Glimpses of the Wonderful: the life of Philip Henry Gosse by Ann Thwaite

A Victorian who lived for insects and angels

Taxonomy is too close to trainspotting for today's taste, so it is good to remember the Victorian passion as a foundation of modern science, even if the results were often melancholy: butterflies pinned out in glass drawers and, as Ann Thwaite notes, rock pools bereft of all but two types of anemone. Her subject was largely responsible for this, through popular books on seashore life that gave families something "educational" to do on holiday.

PH Gosse's other claim to fame was the domestic aquarium. For his contributions to zoology, he was elected to the Royal Society, an impressive accolade for a man of modest origins, whose commitment to Protestantism paralleled that to pond life.

Born in 1810, this son of a provincial portrait painter was 17 when he went as a clerk to the seal-hunting stations of Newfoundland. He conquered loneliness with entomology and religion. After farming in Quebec, teaching in Alabama and bird- and bee-collecting in Jamaica (the happiest episode), Gosse returned to Britain, married and published books on mammals, molluscs, fish and reptiles, with his own exquisite drawings.

All revealed the wonder of God's creation, and Gosse combined biology with preaching to groups of Brethren, who had not yet become Exclusive. But their adherence to the Bible's literal truth was hard to reconcile with extinction, and shortly before Darwin's Origin, Gosse proffered his own creationist explanation: God made the fossil record on the same day as the whales and the fowls. It was not acclaimed.

Harder to bear was his son's apostasy. Edmund Gosse justified this in Father and Son by depicting his father as a tyrannical puritan. For those who have read the memoir or Thwaite's account of Edmund's life, a highlight comes when son asks father to fund publication of his awful verse. Books without purchasers are not worth pushing, writes father, a bestselling author. Edmund insisted, and the volume sold 12 copies. As Thwaite shows, almost every statement in Father and Son is false.

She judges Gosse sympathetically and by his own lights: good principles that do not help to convey his joy in microscopic classification, or the fear that made him cleave to a belief that the Second Coming was scheduled for 1844, or 1866, or 1881... He died, disappointed, in 1888.