Academic and professional historians are not the only people interested in sciences past. The author of this book, Roger S. Wotton, is a case in point: he is an emeritus professor of biology at University College London writing about a Victorian naturalist. Self-published, and written by a non-historian for a popular audience, the book seeks to recover the reputation of the much-maligned nineteenth-century naturalist Philip Henry Gosse. Although P.H. Gosse was highly respected as a scientist and author in the mid-Victorian period, his son Edmund Gosse's widely read and well-regarded 1907 memoir, Father and Son, reflected a dour, ignorant, intolerant and controlling man whose conservative religious faith got in the way of his science – an understanding then broadly adopted. Wotton uses sympathy, based on parallels with his own life, to make the views of each Gosse plausible and understandable. The book is divided into five sections: first, a narrative of Wotton's own upbringing emphasizing his religious and secular educations; second, a biography of P.H. Gosse; third, summaries of P.H. Gosse's most controversial works, including Omphalos (1857) and The Romance of Natural History (1860–1861); fourth, a brief biography of Edmund Gosse, summarized mostly from his own Father and Son contrasted with a few other contemporary accounts; and fifth, Wotton's own general meditations on science and religion. If Wotton's pop-psychological speculations about the Gosses’ psyches are set aside, only the first and fifth sections, about Wotton himself, contribute original material.

Unfortunately, the book falters on a number of methodological and philosophical points. Most relevantly for readers of this journal, it fails to meet the rigorous standards of history as an academic discipline, whatever its methodology, in the three sections devoted to the Gosses. This critique, however, is partly unfair because the book is not written for academic historians, but for someone else – although who is unclear. Judged as a popular book, then, it does introduce the Gosses and convincingly argues against the received blackening of Philip Henry's reputation. But its tone is occasionally condescending, its narrative drags and its language is run of the mill. Additionally, even non-academic books should be aware of larger discussions within the historiography which they summarize. Regrettably, this book reiterates tired generalizations about a ‘conflict’ between science and religion in the Victorian period (and today), about Victorian culture more broadly (men were always the uncontested heads of household, for example), and about the personal closed-mindedness of conservative religious believers (although noting that P.H. Gosse was friendly to Darwin as a naturalist, while rejecting his evolutionary ideas, Wotton continues to talk about Gosse's personal antipathy toward anyone who disagreed with him).

While the historical sections add no original content or argument, the first and fifth sections about Wotton himself present a different type of material. Although useless to historians of nineteenth-century science and uncompelling to popular readers, the book may be valuable as a primary source for scholars studying the lives of contemporary scientists, their engagement with their own sciences’ past, their attitudes towards religion, and their early educations and family lives. However, the book has very little to offer those studying science and religion, for the fifth section, under the title ‘Henry Gosse and the negativity of religious faith’ makes sweeping and uninformed comments about various topics swirling around in that field without engaging in conversation with any of its now well-developed bodies of thought.

Walking with Gosse implicitly and accidentally raises major questions about interdisciplinarity and about who gets to own history by telling it. Written for an academic journal, this review has used the standards of academia to assess the value of the book. But while its stylistic flaws mar its potential popularity, the book challenges the academic ownership of the scientific past. Where humanities scholars are usually the ones telling science's story, here we have a scientist doing it. And while he does not meet our historiographical standards or achieve a robust interdisciplinarity, he reveals that science's history may be told by other people, for other reasons, and using other methods.