In his memoir, Father and Son (1907), Gosse recalls an incident involving Susan Flood, a young female member of the Plymouth Brethren, which occurred when she accompanied relatives to the original Crystal Palace exhibition in London’s Hyde Park. Faced with naked statues, Susan was so affronted that she ran amok among the sculptures, was arrested, and brought before a magistrate. This account is preceded in the text by Gosse’s own experience of statuary as a thirteen-year-old boy. His first encounter comes in the form of steel engravings of statues of Greek gods he discovers in a gift book belonging to his mother. It is evidently a key moment in his intellectual and sexual development as he finds himself violently attracted to them. Asked by Edmund about these ancient gods, Gosse’s father, the naturalist and lay preacher, Philip Henry Gosse, proclaims them wicked, and this incident clearly set up a conflict between his family’s evangelical Christianity and Gosse’s growing pagan aestheticism. Later in life, the strong emotions elicited by the steel engravings seen in childhood resurface the unacknowledged sexual frisson that marked his relationship with the sculptor Hamo Thornycroft. This lecture considers how these emotions are expressed covertly in Gosse’s discourses on sculpture and in his poetry.