Edmund Gosse's present reputation, at least outside the scholarly community, rests on his autobiography, Father and Son (1907). This was not always so. In 1931, three years after Gosse's death, T. S. Eliot reviewed Evan Charteris's The Life and Letters of Sir Edmund Gosse in the Criterion, claiming that "The place that Sir Edmund Gosse filled in the literary and social life of London is one that no one can ever fill again, because it is, so to speak, an office that has been abolished." Despite his tone, T. S. Eliot was paying tribute to Gosse's pivotal position in so many areas of English literary life during the preceding forty years. The range of Gosse's writings is impressive. An inventory of his principal nonfiction writings would include a substantial body of literary criticism and history and a number of important biographies as well as a major autobiography. He also produced...