Author: Beddoes, Thomas Lovell
Biography:
BEDDOES, Thomas Lovell (1803-49: ODNB)
The second of four children of Dr. Thomas Beddoes (q.v.) and his wife Anna Maria Elers Edgeworth, he was born at Clifton, Gloucestershire, on 30 June 1803. When Dr. Beddoes died in 1808, his children were left in the care of their mother and a friend, Davies Giddy (later Gilbert; q.v.). They moved to Great Malvern and then to Bath where he attended the grammar school before going to Charterhouse in 1817. He excelled academically and showed the independence of thought that characterised his adult life. His crudely nationalistic first publication may have been a satiric joke: “The Comet” (Morning Post 6 July 1819) was printed as by “E. D. Bodes.” He matriculated at Pembroke College, Oxford, on 1 May 1820 (BA 1825, MA 1828) and published The Improvisatore which he afterwards attempted to suppress. Beddoes admired Shelley (q.v.) and was one of four guarantors who enabled Mary Shelley to publish his Posthumous Poems of 1824. He entered Göttingen University in 1825 to study physiology, chemistry, and surgery. There he began writing Death’s Jest-Book, or, The Fool’s Tragedy, versions of which preoccupied him for the rest of his life. Expelled from the university for riotous behaviour, he moved to Würzburg where he graduated MD on 10 Sept. 1831. His radical political activity in support of a united Germany led to an order to leave Würzburg in 1832; he lived his remaining years in Zurich, Basel, Berlin, Baden in Aargau, and Frankfurt. Although he visited England in 1846-47, he felt alienated from English society. In 1848 in Frankfurt he suffered from blood poisoning caused by an accident while he was dissecting. After his recovery he moved to a hotel in Basel where in July 1848 he opened an artery in his leg. When gangrene set in, the leg was amputated. Beddoes died in the Basel hospital on 26 Jan. 1849; although hospital records gave the cause as apoplexy it was almost certainly suicide by curare. His body was interred in the vault of the hospital. His friend T. F. Kelsall wrote a memoir and published Death's Jest-Book (1850) and Poems Posthumous and Collected (1851). He left his small English property to his brother Charles who, with Revell Phillips, was appointed executor of his estate. (ODNB 9 Mar. 2023; ancestry.co.uk 9 Mar. 2023; T. F. Kelsall, “Memoir,” in Poems Posthumous and Collected [1851]; Morning Post 6 July 1819, p. 3; R. S. Edgecombe, “Canning’s ‘Sainte Guillotine’ and Beddoes’s ‘Comet’,” Keats-Shelley Review 27 [2013] 26-30)