Philip Henry Gosse: a Skinner Street childhood, 1812-27

Below is an extended extract from Edmund Gosse's biography of his father, The Naturalist of the Seashore, The Life of Philip Henry Gosse, published in 1890, recording a childhood lived in Skinner Street. Henry, as he would become to be known, was born in Worcester in 1810 and settled in Poole with his parents and older brother at the age of two in June 1812. He spent the next 15 years growing up in the house directly opposite the then Independent Chapel before sailing for Newfoundland for work in 1827, aged 17.

Henry's father, Thomas, was himself a man of some renown as an itinerant painter of miniature portraits and before that an engraver in mezzotint. One of his earlier engravings, of Captain William Bligh (of Bounty infamy) collecting breadfruit in Tahiti, can be seen at the Captain Cook Memorial Museum in Whitby. 

Thomas's haphazard work and fluctuating income meant the Gosse family lived in somewhat precarious circumstances in their rented Skinner Street home, or in what his wife, Hannah, liked to call 'reputable subgentility'.

Ann Thwaite in her 2002 biography Glimpses of the Wonderful, The Life of Philip Henry Gosse, notes that Henry's childhood is 'extraordinarily well documented … his early life (in Newfoundland, Quebec province, Alabama and Jamaica, as well as Dorset and London) was not only well documented but of unusual interest; his achievements throughout his life were remarkable'. 

Thwaite maintains that the wonders of science and religion are at the heart of Gosse's story. 'Gosse the naturalist was inextricably linked with Gosse the Christian,' writes Thwaite who notes that he was born 27 years before Victoria came to the throne. 'Certainly he could be pious and earnest on occasion, but he was also enthusiastic, excited and endlessly curious.' This spirit of adventure and discovery shines throuugh as Gosse grew from boy to young man in Skinner Street.  

This extended extract from Edmund Gosse's earlier appreciation of his father begins just as Thomas, Hannah, and their two sons, William and Henry, are about to leave the Midlands to embark on a new life in Poole…

'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 grandparents, 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 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 [whale 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 merchants 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 Newfoundland; 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, in Somerset. Before leaving his wife and children, he took the house, No. 1, 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 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 immeasurably 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 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 Encyclopædia Perthensis, of which father also possessed the first seven volumes. For some time I was accustomed to call this Encyclopcædia 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 Cyclopædia 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 grossulariatd). I used not unfrequently to find the pretty ermine moths (both the buff and 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 mesembryanthemum, 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 standing 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 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, notwithstanding what Thomas Bell says in his 'British Reptiles'. 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,' 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-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 Spitzbergen 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 writin'," 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.

Like all prudent housewives, Mrs. Gosse had a strong aversion to tramps. Her husband, on the contrary, was as easy a prey to them as the great Bishop Butler was,  and squandered his halfpence on their ill-desert. Once, when the family was at dinner, a beggar strolled to the door; the maid came in and told the tale. My grandmother refused — "Nothing for him! "But grandfather's soft compassionate heart stayed the denial. "Oh yes! here's a halfpenny for the poor man." The beggar who, through the open parlour-door, had heard all, shouted in, as he took the copper," God bless the man — but not the woman!" 

Thomas Gosse was a great reader, especially of poetry, but his wife had no approval for this exercise either. In later years the children often recalled how he would, while engaged in finishing a miniature in the back parlour, lay down his brush and take up a volume of verse, till, on hearing Mrs. Gosse's footstep in the passage, he would hastily whip it under his little green-baize desk and set to work on the ivory. My father well remembered the borrowing of Scott's Lady of the Lake and the Lord of the Isles in their original quartos, and especially, about 1816, the arrival of a batch of Byron's Tales, then quite new, and in particular The Siege of Corinth. These my grandfather read and re-read with an evident delight, to the great curiosity of his little second son, in whom the literary instinct was already faintly awakened; but the pleasure was confined to himself as a matter of course, since Mrs. Gosse, from her absolute ignorance of books, could not have appreciated or even comprehended it. 

When the miniature-painter was expected home from one of his journeys, his little sons, evening after evening in summer-time, would go up to the Angel Inn in the Market Place, and wait on the pavement till the Salisbury coach came rumbling in. The particular day of his coming was never announced, and the children would be often disappointed, till at length one evening they would see the white hair, the strange costume, the familiar tall thin figure on the box. The dress in which he would reappear was ever a subject of speculation. Once he arrived in yellow-topped boots and nankeen small-clothes; another time in a cutaway, snuff-coloured coat; and once in leather breeches. Expostulation on these occasions was thrown away; his unfailing resource under my grandmother's sarcasm was, " Pooh! the tailor told me it was proper for me to have!"

His copious head of hair had grown pure silver before he was fifty, and was extremely becoming. In spite of the beautiful and venerable appearance with which nature had supplied him, he nourished a guilty hankering after a brown wig. My grandmother had long suspected the existence of such a piece of goods, but he had never had the temerity to produce it at home. At last, however, when Philip was thirteen or fourteen years of age, the old gentleman came home from his travels daringly adorned with the lovely snuff-coloured peruke. My grandmother was no palterer. Her first salute was to snatch it off his head, and to whip it into the fire, where the possessor was fain ruefully to watch it frizzle and consume. 

Mr. Thomas Gosse had collected a considerable mass of miscellaneous literary information, and his son afterwards often regretted that he so seldom felt drawn to impart it to his children. The memory of his second son would certainly have borne away the greater portion of any instruction so given, and as a very extraordinary instance of the child's retentive power, I may mention the following fact: — My father happened once to relate to me a conversation he had with his father about the year 1823 — that is to say, nearly half a century previously — in the course of which Mr. Thomas Gosse had quoted a stanza of a poem on the Norman Conquest, in which there were many Saxonisms. This stanza my father had never heard a second time, had never met with in any book, and yet remembered so perfectly that I, happening to recollect the source, begged him (in 1869) to write it down. He did so literally as follows: 

"With thilka force lie hit him to the ground, 
And was demaising how to take his life; 
When from behind he gat a treach'rous wound. 
Given by De Torcy with a stabbing knife.
O treach'rous Normans! if such acts ye do,
The conquer'd may claim victory of you." 

The passage comes from the twenty-eighth stanza of Chatterton's Battle of Hastings No. 1, and the divergencies are so extremely slight and unimportant that they merely add to the impression of the extraordinary tenacity of a memory which could retain these words from childhood to old age after only hearing them once recited. 

In a paper which has been printed since his death, my father has described the schooling which he enjoyed in Poole. After having imbibed a slender stream of tuition successively from Ma'am Sly, and from a slightly more advanced Ma'am Drew, at the age of eight he joined his elder brother at the school of one Charles Sells, whose establishment was at that time the best day school in Poole. While he was there, Mrs. Gosse "would sometimes, for economy, keep us at home a quarter to carry on our studies in the back garret by ourselves. We were industrious, and mother was on the keen look-out, and we did not miss much."

It was before this, in 1815, that Philip began to form a friendship which lasted, with only one momentary interruption, until adolescence and the untimely death of his friend. John Hammond Brown was the nephew of a widow lady, a Mrs. Josiah Brown, who lodged in the Skinner Street house in succession to the fair professors of the mystery of Poonah-painting. The two little boys, who were identical in age, and who shared several peculiarities of temperament which were not found in any of their playmates, immediately became and remained inseparable companions from morning to night. My father has recorded, "My tastes were always literary. As early as I can recollect, a book had at any time more attraction for me than any game of play. And my plays were quiet; I always preferred my single playmate, John Brown, to many." In another note I find this statement enlarged: 

"From infancy my tastes were bookish. I can recall myself, when a very tiny boy, stretched at full length on the hearth-rug before the parlour fire, reading with eager delight some childish book; and this as an ordinary habit. The earliest books I read were, I think, London Cries, The History of Little Jack, and Prince Leboo. Old Mrs. Thompson, our former landlady, gave me a Sparrman's Travels in South Africa and the East Indies. This became one of my most valued books, yet, owing to my morbid bashfulness, I could not be persuaded to formally thank the old lady for her gift. Robinson Crusoe was an early delight, of course, and Pilgrims Progress another. This latter I knew nearly by heart when I was ten or twelve years old. It was the first part only that we had. Christiania's adventures I did not know until long after, and when I came to read them they never possessed for me the same charm as Christian's. I could not persuade myself that they were genuine."

The first break in the monotony of the child's life occurred when he was nine years old. For seven years Mrs. Gosse had not seen her parents, and in order that she might go to Titton, it was necessary first of all to find a place where she could leave her children. They were accordingly boarded at the house of a farmer in the village of Canford Parva, a mile from Wimborne. This was the first experience of the country, or of anything but the tarry quays of Poole, which the children had enjoyed. My father's memory of it was very vivid, but it was divided between the meadows and the orchards, on one hand, and a store of the highly coloured romances, by Miss Porter and Lady Morgan, which had just come into fashion, and had found their way down into a cupboard of the Dorset farmhouse. It was here, moreover, that he read Father Clement and formed, at the tender age of nine, the basis of that violent prejudice against the Roman Catholic faith and practice which he retained all through life. At Canford Magna there was a nunnery, and the precocious little Protestant shuddered in passing it, with a vague notion of the terrible practices which, no doubt, were the occupation of its inmates. 

It is pleasanter, and more agreeably characteristic, to note that the event which, above all others, illuminated the visit to Canford Parva was the discovery of a kingfisher's nest. Just beyond the farm, a short and narrow lane ran down to a bend of the river Stour. In this lane there was a low gravelly cliff over a horse-pond. From a hole in this cliff the child used to watch the brilliant little gem fly out many times a day, and as often return; while, by going a few rods further, the bird could be seen coursing to and fro over the breadth of the river, sitting on the low horizontal branches, or swooping down for fish. The child was already naturalist enough fully to appreciate the interest of this incident. The visit to Canford Parva was the only stay in a rural English district which my father enjoyed until, in middle life, he came to reside in Devonshire.

Next year, in July, 1820, the boys had another brief outing, this time by sea to Swanage. It was haymaking time, and they were playing in the hayfield, whence the crop was being carried until pretty late in the evening. It was quite dark, when Philip found, moving rapidly through the short mown grass, already wet with dew, a half-grown conger eel, though the field was a long way, perhaps half a mile, from the seashore. The incident was a decidedly curious one;  though far from unprecedented, and, in fact, mentioned by Yarrell as having occurred within his experience.

About the end of this same year, Poole, like other country towns, was almost universally illuminated on occasion of the termination of the trial of Queen Caroline in accordance with popular sympathy. The house of the Gosses became, on this occasion, the cynosure of Skinner Street, for while neighbours were content with a candle or two in each window, the Gosse boys adorned their front with heads and figures borrowed from out of the paternal portfolio — the queen at full length, a dark bandit who did duty for "Non mi ricordo" Majocchi, a priest, a scaramouch, and other vaguely effective personalities, handsomely illuminated from behind. 

The first incident which could be called a landmark in this uneventful career was the departure of the elder brother to make his way in the world. Early in 1822, William, being fourteen years old, sailed from Poole for service in the firm of his uncle, in the port of Carbonear, Newfoundland. Philip accompanied him on board the ship, returning in the pilot's boat, and William's last act was to tie a comforter round his brother's throat just as the latter was leaving the ship. This mark of brotherly care would bring tears into the younger boy's eyes for months afterwards, whenever he thought of it.

Carbonear in Newfoundland where William Gosse went to work in 1822 at the age of 14. Henry would follow him to Carbonear a few years later
 

It appears that the departure of William drew more attention to Philip, whose curious cleverness in certain unfamih'ar directions began from this time to be more and more a subject of local talk. In spite of his mother's absence of education, she knew the value of book-learning, and the aptitude which her second son showed induced her to make peculiar sacrifices for his advantage. She was determined to give him a chance of acquiring some knowledge of Latin, and in January 1823, she contrived to get him admitted into the well-known school at Blandford. Of his brief stay in this school not many memorials exist. But one anecdote may not be thought too trivial to relate, because it illustrates the early development of the boy's independent curiosity in all matters connected with literature: —

"One day, when we boys were out walking on the Wimborne Road, and had just come to the opening of Snow's Folly and Hanger Down, an elderly gentleman with a long beard met us, and gathering the elder boys around him, began to question us about learning. He pulled an Eton Latin Grammar from his pocket, and turning to the example 'nee hujus 'existimo, qui me pili a:istimat,' asked us to explain it. Several, in an instant, construed it, correctly enough, 'Nor do I regard him this, who esteems me not a hair.' ''Yes,' said our bearded friend, 'that is the translation, "but I want the meaning; what is meant by this?' All were dumb, till I, whose curiosity had long before been exercised on this very point, having guessed out for myself, unaided, the solution, snapped my fingers at the word 'this,' as I repeated it to him. He immediately approved my answer, and praised me before the others as 'a thinker.'" 

When my father, however, in later years was desired to recall the incidents of this part of his boyish life, he was apt to recollect more clearly when the narcissus bloomed in fields beside the Stour, and where yellow frogs of an uncommon marking were to be found, than what boys more usually remember. Yet he never failed highly to appreciate the education which he received during these months, the only classical training which he ever enjoyed. His favourite walk was over the race-down to Tarrant Monkton, along the course of that primitive telegraph, on the six-shutter principle, which had been opened by Government to connect London with Weymouth in the course of the Napoleonic wars. Of the working of this line of telegraph, a picturesque account is given in Mr. Hardy's admirable Dorset novel, The Trumpet Major.

A model of the six-shutter telegraph system as Goose would have seen it near Blandford. They were installed during the Napoleonic wars Images: Royal Signals Museum, Blandford

In summer my father used to wander off, across Lord Portman's park, to the bend in the river just below Stourpaine, where the "clotes," the waterlilies, grow thickest; and in after years, looking back on these childish excursions, he used to repeat with peculiar gusto those exquisite lines of William Barnes — 

"Wi' earms a-spreaden, an' cheaks a-blowen,
How proud wer I when I vu'st could zwim
Athirt the pleace where thou bist a-growen,
Wi' thy long more vrom the bottom dim ;
While cows, knee-high, O,
In brook, wer nigh, O,
Where thou dost float, goolden zummer clote!" 

The inseparable John Brown had accompanied his friend to Blandford, and these two were sufficient unto themselves throughout their school-days there. My father, at no time of life much given to promiscuous cordiality, does not seem to have formed lasting acquaintanceships with any of his Blandford schoolfellows. John Brown and he continued their zoological studies with unabated ardour, and at this time began to make coloured drawings of animals with great assiduity.

In 1824 Wombwell's travelling menagerie arrived at Blandford. The two young naturalists were excessively interested in a canvas painting on the booth, which advertised an animal unknown to either of them by name or figure. This was "The Fierce Nondescript, never before seen in this Country alive." John Brown, to allay his feverish curiosity, contrived overnight an interview with the attendant, who confessed that the Nondescript was also sometimes known by the less mysterious name of the tortoiseshell hyena. This, on the following day, was found to be the case, and the boys had the delight of seeing the South African hyena or Cape hunting-dog (Lycaon pictiis), now familiar to English sightseers, but in those days a quadruped never before secured by any travelling menagerie. 

Philip was at Blandford until the end of the first term of 1824. He acquired during his one full year at Blandford a good fundamental knowledge of Latin and the elements of Greek, being well grounded in the grammar of the former language. His vocabulary in Latin was not extensive ; he had read but few authors, and only Virgil at all thoroughly, yet he had secured an acquaintance with the language which was of great service to him in later life, and which he steadily increased until quite recent years. Like all boys who are destined to be men of letters, he began to versify, and such specimens of his early rhymes as have been preserved from his Blandford days show that he was beginning to secure facility in the arrangement of phrases.

The expense of keeping him at boarding-school now became more than the household at Poole could sustain any longer, and he came home early in his fifteenth year. For the next twelvemonth he continued his studies as well as he could with none, or with at best very inadequate local help. 

At fifteen Philip Gosse was a broad-shouldered, healthy boy, short for his age, with a profusion of straight dark brown hair on his head, and a dark complexion which he inherited from his father. He describes himself at that age as "a burly lad, tolerably educated, pretty well read, fairly well behaved, habitually truthful, modest, obedient, timid, shy, studious, ingenuous." It was time for him to begin bread-winning, but what was to be done with him ? Poole was a town of merchants. His brother William had entered life in a merchant's counting-house; why should not he? His parents had kind and influential friends, and one of them spoke to Mr. Garland, the much-respected head of a large mercantile house in the Newfoundland trade. There was a junior place vacant in his Poole business, and he sent permission for Philip to call on him. Accordingly, Mrs. Gosse took him to the office, where the kind and genial old gentleman readily offered to engage the boy as a junior clerk, at a salary of; £20 per annum to begin with. This, of course, would not pay for his food, yet it was better than lying idle, and there were hopes that it might lead to something better. The proposal was thankfully accepted. 

The counting-house of Messrs. George Garland and Sons was a spacious old-fashioned apartment, adapted from a sort of corridor in the rambling family mansion. The whole of one side, except an area at the doors which was shut off by a rail, was occupied by three ample desks, which looked down into the back-yard. The first of these desks was occupied by Mr. Edward Lisby, chief clerk, a spruce little man of about twenty- three. The second was assigned to young Gosse, and the third remained untenanted. Each clerk was ensconced in a den, since each several desk was surrounded by a dark wainscot wall, around the summit of which ran a set of turned rails. Mr. Lisby was very silent; the new clerk was very shy; and a portentous hush, broken only by the squeaking of pens, was accustomed to reign in that solemn apartment.

There was not nearly work enough to keep the boy employed, and he enjoyed a great deal of leisure. The time he spent at Mr. Garland's office was veiy pleasant. The further end of the counting-house was occupied by an antique bookcase, in which were many old books and a few new ones. There was an extensive series of the Gentleman's Magazine, and another of the Town and Country Magazine; and these the boy read with great avidity. But, far more important to record, it was in this bookcase that Philip discovered a volume which exercised, as he has said, "a more powerful fascination upon me than anything which I had ever read." This was the first edition of Byron's Lara, the issue of 1814, with Roger's Jacqueline printed at the end of it. To the close of his days my father used to avow, with rising heat, that it was most impertinent of Rogers to pour out his warm water by the side of Byron's wine. Lara he had till now, in 1825, never even heard of, but as he read and re-read, devouring the romantic poem with an absorbing interest which obliterated the world about him, almost the entire book imprinted itself upon his memory, and remained there indelibly impressed. 

The reading of Lara, he says, "was an era to me; for it was the dawning of Poetry on my imagination. It appeared to me that I had acquired a new sense. Before this I had, of course, read some poetry, many standard pieces of the eighteenth century, including something of Cowper, Thomson, and Shenstone; but Shakespeare, Milton, and Dryden I knew only by the extracts in my school-books, and of the modern sensational school nothing at all."

About the same time, the two volumes of Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads came into his hands, and caused him great pleasure, tame, however, it must be confessed, in comparison with his ecstatic enjoyment of Byron's tale. 

There was in the office bookcase a copy of Scarron's Roman Comique in English, and the broad humour of this farcical classic delighted the boy amazingly, although its coarseness a little shocked him. He enjoyed it infinitely more than Don Quixote, which he had read a short time before." Perhaps my boyish mind," he says," could not appreciate the polished wit and satire of Cervantes so well as the broad grins and buffoonery of Scarron." But Don Quixote was a book to which he retained through life an inexplicable aversion.

Another novel in the office book-case was the immortal Joseph Andrews, with which he was so greatly charmed that, on a second perusal, he could not refrain from taking it home to read aloud in the evenings for the delectation of his mother and his sister. The rough expressions which he had not observed as he read the book to himself, however, became painfully patent when propounded openly by the fireside, and he found, what others have discovered before and since, "Joseph Andrews, noble as it is, is one of the male children of the Muses; he had to make an excuse and leave the tale half told. Among other literary stores laid up in this delightful bookcase were the "Peter Porcupine" pamphlets of William Cobbett, and these, when everything else was exhausted, were waded through for lack of better reading in many unoccupied hours. 

John Brown remained at school in Blandford until mid- summer, 1825, when the friends were once more reunited in Poole. He was presently put into a counting-house on the Quay, and after office-hours, which closed at five in each case, the two lads were always together. They read and studied science together, tried their hands at music, and stained their clothes with chemicals, on one occasion coming near to a public scandal with the unparalleled success of an artificial volcano.

A large room at the top of the house now occupied by John Brown's mother they turned into a studio and workroom. John was mechanical, Philip inclined to the arts, both were equally bookish. One experiment of theirs mildly foreshadowed a famous invention of our own day. Philip contrived to make an acoustic tube of the rain-spout that led from a gutter within the parapet of his mother's house all down the front of the house to the street, and into this sort of speaking-tube, the speaker being concealed close beneath the roof, he used to breathe prophetic utterances, which rose as if from the pavement, to the alarm of mystified passers-by.

But the serious amusement or main studious entertainment of the boys was zoology. From every available source they added to their knowledge of natural history, eagerly reading up for the dimensions, colours, postures, and habits generally of the principal quadrupeds and birds. This, with incessant copying of cuts and plates of animals, could not fail to give them both a solid substratum of zoological knowledge. At sixteen they were children still, unsophisticated, bashful, and ignorant of the world, far more interested in such a show as Sir Ashton Lever's travelling exhibition of natural history than in any public events or local politics. It was the collection which I have just mentioned which first awakened in Philip Gosse one of the master passions of his life, a love of exotic lepidoptera. The Lever Museum contained one of the grand silver-blue butterflies of South America – it was probably Morpho Menelaus – and this created an extraordinary longing in the boy's heart to go out and capture such imperial creatures for himself.

It was outside this show that was exhibited the portrait of a mermaid," radiant in feminine loveliness and piscine scaliness." But the boy had studied his zoology with far too much care to be deceived for one moment by the real object, a shrivelled and blackened little thing composed by the ingenuity of some rascally Japanese fisherman out of the head and shoulders of a monkey and the body and tail of a salmon. It was in the year 1826 that Philip made his first debit in the world of letters, in a very humble way. He composed a little article on "The Mouse a Lover of Music," and sent it to the editor of the Youth's Magazine. It was sual, in those days, to get the local M.P., so far as his good nature extended, to frank your letters, and the boy appeared early at the door of Mr. Lester, the member for Poole. He had addressed the envelope to the publishers, "Messrs. Hamilton, Adams, and Co.;" the footman, as he took it in, misread the "Messrs." for "Miss," and benevolently smiling, rallied the lad on its being "for his young lady." The member franked it, however, and in due time, to the inexpressible joy of its author, "The Mouse a Lover of Music" appeared, signed [a pseudonym in Greek letters], in the pages of the Youth's Magazine. 

One day, in 1826, he had a narrow escape from death by drowning. Standing at the edge of the quay just behind his employers' business premises, he suddenly slipped down between the quay and one of Garlands' brigs which was anchored there. By an extraordinary good fortune he fell astride a spar which happened to be lashed alongside at that point, acting as a "fender," and he was hoisted up again, jarred and terrified, but unhurt, having escaped the death of a rat by a mere hand-breadth.

A further stage in his imaginative susceptibility was marked this year by his enjoyment of Campbell's Last Man, then recently published in the New Monthly Magazine. He thought it very noble, as indeed it is, but in making copies of it for his friends he must needs, an infant Bentley, be tampering with the text, and, in his remarkable revision, a line – "The aggregate of woe," takes the place of Campbell's (truly rather feeble) "That shall no longer flow!" 

Employment at the Garlands' office came to a natural end towards the close of 1826, when they found they had no further use for a junior clerk. Mrs. Gosse became anxious once more, and was constantly urging Philip to "show himself about on the Quay," that the sight of him might keep him in the mind of mercantile acquaintances. But he had no liking for the babel of the Quay, and after going thither he used immediately to take himself off over the ferry to Ham, where he would sit for hours in one of the vessels building in the shipwrights' yards, reading some book which he had brought in his pocket. Friends, however, would appear to have noticed him as he strolled across, or else their memories needed no such refreshing, for at length, as the spring of 1827 came on, the firm of Messrs. Harrison, Slade, and Co. offered the lad employment as a clerk in their counting-house at the port of Carbonear, in Newfoundland.

He dreaded expatriation, and this proposal did not meet with his wishes; his mother, however, promptly vetoed all objection on his part, and he presently signed an agreement to go out for six years to the American counting-house, on a very small salary. On Sunday morning, April 22, 1827, as the bells were ringing the people of Poole to church, having a few days before completed his seventeenth year, Philip Gosse, with a very heavy heart, slipped down the harbour in a boat and climbed on board the brig Carbonear which was lying at Stakes ready to get under way for Newfoundland.'

Gosse spent the next five years working in Newfoundland before returning to Poole for a brief visit in 1832 after learning that his only sister, Elizabeth, was dangerously ill and had asked for all her brothers to come home. Henry describes the euphoria of leaving 'dreary Newfoundland' behind him and being back among his family – and the birds, hedgerows and insects – in Dorset. A paradise, he called it.

His son, Edmund, continues the story …

On July 10, 1832, my father sailed from Carbonear, in the brig Convivial, for Poole. The skipper. Captain Compton, was the most gentleman-like of the Elson captains, a man of immense bulk, genial and agreeable in manners, and he made the voyage a very pleasing one. Philip kept a journal of this expedition, which still exists and bears witness to his increased power of observation and description.

On August 6 the young naturalist, who was now within sight of the coasts of Devon and Dorset, had the satisfaction of observing one of the rarest visitors to our shores, the white whale, or Beluga. Late in the evening of the same day he stepped on Poole Quay, and five minutes brought him to the familiar house in Skinner Street. As he knocked at the door, his heart was in his mouth, for he knew not what tidings awaited him. His brother answered his knock.

"Oh," Philip said, as he grasped his hand, "is all well?" for he could not speak the name of Elizabeth. "Yes," was the reply, "very well!" and the newcomer felt a load lifted from him. Though still weak, Elizabeth was fast recovering, and had been removed to lodgings at Parkstone, in company with her mother, for purer air.

Little did Philip sleep that night. Awake in conversation until past midnight, he was up at four o'clock next morning, and sallied forth, armed with pill-boxes, ready for the capture of any unlucky insect desirous to experience the benefits of early rising. During the voyage home his dreams had been nightly running in the pursuit of insects over the flowery meadows of Dorset. At length it was a reality. He was in a humour to be pleased with everything; but even if it had not been so, the morning was so fresh and bracing, the hedges so thickly green, and the flowers so sweet after the harsh uplands of Newfoundland, that he could not fail of an ecstasy.

In later life my father constantly recalled that delightful morning, which appears to have singularly and deeply moved him with its beauty. "I was brimful of happiness," he said in a letter of a year later (November 16, 1833). "The beautiful and luxuriant hedgerows; the mossy, gnarled oaks; the fields; the flowers; the pretty warbling birds; the blue sky and bright sun; the dancing butterflies; but, above all, the unwonted freedom from a load of anxiety; — altogether it seemed to my enchanted senses, just come from dreary Newfoundland, that I was in Paradise.

How I love to recall every little incident connected with that first morning excursion! — the poor brown cranefly, which was the first English insect I caught; the little grey moth under the oaks at the end of the last field; the meadow where the Satyridcs were sport ing on the sunny bank; the heavy fat Musca in Heckfordfield hedge, which I in my ignorance called a Bombyiitcs, and the consequent display of entomological lore manifested all that day by the family, who frequently repeated the sounding words 'Bombylius bee-fly.'"

The mother and sister soon returned from Parkstone, and the circle around the table in Skinner Street was once more complete. Philip did not stray three miles from Poole during the whole of his visit. He found little changed in Poole during his five years' absence. "Our lane," which had been a cud-de-sac, was now a thoroughfare, by the turning of the old gardens at the end into new streets, and there was a new Public Library built at the bottom of High Street. Of this Philip was made free, and there he read a good deal.

His time was largely spent in entomological excursions, and he threw himself into scien- tific study with extreme ardour and singleness of purpose. He found an occasional companion in his cousin, Tom Salter, an ardent young botanist, and he discovered that, in a young man named Samuel Harrison, Poole now possessed a local entomologist. With this latter Gosse agreed to correspond and exchange duplicates when he returned to Newfoundland, and these pledges were faithfully kept.

Harrison was the son of the most influential member of the firm, and probably his friendship with Philip Gosse gave the latter a sort of status with Mr. Elson and the captains, and invested his pursuit of insects with a certain consideration. From this time forth, my father's zoological proclivities were matters of notoriety, but he does not seem to have met with any of the ridicule which so unusual an employment of his leisure might be presumed to bring upon him in a society like that of Carbonear.

On September 20, 1832 ("the day before Sir Walter Scott died," as he notes in his diary), my father's brief but pleasant sojourn in England ended. He sailed with the Convivial, on her return to Carbonear.

That is almost the end of Philip Henry Gosse's documented associations with Poole, notwithstanding his longings for home amid the continuing hardships of life in Newfoundland. But not quite the end; in an appendix to Edmund Gosse's 1890 biography, we learn that Henry returned to Poole with his second wife, Eliza, in 1868.

In 1868 my husband and I paid an interesting visit to Poole, in Dorsetshire – the place where he had been brought up by his parents from two years old. We walked around to see all the familiar places – the home of his parents, in Skinner Street which was a narrow cul-de-sac, with the Independent Chapel on the opposite side of this little street, where the family attended. He and his brother had been in the choir, William having played the violin.

We obtained leave to go inside his old dwelling and there he searched all the rooms, and endeavoured to see if any traces existed of sentences and aphorisms, which he and his brothers used to write under the chimney-slab or other places. At length, he found, in a corner of the ceiling, some lines of his own writing, fifty years old, but still unobliterated by cleaning or whitewash. The old familiar water-butt in the corner of the little backyard, and other reminiscences, brought back many of his youthful thoughts, occupations, and amusements; the harbour and quay, from whence, as a boy, leaving the parental roof, he went out to Newfoundland.

We walked to see the old oak tree in a field outside the town, in which he used to sit on Saturday afternoons and half-holidays, with his great friend and favourite school-fellow, John Brown, reading and discussing their histories and their little empires and infant zoological studies, thus sowing the seeds of that incipient life, which afterwards developed into his great, extended, and accomplished mind.

He made a sketch of the fine Poole Harbour and Brownsea Island, sand rocks. Old Harry Cliff, from Parkstone, where we walked several times to visit our kind friend, Walter Gill, who kept a large school there. This view we painted together in water colours, and finished when we got back to Sandhurst; it is framed and hangs in the dining-room to this day, with many other landscapes, which his skilful hand drew from the spots.

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