The Corpus and the Corpse. Thomas Lovell Beddoes and the Limitations of Anatomy.

Little known Physio-poet Thomas Beddoes was born into a literary family, his mother was the sister of the novelist Maria Edgeworth and his father (a physician, scientist, and radical educator) a friend of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

 Beddoes was educated at Oxford and, like his literary hero Percy Bysshe Shelley, published his first book, a Gothic romp entitled The Improvisatore, while still an undergraduate. His next work, The Bride's Tragedy (1822), follows in the tradition of the revenge drama, and was heavily influenced by Shakespeare and other Renaissance writers; it had the further distinction of being the only financial success Beddoes ever had. He spent most of his adult life in various cities in Continental Europe (once being banished from Göttingen because of drunkenness, later being banished from Bavaria and Sweden for radical political activity), studying medicine and anatomy as well as writing. Most of his literary energy was devoted to Death's Jest-Book, begun in 1828.

“I search with avidity for every shadow of proof or probability of an after-existence” Sadly Beddoes never achieved his goal and his growing sense of disillusionment eventually led to his second,

and this time, successful attempt at suicide in 1849. “I am food for what I am good for – worms”, he wrote in his last letter and will to friend Revell Phillips. Beddoes is often described by his critics as having a ‘death drive’ or ‘skeleton complex’ which has been linked not only to early bereavements but to his father the elder Dr.Beddoes habit of performing dissections in front of his children, for educational purposes.

            Throughout his medical studies and writing Beddoes displays an obsession with an explanation for death, the nature of the soul and the existence of an after-life; his scientific search concealing an “emotional one of almost manic intensity.” Beddoes has been known as a ‘poet of fragments’ as he destroyed much of his own work demonstrating a perfectionist nature which ultimately to a creative dry-spell, meaning that arguably his best known work Death’s Jest-Book was not published until 1850 posthumously, with a memoir by his friend T. F. Kelsall. Death’s Jest-Book was a  piece of work that had frustrated Beddoes, he himself naming it ‘still-born’, ‘never-ending and a ‘horrible waste of time’. His collected poems followed in 1851. Critics have found it difficult to neatly summarise Beddoes, as illustrated in this quote by Susan Wolfson and Peter Manning.

 The last Elizabethan, a Jacobean scion, an eighteenth-century graveyard poet resurrected in the Romantic age, an original interpreter of the English-German vogue of ‘Gothic’ terror, the dark rearguard of second-generation Romanticism, a soul-mate of Baudelaire and Poe, the first modernist and, with his comic grotesqueries, a precursor of the twentieth-century theater of the absurd.”

             This perhaps explains why this pastiche of a poet has captured my interest and that of many critics displayed in a bibliography (which is by no means comprehensive at this stage) below.

I intend to look at Beddoe’s exploration of the body and the soul in his selected works and place it in the context of the “nineteenth century medical culture’s treatment of the soul (uneasy with the notion of its existence yet unable to deny the possibility) The question being whether he achieves his goal of “healing the disjunction” between the soul and the physical body.

Further info about Beddoe's.