Thomas Lovell Beddoes, the nineteenth-century English poet- physician, remains a shadowy and largely unknown figure. His farcical grotesquerie was said to have influenced Samuel Beckett but when I wrote to Beckett in 1986, he replied tersely: ‘I have not heard of him. Sorry.’ Assuming Beckett was telling the truth, here was further proof of Beddoes’s strange oblivion. In modern times perhaps only T. S. Eliot approached Beddoes for his comically nauseated vision of our mortality. That may be why Ezra Pound wrote: ‘Strange, is it not, that Mr Eliot has not given more time to Mr Beddoes, prince of morticians.’ Beddoes’s great poem ‘Dream-Pedlary’, written in 1830 under the spell of Keats and Shelley, is one of the most sublimely tender lyrics in the English language.
If there were dreams to sell,
What would you buy?
Some cost a passing bell;
Some a light sigh,
That shakes from Life’s fresh crown
Only a roseleaf down.
Few poets have written so exquisitely of life’s uncertainty; Beddoes was known as ‘the last Elizabethan’ for his poetry’s doleful cemetery music and the moony ghostliness (‘moony’ was his favourite adjective) of his imagination. In 1817, at the age of 14, Beddoes was sent to board at Charterhouse school in London, a former Carthusian monastery situated on the edge of Smithfield meat market. The area, a clanging, shouting hell of drovers and squealing animals, had grown monstrously by the time Beddoes arrived. Ro
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Subscribe now or Sign inThomas Lovell Beddoes, the nineteenth-century English poet- physician, remains a shadowy and largely unknown figure. His farcical grotesquerie was said to have influenced Samuel Beckett but when I wrote to Beckett in 1986, he replied tersely: ‘I have not heard of him. Sorry.’ Assuming Beckett was telling the truth, here was further proof of Beddoes’s strange oblivion. In modern times perhaps only T. S. Eliot approached Beddoes for his comically nauseated vision of our mortality. That may be why Ezra Pound wrote: ‘Strange, is it not, that Mr Eliot has not given more time to Mr Beddoes, prince of morticians.’ Beddoes’s great poem ‘Dream-Pedlary’, written in 1830 under the spell of Keats and Shelley, is one of the most sublimely tender lyrics in the English language.
If there were dreams to sell,
What would you buy?
Some cost a passing bell;
Some a light sigh,
That shakes from Life’s fresh crown
Only a roseleaf down.
Few poets have written so exquisitely of life’s uncertainty; Beddoes was known as ‘the last Elizabethan’ for his poetry’s doleful cemetery music and the moony ghostliness (‘moony’ was his favourite adjective) of his imagination. In 1817, at the age of 14, Beddoes was sent to board at Charterhouse school in London, a former Carthusian monastery situated on the edge of Smithfield meat market. The area, a clanging, shouting hell of drovers and squealing animals, had grown monstrously by the time Beddoes arrived. Round his boarding-house on Wilderness Row the drains were choked with animal effluvia; Pissing Alley (now Passing Alley, off St John Street) was ankle-deep in blood and shambles. To Georgian town planners the meat market’s proximity to St Bartholomew’s Hospital was a scandal. William Thackeray, who entered the Charter house a couple of years after Beddoes, referred to the school as ‘The Slaughterhouse’. The gibber and gloom of Smithfield inevitably wormed its way into Beddoes’s darkly off-putting poems. The London saturnalia known as Bartholomew Fair was held annually on 24 August in the vicinity of his school. In 1819, amid a din of crackers and squeaky toy trumpets, Beddoes would have encountered the pantomime characters King Maximo Rotundo, Jumble Juzzy and Doctor Bolus, names vaguely reminiscent of the title of his lost Charterhouse novel, Cynthio and Bugboo. Nothing would have pleased him more than the sellout Harlequine Faustus! (or The Devil Will Have His Own) in which a diabolical Luciferno Daemon queened it in blood-red stockings and a joke-book Spanish ruff. Beddoes’s schoolboy novella Scaroni: or The Mysterious Cave groans with skeletons, nuns and screech owls from Bartholomew Fair burlesque and the School of Terror popularized by Horace Walpole. His first poetry collection, The Improvisatore, completed at the Charterhouse in 1821, was no less fixated on mortality. Beddoes chose to give the poems the Chatterton-like antiquarian term ‘fyttes’ (‘Fits indeed!’ grumbled one reviewer. ‘Hysterical decidedly’). Beddoes was barely 18. After he graduated in medicine from Pembroke College, Oxford, in 1826 Beddoes enrolled in an anatomy course at the University of Göttingen in Germany. In between lectures he conceived an ambitious, wildly over-long verse drama provisionally titled Death’s Jest-Book. ‘I think it will be entertaining, very unamiable, & utterly unpopular,’ he wrote (with characteristic contrary glee) to a friend back in England. Death’s Jest-Book was to be Beddoes’s masterwork. The play is grimly funny at times, with flights of ghoulish absurdity and grim Dürer-like contemplations of human anatomy. ‘After all,’ croaks a character, ‘being dead’s not so bad once one’s got into the knack of it.’ Because of its inordinate length, Death’s Jest-Book has rarely been performed except as a sort of Bartholomew-like harlequinade and indeed it was not staged in its entirety until 2003 in a production at Fordham University in New York. (The avant-garde New York poet John Ashbery, a lifelong Beddoes admirer, may have attended.) Only fragments of the five-act play shine out as enduring literature, but beneath the occasionally stilted dialogue and near-static plot are slivers of gemlike poetry (the madrigal ‘If Thou Wilt Ease Thine Heart’) and slices of proto-Surrealist fantasy (the dirge ‘Old Adam, the Carrion Crow’). Patrick Leigh Fermor, who until his death in 2011 was patron of the Thomas Lovell Beddoes Society, com mended the play’s ‘dark humour and mockery’, while the critic (and Bob Dylan devotee) Christopher Ricks praised Beddoes as the ‘poet of wormy circumstance’. The play owes a great deal to Jacobean funerary art and the glow in-the dark skulls of Jacobean revenge melodrama. Each morning at the Charterhouse the pupils had to line up in front of the tomb of the school’s founder, Thomas Sutton, which was chiselled with scythes, hour glasses and skeletons enscrolled with Latin tags warning of life’s transitoriness. (Sutton, a London philanthropist, was a model, incidentally, for Ben Jonson’s foxy Volpone.) The three years Beddoes spent amid the darkness of mid-Georgian Smithfield certainly left their mark on Death’s Jest-Book. To judge by Beddoes’s correspondence (edited and published by Edmund Gosse in 1894), Death’s Jest-Book was originally conceived as an occult revenge tragedy which mocks and ‘unmasks’ our fear of death. The play has a cast of zanies, jesters and ghosts with strikingly odd names such as Thorwald, Athulf and Homunculus Mandrake the ‘amateur goblin’. The subplot of fratricidal rivalry between the Duke of Münsterberg’s sons Isbrand and Wolfram is clogged with puerile jokes and is frankly stodgy. (Beddoes can be frightful in quite another sense of the word.) But much of the play, with its zoological conceits and sense of a godless materialism, is strikingly modern and inhabits the border zone between literature and science. In fact science was a long-standing tradition in the Beddoes family; the writer’s father was the eccentric Bristol-based physician Dr Thomas Beddoes who prescribed quantities of nitrous oxide (laughing gas) to Samuel Taylor Coleridge and urged his consumptive patients to sleep in cowsheds for the perceived beneficial ‘vapours’. Beddoes worked with concentrated energy on Death’s Jest-Book while in Göttingen, where he may have met the German dramatist and fellow medical student Georg Büchner (author of that cruel masterpiece Woyzeck), whose own atheism anticipated elements of evolutionary theory. Within three years, a first draft was ready. Dated 1829, the play was subtitled The Fool’s Tragedy but it was in narrative disarray, and friends in England urged Beddoes to make significant revisions if the play was to be at all performable. Beddoes’s young ambition was badly dented by his friends’ verdict of literary failure, and for the rest of his brief life he was intermit tently suicidal. In 1848 he was rushed to a hospital in Switzerland after drunkenly opening an artery in his leg. Gangrene set in and the limb was amputated below the knee. Finally, on 26 January 1849, Beddoes ingested a lethal poison. ‘I am food for what I am good for – worms,’ he wrote from his deathbed. Beddoes had ‘died in solitude, by his own hand’, Evelyn Waugh laments in Put Out More Flags. He was only 42. The day he died in far-distant Basle, an outbreak of cholera was reported in the south London wasteland of Tooting. Beddoes might have been amused by that. He sometimes signed himself Theobold Grimbottle. Over two decades Beddoes had revised Death’s Jest-Book with a view to publishing an improved version. It is not known exactly what amendments were made, but each alteration was incorporated into the ‘finished’ work which he finally submitted for publication in the year of his death. Two versions of Death’s Jest-Book are consequently extant: that of 1829 and that of 1849. The Romantic literature profes sor Michael Bradshaw and the poet Alan Halsey published separate new editions of the two texts in 2003 which, taken together, provided the first full variorum of Beddoes’s crowning achievement. Beddoes (whose instinct always was to amplify rather than pare down) added a number of significant new characters as well as nine new songs for the 1849 play. In both the earlier and the later versions the dirges and madrigals that punctuate the action are designed to blend the sensuous with the loathly. The Cavalier poets Richard Crashaw and Richard Lovelace – both former Charterhouse pupils – clearly left their courtly imprint on Beddoes, whose play found a lugubrious comedy in human failings.If man could see
The perils and diseases that he elbows
Each day he walks a mile, which catch at him,
Which fall behind and graze him as he passes,
Then would he know that
Life’s a single pilgrim
Fighting unarmed among a thousand soldiers.
Aldous Huxley, in his fine 1920s novel Those Barren Leaves, exalts the work of the ‘blood-curdling’ anatomist-poet Beddoes, and Dorothy L. Sayers quotes liberally from Death’s Jest-Book in her 1932 murder mystery Have His Carcase. But there is another, more intriguing Beddoes connection. Smithfield Charterhouse is now an almshouse for the elderly and no longer a school. Its most distinguished pensioner until he died there in 2001 was the writer Simon Raven, whose deliciously nasty novel sequence Alms for Oblivion teems with allusions to Beddoes and his necromantic imagination. Raven’s bisexual hero, the ruined, ravaged Fielding Gray, happens to be writing a fiction pointedly titled Love’s Jest-Book. Beddoes was himself homosexual. His first companion in his German exile was a Russian Jewish student, Bernhard Reich; later he lived with a Swiss-German baker boy. For most of his German exile Beddoes was rude and excoriating about England (‘Britannia drink your tea, for Britons, Bores, and butter’d toast, they all begin with B’). In 1840 during a fleeting visit to London he tried to burn down Drury Lane theatre with a lighted five-pound note. His wayward behaviour was attributed to his fond ness for alcohol and his anger that no one wanted to stage his play. The man Graham Greene called the ‘filibustering medical poet’ has long been fit for revival and one day I shall write his biography. Death’s Jest-Book, with its gallows humour and spookish, gleeful morbidity, is a tonic for our times.Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 91 © Ian Thomson 2026
About the contributor
Ian Thomson is Primo Levi’s biographer. He is currently completing a book for Faber & Faber set in the Baltic during the Second World War.
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