Thomas Lovell Beddoes

Thomas Lovell Beddoes was a homosexual poet, dramatist and physician who was born at 3 Rodney Cottages, Clifton Down Road, Bristol in June 1803. Short and thick set, Beddoes was described as “innocently gay, with a gibe on his tongue, a mischievous eye, and locks curling like the hyacinth”. His work was admired by Edmund Gosse, Ezra Pound and Samuel Beckett.

His father was Dr Thomas Beddoes (1760-1808), a celebrated but eccentric practitioner noted for his treatment of tuberculosis. Dr Beddoes performed autopsies for his children’s edification and once led a horse upstairs to breathe on a bedridden patient. In the 1790s Dr Beddoes practised at a clinic in Hope Square, Hotwells, and later taught at the Pneumatic Institution in Dowry Square. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a family friend and Thomas Lovell Beddoes’s maternal aunt was the novelist, Maria Edgeworth.

Beddoes was baptised at St Andrews Church, Clifton in 1808 and attended Bath Grammar School (King Edward’s School), Broad Street. From 1817 he was a pupil of Charterhouse School after which he went to Oxford University.

He wrote the blank verse drama The Bride’s Tragedy in 1819 when he was 16. Published in 1822 the play was well reviewed. Reputed to be “founded on facts which occurred at Oxford” the plot revolves around the murder and burial of a secret bride. It has been suggested that sexual symbolism in the text hints at Beddoes homosexual activity at university.

Beddoes was obsessed with death, the macabre and the supernatural. Described as ”brilliant, solitary, eccentric, erratic, homosexual, politically radical, a poet of powerful, haunting imagination“, he was heavily influenced by Jacobean dramatists such as John Webster. Lytton Strachey dubbed him “the last Elizabethan”. In 1824 he met and befriended the widowed Mary Shelley, creator of Frankenstein whose writing shared many of Beddoes themes and preoccupations.

Beddoes returned to Bristol in the spring of 1824. In a letter in 1830 he wrote “I seem to myself a very Bristol diamond, not genuine, although glittery, just enough to be a sham”.

In 1825 Beddoes went to Göttingen in Germany to study medicine, motivated by hope of discovering physical evidence of a human spirit which survives after the death of the body. While at Göttingen Beddoes had a homosexual relationship with Benjamin Bernhard Reich, a Russian-Jewish medical student. Reich is probably the “long lost boy” in Beddoes’ poem Dream Pedlary: “Raise my loved long-lost boy – To lead me to his joy”.

He was expelled due to his radical thinking and in 1829 moved to Würzburg, Bavaria, where he completed his training, graduating as a doctor in 1832. He was deported the following year for expounding democratic theories and from then on led an itinerant life in Switzerland, practising medicine and continuing to write but publishing nothing. While living in Basle he had a homosexual relationship with Konrad Degen, a young baker who had ambitions to become an actor.

In 1825 he had begun to write Death’s Jest Book: The Fool’s Tragedy, a nightmarish drama of murder, disguise, revenge and ghosts. The play contains themes of Beddoes tormented sexuality and preoccupation with death, decay, dissection and abortion. Relationships between men and women (and men and men) are disrupted by rivalry and jealousy. The play depicts the social tragedy of repressive homophobia, turned into grotesque, dark comedy. Published in 1850, the year after Beddoes death, Death’s Jest was not performed until 2003 with a production at Fordham University, New York.

In his later years Beddoes became an increasingly disturbed manic depressive and an alcoholic.

Beddoes made a last visit to England in 1846. In a letter to a relative (a “Miss – of West Town, Bristol”) dated November 1848 he wrote “I am getting on very well”. In fact he had been contaminated by a diseased cadaver in Frankfurt and his health had deteriorated. Deeply depressed he attempted suicide by severing an artery in his leg with a razor. The wound became gangrenous and the leg was amputated in October 1848.

In January 1849 Beddoes, aged 45, took curare poison in Basle and died. He was buried in the hospital cemetery.

Jonathan Rowe 2024

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Lovell_Beddoes
Queer Places: http://www.elisarolle.com/queerplaces/pqrst/Thomas Lovell Beddoes.html
Carcanet (books):  https://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?owner_id=37
My Poetic Side (poems):  https://mypoeticside.com/poets/thomas-lovell-beddoes
Penny’s Poetry Pages (detailed biography): https://pennyspoetry.fandom.com/wiki/Thomas_Lovell_Beddoes
The Letters of Thomas Lovell Beddoes: https://archive.org/details/lettersofthomasl00bedd
Stanley Hutton: Bristol and Its Famous Associations (1907): https://archive.org/details/bristolitsfamous00hutt