Article Text
PDF
Abstract
Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803–1849) was a doctor and intermittently brilliant poet whose explorations of “the florid Gothic in poetry” (his words) offer some of the most haunting, claustrophobic, and grotesque verse in the English language. Son of the pioneering Bristol scientist Thomas Beddoes and nephew of Maria Edgeworth the novelist, he stemmed, like Mary Shelley, author of the celebrated novel Frankenstein, from a line of influential freethinkers. This article situates Beddoes’s work in the transition from the confident empiricism of the eighteenth century to the nineteenth century’s imaginative reaction to social and intellectual life after the Napoleonic wars. Having spent most of his adult life in Germany (where he studied anatomy with the famous biologist Blumenbach) and latterly Switzerland, Beddoes engaged in radical politics, dabbled in the occult, and may even have encountered the German doctor/playwright Georg Büchner, whose career parallels his own. Beddoes hoped that by reading the body literally, in terms of its material structure, he would be able to bring about a revival of English theatre. Inevitable defeat led him to develop his signature form of abject irony. In view of the current interest in semiotics (a development of medical semiology), and the subterranean analogies in Beddoes’s writing between the corpus and the corpse, his reputation ought to be rescued from the “critical pickle”.
- Thomas Lovell Beddoes
- English poetry
- rational philosophy
- galvanism
- Frankenstein
- Shelley
Statistics from Altmetric.com
Footnotes
-
↵* A fuller account of Thomas Beddoes’s life and times as a pioneering scientist is to be found in Roy Porter’s Flesh in the Age of Reason.3
-
↵** This potent phrase comes from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
-
↵*** Donner is quoting from a letter written by Beddoes in January 1825.
-
↵† Although Godwin, who preached property-sharing in addition to the dissolution of the “fraudulent” institution of marriage, was happy to accept money from Shelley, heir to an estate in Sussex, he could never come to terms with the fact that Mary, his daughter by the distinguished feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, should elope with a married man.
-
↵†† The editors of Death’s Jest-Book note, however, that “international interest in the poet and his work has never been greater”: a “dramatic travesty” of Death’s Jest-Book by J J McGann was even staged in summer 2003 in New York and Los Angeles. Beddoes’s major work has also been reinterpreted in terms of an encoded homoerotic tale.
-
↵‡ “It is not possible to conceive emotions more opposite than those excited by the aspect of a dead body, and by licentious conversation; or even by jests, from which, unfortunately, many persons of reflection, and, in other respects, of decent conduct, do not restrain themselves in the presence of boys. No power would afterwards be able to deprive the ideas, impressed by such a sight, of their serious complection.” Thomas Lovell senior quoted by H W Donner.13
-
↵‡‡ In one of the best essays on Beddoes’s poetry, Christopher Ricks makes a convincing argument for Beddoes as a poet who lived before his time, the 1830s being the decade in which Tennyson and Browning discovered the full possibilities of the dramatic monologue, “the most inaugurative of nineteenth century poetic kinds”.16