Philip Henry Gosse (; 6 April 1810 – 23 August 1888), known to his friends as Henry, was an English naturalist, populariser of natural science, prolific author, "Father of the Aquarium", scientific illustrator, lecturer, entrepreneur and pioneer in the study of marine biology and ornithology. Gosse created and stocked the world's first public marine aquarium at London Zoo in 1853, and coined the term "aquarium". His 1854 work The Aquarium: An Unveiling of the Wonders of the Deep Sea was the catalyst for the aquarium craze in mid-Victorian England. Over thirty years later, Gosse co-authored a three-volume work on Rotifera (microscopic aquatic animals), considered at the time "the most complete and exhaustive history of the Rotifera in any language", with drawings of "extreme minuteness, accuracy, and beauty". In addition, Gosse was one of the chief figures among Brethren, British evangelical Christians frequently referred to by the misnomer "Plymouth Brethren". For over half of his life, he advanced his religious outlook by lecturing, evangelising, teaching, preaching and watching for the Second Advent, as well as helping to spread the movement across the world. After his death in 1888, the popular image of Gosse was shaped by his son, Edmund W. Gosse, the poet and critic, in his 1890 Life of Philip Henry Gosse F.R.S. and most notably in his 1907 memoir, Father and Son. In the latter work, among other things, Gosse was portrayed as an overbearing father of uncompromising religious views. Edmund Gosse mythologized the reception given to Gosse’s Omphalos (1857), an attempt to reconcile the geological ages of uniformitarian geology with the biblical account of creation. After new research, most aspects of Edmund Gosse's characterization of his father's life and career in religion and science have been challenged by Douglas Wertheimer in Philip Henry Gosse: A Biography (2024) and elsewhere though the older view persists. There are three portraits of Gosse at the National Portrait Gallery, London.
Early life Philip Henry Gosse was born in Worcester in 1810, second of four children of Thomas Gosse (1765–1844), a mezzotint engraver and itinerant painter of miniature portraits, and Hannah (née Best), a lady's maid before her marriage. He spent his childhood mostly in Poole, Dorset, where his aunt, Susan Bell, taught him to draw and introduced him to zoology. She had similarly taught her own son, Thomas Bell, who was 18 years older and later became a great friend to Gosse. At 15, he began work as a clerk in the counting house of George Garland and Sons in Poole. In 1827 he sailed to Newfoundland to serve as a clerk in the Carbonear premises of Slade, Elson and Co. There, he became a dedicated, self-taught student of Newfoundland entomology, "the first person systematically to investigate and to record the entomology" of the island. While living in Carbonear, he wrote and illustrated an "exquisite" volume, never published, the "Entomologia Terrae Novae". In 1832, Gosse experienced a religious conversion and, as he described it, "solemnly, deliberately and uprightly, took God for my God". In 1835, he left Newfoundland for Compton, Lower Canada (now Quebec), where he farmed unsuccessfully for three years. He originally tried to establish a commune with two of his religious friends. The experience deepened his love for natural history, and locals referred to him as "that crazy Englishman who goes about picking up bugs". During that time, he became a member of the Natural History Society of Montreal and submitted specimens to its museum. In 1838 Gosse taught for eight months for Reuben Saffold, the owner of Belvoir plantation, near Pleasant Hill, Alabama. In that period, planters often hired private tutors to teach their children. Gosse also studied the local flora and fauna and drew illustrations of insects in a notebook titled Entomologia Alabamensis that were not published until 2010. The cotton plantation was in the Black Belt of Alabama, and Saffold held numerous enslaved labourers. Gosse recorded his negative impressions of slavery, later published as Letters from Alabama (1859).
Young naturalist and lay preacher Returning to England in 1839, Gosse was hard pressed to make a living and subsisted on eightpence a day ("one herring eaten as slowly as possible, and a little bread"). His fortunes began to improve when John Van Voorst, the leading publisher of naturalist writing, agreed, on the recommendation of Thomas Bell, to publish his Canadian Naturalist (1840). The book, set as a conversation between a father and his son (Gosse did not yet have a son), was widely praised. It is now considered to demonstrate that Gosse "had a practical grasp of the importance of conservation, far ahead of his time". Gosse opened a "Classical and Commercial School for Young Gentlemen" while keeping detailed records of his microscopic investigations of pond life, especially cyclopidae and rotifera. He also began to preach to the Wesleyan Methodists and led a Bible class. In 1842, he became so captivated by the doctrine of the Second Coming of Christ that he severed his connection with the Methodists and joined Brethren. Though Dissenters emphasised the Second Coming and rejected liturgy and an ordained ministry although they otherwise endorsed the traditional doctrines of Christianity as represented by the creeds of the Methodist and the Anglican Church. In 1843, Gosse gave up the school to write An Introduction to Zoology for the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) and to draw some of the illustrations. Writing the work inspired him to further his interest in the flora and fauna of the seashore. He showed in his book that he was a creationist, which was typical of pre-Darwinian naturalists.
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