In Andrew O’Hagan’s “Our Fathers”, the narrator as a young boy is given a book by his old teacher as a parting gift: “A Year at the Shore”, by Philip Henry Gosse. Intrigued, I found a scan of the book and started it at DP; this week it was posted.
Gosse was an interesting, if not entirely likeable character: his son, the poet Edmund Gosse, gave a grim account of his upbringing in his Father and Son. Gosse senior was a member of the Plymouth Brethren who, in this book, writes admiringly of Darwin’s works, but who could not accept the discoveries of evolution and the age of the Earth.
A Year at the Shore is loosely structured around the twelve months of the year, describing the natural history of south-west England. Gosse’s descriptions fall somewhere between scientific rigour and anthropomorphism, with a sprinkling of creationist commentary. Perhaps the finest aspect of the book is its illustrations, painted by Gosse himself, which depict the shore’s dwellers in splendid fashion, rather reminiscent of 1950s pulp sci-fi:
