Reviewed by: The Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Lovell Beddoes John H. Baker The Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Lovell Beddoes. Edited by Ute Berns and Michael Bradshaw. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. Pp. 292. ISBN 978 0 7546 6009 5. £60. When Thomas Lovell Beddoes committed suicide in Switzerland in 1849 he felt, like the dying Keats, that his career had been a failure. As he wrote in his suicide note: 'I ought to have been among other things a good poet'. A cursory examination of his life would initially support this harsh self-diagnosis. Born in 1803, Beddoes attained his critical apotheosis in 1822, at the tender age of nineteen. His verse tragedy, The Bride's Tragedy, was highly acclaimed by the literary journals of the day, and the youthful Beddoes seemed set for a successful career. Incredibly, however, this marked the zenith of the fame Beddoes would enjoy in his homeland in his lifetime. As far as the critics were concerned, the promising Beddoes simply vanished, never to reappear. He left England for Germany and a new career in medicine in 1825, throwing himself into his scientific studies and radical politics. A moody, irascible and somewhat intimidating character by all accounts, Beddoes did not make friends easily and his political beliefs (and probable homosexuality) isolated him yet further. These European years were marked by obsessive study and political activity (he was deported from Bavaria in 1832 as a dangerous subversive), but Beddoes did not abandon poetry. He spent this period working on what is now regarded as his greatest achievement, Death's Jest-Book, a huge blank-verse tragedy much concerned with his characteristic themes of death and decay. He completed a first draft by 1829, but a negative reaction from two of his three most trusted friends (perhaps sparked by the play's alarming political and sexual heterodoxy) put him off publication and plunged him into a depression that seems to have haunted him for the rest of his life. He continued to revise and expand the drama on and off until his death, though apparently without any serious hope of seeing it published or staged. Beddoes's final decade seems unfocused and rootless. He moved from Switzerland to Germany and back again. He formed a close relationship with a young man, Konrad Degen, that ended unhappily. He had been drinking heavily for many years by this stage, and the failure of his relationship with Degen (perhaps the closest of his life) may have been the last straw. An attempt to commit suicide by opening an artery in his leg failed and led to the leg's amputation. A second attempt, this time with poison, proved successful in January 1849. In England he had long been forgotten, save by a handful of devoted friends, one of whom, Thomas Kelsall, collected and posthumously published most of his work. Beddoes's poetry is not to everyone's taste. It is certainly true that mortality is a continual preoccupation; Beddoes's father was a celebrated physician, and it has long been speculated that early exposure to corpses and dissections cast a pall over the young Thomas's imagination. Rather less well-known is the fact that Beddoes can be hilariously funny – his poetry is often of a grimly sardonic cast, and the humour is of the blackest, but his reputation for unrelenting gloom is undeserved. Until relatively recently, Beddoes was an unjustly neglected figure, for various reasons. His poetic career inconveniently straddles the 'Romantic' and 'Victorian' periods. His departure for Europe in 1825 removed him from the British literary scene for the latter half of his life. His poetry often has a 'fragmentary' quality. He never finished his greatest work. His eccentric individuality has made him impossible to slot into any neat category. Nevertheless, in recent years there has been a remarkable flowering of critical interest in this weird figure. Death's Jest Book was successfully staged for the first time in 2003, new editions of Beddoes's major works [End Page 84] have been published and critics have begun to explore his work from a variety of new and refreshing angles. The editors of this new collection, Ute Berns and...