of memory which was to accompany him through life. “ I was in my mother’s arms,” he wrote in a memorandum dated 1868, “at the bottom of the front garden [at Titton], where it was divided by a hedge from the road. There came by a team of oxen or horses, driven by a peasant who guided them by his voice : — ‘ Gee, Captain ! Wo, Merryman ! ’ These two names I vividly recollect, and the whole scene.” He never again visited Titton Brook, and it is certain that no portion of the impression could be derived from later knowledge. Travelling by Birmingham and Salisbury, the Gosses came, in June, 1812, to Poole, and settled in furnished lodgings in the Old Orchard.

The borough and county of the borough of Poole, to give it its full honours, possessed in those days a population of about six thousand souls. It was a prosperous little town, whose good streets, sufficiently broad and well paved, were lined with solid and comfortable red-brick houses. The upper part of the borough was clean, the sandy soil on which it was built aiding a rapid drainage after rain. The lower streets, such as the sea end of Lagland and Fish Streets, the Strand, and the lanes abutting on the Quay, were filthy enough ; while the nose was certainly not regaled by the reeking odours of the Quay itself, with its stores and piles of salt cod, its ranges of barrels of train oil, its rope and tar and turpentine, and its well-stocked shambles for fresh fish, sometimes too obviously in the act of becoming stale fish. Yet, among seaport towns, its character was one of exceptional sweetness and cleanliness. And here, though the memory is one of some years’ later date, I may print my father’s impression of the Poole of his early childhood : —

“ The Quay, with its shipping and sailors ; their songs,

“ and cries of ‘ Heave with a will, yoho ! ’ the busy mer-

THE LIFE OF PHILIP HENRY GOSSE.

“ chants bustling to and fro ; fishermen and boatmen “and hoymen in their sou’westers, guernsey frocks, and “ loose trousers ; countrymen, young bumpkins in smocks, “seeking to be shipped as ‘youngsters’ for Newfound- “ land ; rows of casks redolent of train oil ; Dobell, the “gauger, moving among them, rod in hand ; customs- “ officers and tide-waiters taking notes ; piles of salt fish “ loading ; packages of dry goods being shipped ; coal “cargoes discharging ; dogs in scores ; idle boys larking “ about or mounting the rigging, — among them Bill “ Goodwin displaying his agility and hardihood on the “ very truck of some tall brig ; — all this makes a lively “picture in my memory, while the church bells, a full “peal of eight, are ringing merrily. The Poole men “ gloried somewhat in this peal ; and one of the low inns “ frequented by sailors, in one of the lanes opening on “the Quay, had for its sign the Eight Bells duly depicted “ in full.

“ Owing to the immense area of mud in Poole Harbour, “ dry at low water, and treacherously covered at high, “ leaving only narrow and winding channels of water “deep enough for shipping to traverse, skilled pilots “ were indispensable for every vessel arriving or sailing. “ From our upper windows in Skinner Street, we could “ see the vessels pursuing their course along Main “ Channel, now approaching Lilliput, then turning and “apparently coasting under the sand-banks of North “ Haven. Pilots, fishermen, boatmen of various grades, “ a loose-trousered, guernsey-frocked sou’westered race, “ were always lounging about the Quay.”

Such was in 1812, and such continued to be for the next twelve years, the background to the domestic fortunes of the Gosses. Thomas Gosse presently departed, in his customary nomadic way, and spent the winter at Yeovil,

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in Somerset. Before leaving his wife and children, he took the house, No. i, Skinner Street, which is mentioned in the above quotation. The sisters-in-law helped with the furnishing, and life promised to be far more pleasant with Hannah Gosse than ever before ; but the protection of these relations was tempered by a kind of conscious condescension, and Thomas was not allowed to forget that he had been guilty of a mesalliance. I have heard my grandmother describe how deep an impression was made upon her by the loneliness of her first winter in Poole. She was timid and not a little inclined to superstition, and she had newly come into what seemed to her a large house, with not a soul to relieve her nocturnal solitude, except her two sleeping babies. She used to keep them in a crib in the parlour till she went to bed, as some feeble company. These painful feelings were much increased by a terrifying circumstance, which was never satisfactorily accounted for. There was no shutter to the back-parlour window, and late one dark evening, in the depth of the winter of 1812, one of the bottom panes was suddenly smashed, by no apparent cause. Perhaps a cat had lost his footing on the tiles, and, pitching on the sill, had rebounded against the glass. But it was the last straw that broke my poor grandmother’s philosophy.

Partly to increase her income, partly to lose this dreadful sense of loneliness, Mrs. Gosse let some of her rooms as lodgings. They were taken by two ladies of the name of Bird, whose occupation was that of teaching a mysterious art known as “ Poonah painting ” in private, but on their printed advertisement described as “ Oriental tinting.” A good many young ladies came to learn ; but the fair professors affected great secrecy in their process, and bound their pupils by a solemn pledge to keep the secret of “ the Indian formulas.” This greatly stimulated Mrs. Gosse’s

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curiosity, and when, long afterwards, the ladies left, she tried to worm out the secrets of the art by pumping the servant-maid. All that that poor oracle could tell, however, was that she had been frequently sent to the chemist’s for “ million ; ” this the united brains of the family translated into “ vermilion,” and it was felt that a considerable discovery had been made.

Immediately after the family had removed into Skinner Street, Philip was seized with a serious attack of water on the brain, and for a while his life hung on an even balance. His subsequent health does not seem to have been impaired and through life, in spite of frequent temporary disorders, he enjoyed a very tough and elastic constitution. He acquired the rudiments of book-learning from a venerable dame, called “ Ma’am Sly,” who taught babies their alphabet in a little alley leading out of Skinner Street. To her he went at three years old, to be out of harm’s way. A little later, he began to suffer from a phenomenon which would perhaps not be worth recording if it had not shown, in our family, a hereditary recurrence, having tormented the early childhood of my grandfather and also of myself. My father has thus described it :

“ I suffered when I was about five years old from some “ strange indescribable dreams, which were repeated “ quite frequently. It was as if space was occupied with “a multitude of concentric circles, the outer ones im- " measurably vast, I myself being the common centre. “ They seemed to revolve and converge upon me, causing “ a most painful sensation of dread. I do not know that “ I had heard, and I was too young to have read, the “description of Ezekiel’s ‘ dreadful wheels.’ ”

At the age of four, the instinct of the future naturalist was first aroused, as in later years he was fond of repeating, by a vision which imprinted itself upon his memory with

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ii perfect clearness. Being alone in the Springwell Fields, from amidst the tall ripening wheat he saw rise, close to the footpath, and within a few yards of him, a large white grallatorial bird, which he was afterwards sure was the great white heron, or else the stork ; both of them, even in 1814, very rare English birds. In the next winter, between his fourth and fifth years, the child observed, with much interest, a robin, sitting day after day, pouring forth his cheery song from the corner brick of the summit of the parlour-chimney in Skinner Street, right above the yard, in which the delighted Philip stood watching him. Of his slightly later inclinations towards natural history, a note of his own shall speak more fully : —

“ My love for natural history was very early “awakened. In Mr. Brown’s library was a complete “ series of Encyclopedia Perthensis , of which father also “possessed the first seven volumes. For some time “ I was accustomed to call this Encyclopedia Parenthesis. “ Well, the plates of animals in this work, poor as they “ were, John and I were never tired of studying, and in “later years of copying. But at Uncle Gosse’s I had “ the opportunity of looking over the Cyclopedia “ Pantologia, which, though a work of inferior value, had “ much more pretentious figures of animals, nicely “ coloured. Aunt Bell and Cousin Salter both cultivated “ natural history, and when I found any specimen that “ appeared to me curious, or beautiful, or strange, I “would take it to Aunt Bell, with confidence that I “should learn something of its history from her. I “learned something of the metamorphosis of insects “ from her, though I do not recollect actually rearing any “caterpillars except that of the gooseberry or magpie “ moth {Abraxas grossulariata). I used not unfrequently “to find the pretty ermine moths (both the buff and

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“the white) under the window ledges, and once we “found on the doorstep a very large moth with light “ brown deflected wings, which Aunt Bell took for her “ cabinet. I presume it was one of the eggers. A “little later I found, at very low springtides, around “ Poole quays, the common forms of Actinia mesem- “ bryanthemum , but I think no other species of sea- “ anemone. Aunt Bell taught me their name of “ Actinia , and suggested that I should keep them alive “in a vessel of sea-water. I recollect finding a very “showy specimen of the strawberry variety, round by “ Oakley’s Quay. It was too much trouble to get fresh “ sea-water, and there was nothing known in those days “ of aquarian philosophy, so the poor things were kept “ involved in their mucus until the water stank and they “had to be thrown away. I well recollect them stand- “ ing in jugs of sea-water in the kitchen window.”

To “Aunt Bell,” then, belongs the distinction of having been the first person to suggest the preservation of living animals in aquaria of sea-water. This was Susan, the fourth and by far the most intellectual of the children of William Gosse ; she was remarkable for her gracious sentimental manners, and for a devotion to science, then so rare in a woman as to be almost unique. She had been born in 1752, had in 1788 married Mr. Bell, a surgeon of Poole, and was the mother of Thomas Bell, afterwards an F.R.S. and a distinguished zoologist. From this cousin my father in later life received much sympathy, but they did not meet in the youth of the latter. Thomas Bell was eighteen years my father’s senior, and left Poole for Guy’s Hospital in 1813. At home in Skinner Street, the early partiality for animals was not welcomed so warmly as by Aunt Bell : —

“ Constitution Hill, not quite two miles from Poole, on

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“ the Ringwood Road, was the limit of my walking in “this direction, but here, scrambling up a gravelly cliff “ on the left, on a broad expanse of heath, with a fine “view on all sides, one day in summer, probably in “1819 or ’20, we caught some beautiful green lizards, “ which I incline, from recent evidence, to believe were “ the true Lacerta viridis of continental Europe, not- “ withstanding what Thomas Bell says in his ‘ British “Reptiles.5 William brought them home in his handkerchief; but on showing our treasures to mother, “she was terribly frightened, supposing them to be “ venomous. She ordered us to kill the ‘ nasty things,5 “ which of course we immediately did, though with great “ regret, on the pebbles in front of the house.

If Mrs. Gosse lacked a due appreciation of reptiles, she was none the less an admirable mother. Her life was by no means an easy one. The peculiarity of her husband’s profession made him absent from home for ten or eleven months of every year, and during his prolonged journeys all the responsibility fell upon her. The income of the family was extremely restricted, yet she contrived all through the anxious period of their childhood to bring up three sons and one daughter in what they were able to look back upon as a “ reputable subgentility ; ” she took care that they were always clean in person and neat in clothing, sufficiently fed and decently educated. Mr. Gosse’s earnings were not very considerable, were so irregular that they could not be depended upon, and were to a large degree expended by himself in his ceaseless wanderings. But his wife had an abhorrence and terror of debt, and rarely indeed was the rent not paid on the very day it was due. To secure this, the greatest frugality and industry were required, and ceaseless exercise of ingenuity. Between Mrs. Gosse and her husband there was an ever-

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widening alienation, arising from their wholly different habits of thought and life. Each respected the other, but the peculiarities and weaknesses of the painter jarred more and more on the narrow sympathies and practical energy of his wife. It was an unceasing matter of dispute between them that my grandfather was always scribbling. For, in truth, he was a most voluminous writer, producing volumes upon volumes of manuscripts, which he was always endeavouring, and always vainly, to palm off upon the publishers. His works were varied enough — tales, dialogues, allegories, philosophical treatises, in verse as well as in prose. He completed two epic poems, if not more ; The English Crew wintering in Spit zb er gen and The Attempts of the Cainite Giants to re- conquer Paradise still languish in the family possession. Mr. Thomas Gosse is perhaps unique as a very voluminous author who never contrived to publish a line. My grandmother, soon perceiving that all this writing brought no grist to the mill, and even interfered with the painting of miniatures, which was fairly lucrative, waged incessant and ruthless war against it, scrupled not to style it “ that cursed writm’,” and scolded him whenever she found him at it. Many years after, when Philip was in the stream of successful literary life, and indeed supporting both parents in their old age by his pen, the war still continued. Grandfather would meekly object, “ But there’s Philip ; he writes books ; you don’t find fault with him ! ” “ Philip ! no, his books bring

in bread-and-cheese for you and me ! When did your writings ever bring in anything ? ” And the meek author of the Cainite Giants would fall back on his favourite ejaculation, “Pooh ! my dear ! ” and let the discussion drop.