The Underwater Adventure of "only a little boy"

This essay considers an item of Gosse’s juvenilia entitled “Sleep in the Deep” (Add. 7027/ 17) in relation to the depiction of his childhood and adolescence in Father and Son, seeking not to prove or disprove the veracity of the latter, so much as to explore how far these two texts are mutually illuminating despite being separated by almost half a century. I conclude that "Sleep in the Deep" encompasses the bewildering feelings of a boy on the brink of puberty, but who is just starting to learn how to read and how to write fiction, who is starting to doubt the solidity and integrity of the world he has inhabited thus far.