Born in 1803 in Clifton, Bristol, Beddoes was the second of four children born to Anna (née Edgeworth, sister of the novelist Maria Edgeworth) and Dr Thomas Beddoes, an acclaimed physician and author. After the death of his father in 1808, Beddoes and his family relocated to Great Malvern, Worcestershire in 1811 and then to Bath in 1814. Excelling at Charterhouse School (enrolling in 1817), Beddoes then went up to Pembroke College, Oxford in 1820.
Beddoes’s first publication was a short poem in heroic couplets, ‘The Comet’, which appeared in the Morning Post, 5 July 1819; its prophetic and controlled voice recalls Byron’s ‘Darkness’. On beginning his degree at Oxford, he entered into a period of intense creativity. He published The Improvisatore, in Three Fyttes, with other Poems in March 1821, despite coming to regret the collection, and in November 1822, Rivington published The Brides’ Tragedy. Earning the notice of Bryan Waller Procter (Barry Cornwall, a respected contemporary poet) and George Darley, this drama showed Beddoes earning his spurs as a playwright in the Jacobean tradition, and between 1823 and 1825 he wrote various dramatic fragments, including The Second Brother, Torrismond, Love’s Arrow Poisoned, and The Last Man. These early publications reveal his ability to write a blank verse deeply inspired by the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, yet speaking with his own often macabre, haunting, and sardonic voice. An additional major source of inspiration was Percy Bysshe Shelley, especially but by no means only as the author of the drama The Cenci, and in 1824 he stood guarantor with Procter, Kelsall (later Beddoes’s literary executor), and Nicholas Waller for the publication of Shelley’s Posthumous Poems.
After his mother’s death in Florence in 1824 (he did not arrive at her deathbed in time), Beddoes returned to Oxford to complete his studies, but he soon left England to move to Germany to study medicine. Enrolled in the medical school in Göttingen, Beddoes was both an excellent academic asset to the university and a liability owing to his misconduct (financial as well as personal). Having written a large part of Death’s Jest‐Book, or, The Fool’s Tragedy by 1829, Beddoes was devastated by the negative reactions of Procter, Kelsall, and J. G. H. Bourne, which intensified his descent into drinking and debauchery. Ironically, this is now the work by Beddoes that attracts the most critical praise, but the censure of his friends led him to never publish it, despite reworking it frequently in the 1830s and 1840s. After being asked to leave the university in Göttingen, Beddoes began to study again in Würzburg, receiving his degree in September 1831. His involvement in radical politics, however, saw him banished from Bavaria in 1832 and he moved to Switzerland, until finally he was expelled from Zürich in 1840 and returned to Germany. Though his interests had moved from the poetic to the political, Beddoes kept writing satiric and lyric poetry and revising Death’s Jest‐Book. He met Konrad Degen, a baker for whom he apparently developed romantic feelings, and when he returned to England for a visit in 1846–7, Beddoes’s dissipation disturbed his family and friends. When he returned to Frankfurt, he contracted blood poisoning from a diseased cadaver. After falling out with Degen, he returned to Basel in despair. He committed suicide and was found on 26 January 1849; his friends and family hushed up the tragic circumstances of his death. One of the most significant third‐generation Romantic poets, as Michael Bradshaw writes, ‘Beddoes’s career was impelled by early acclaim which he avidly watched unfold in the pages of Blackwood’s and The London Magazine, but which he could never replicate with his mature writing’.1 However, critics have brought and continue to bring Beddoes’s significant achievements into the larger Romantic arena.
Alan Halsey, ‘Beddoes, Thomas Lovell (1803–1849)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2007 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/1920, accessed 9 September 2015]; Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803–1849): doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/1920; Shelley S. Rees, ‘Thomas Lovell Beddoes’, The Literary Encyclopedia, first published 13 February 2006 [http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=324, accessed 09 September 2015].