On being second-rate: the Skeleton Art of Thomas Lovell Beddoes

Yearbook of English Studies, Annual, 2006 by Daniel Karlin

Thomas Lovell Beddoes is periodically subject to critical resurrection, in an attempt to secure his 'rightful place' in the canon. But Beddoes himself offers a different perspective on his life's work--principally its central ruin, Death's Jest-Book. He repeatedly described himself as a second-rate poet, inferior to the Romantic poets he worshipped (especially Shelley); his modesty is not feigned, but passionate and principled, as is his disgust with contemporary literary culture in both its artistic and commercial manifestations. He confronted his own troubled, fitfully brilliant mind with complete honesty; we owe him the justice of taking him at his word.

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   Poor bird, that cannot ever
   Dwell high in tower of song:
   Whose heart-breaking endeavour
   But palls the lazy throng.

   (Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1))

Mr Creakle, the bullying schoolmaster in David Copperfield, 'couldn't resist a chubby boy'. 'There was a fascination in such a subject', David observes, 'which made him restless in his mind, until he had scored and marked him for the day.' The chubbiest boy in the school is honest, honourable, likeable Tommy Traddles:

Poor Traddles! In a tight sky-blue suit that made his arms and legs like German sausages, or roly-poly puddings, he was the merriest and most miserable of all the boys. He was always being caned--I think he was caned every day that half-year, except one holiday Monday when he was only ruler'd on both hands--and was always going to write to his uncle about it, and never did. After laying his head on the desk for a little while, he would cheer up, somehow, begin to laugh again, and draw skeletons all over his slate, before his eyes were dry. I used at first to wonder what comfort Traddles found in drawing skeletons; and for some time looked upon him as a sort of hermit, who reminded himself by those symbols of mortality that caning couldn't last for ever. But I believe he only did it because they were easy, and didn't want any features. (2)

David Copperfield began appearing in May 1849, four months after the suicide, in Basel, of Thomas Lovell Beddoes. When the last number appeared in November 1850, Beddoes's masterpiece Death's Jest-Book had at last been published, albeit posthumously and in a mutilated form. (3) In his twenty-five years of self-exile in Germany and Switzerland--a sort of hermit, certainly, as far as English literature was concerned--Beddoes ate his fair share of Germansausages; he too delighted to draw skeletons, and it seems to have cheered him up, somehow, though it gave him in the end the courage to die rather than live. His last letter, found on his body, begins 'I am food for what I am good for--worms' (Works, p. 683), a jest in grim earnest; but then Death's Jest-Book itself, and indeed all Beddoes's work, looks in retrospect like a suicide note in the making. What troubles me is David's (Dickens's) comment about skeletons being easy to draw because they 'didn't want any features'. It goes to the heart of Beddoes's limitations as a poet and dramatist, limitations perceived by himself as much as by others. Time and again what is superb, unsurpassable in Beddoes is undone by this want of feature. It took the humane encompassing imagination of Dickens to conceive the chubby boy's fantasy of reduction--the yearning of those roly-poly-puddingy limbs to be divested of caneable flesh. It is one thing to see the skull beneath the skin. But what if you see nothing else?

Thomas Lovell Beddoes was a second-rate writer. He thought so himself; he was that rare thing, an honest, unaffected self-dispraiser. Modern literary criticism finds it hard to make such judgements--cultural relativism, the growth of sectarian enclaves in literature as in other arts, the grade inflation of both high and popular culture, all combine to make us shun the principle of comparative achievement. We are so fearfully supportive that we undermine ourselves; our critical vocabulary is swamped in effusiveness. We are in denial about mediocrity.

What happened to Beddoes, during his writing life and afterwards, has a bearing on the history of literary reputations and the practice which goes under the current name of 'canon formation'. Beddoes has always had very strong partisans-from personal friends such as Thomas Forbes Kelsall, his lifelong, and death-long, champion, literary executor, and first editor, to kindred poets such as Landor, Browning, and Pound--even though their partisanship has sometimes had something ambivalent or blighted about it. (4) Literary criticism has been equally zealous, from Edmund Gosse and Lytton Strachey to Northrop Frye and Christopher Ricks. (5) And yet, almost from the beginning, admirers have had to face the problem of Beddoes, his intractable refusal to cooperate with the conventional processes of literary name-making--which is one of the reasons for admiration. The effort to save Beddoes from himself began early, with the memoir which Kelsall axed to his posthumously published edition, and has continued ever since, in a pattern of revival and retreat which critics themselves recognize as exasperatingly apt. Beddoes's obsessive interest in death, burial, resurrection, and immortality makes critical self-reflexiveness hard to avoid; he is always being figuratively dug up, with the guilty critic making a virtue of necessity, using Beddoes's own phrases and images to do the spadework. The ghost of Beddoes haunts his own ruin; we dissect his corpus, in an act of critical anatomy for which he himself wrote the textbook; we are bookworms, preserving what we devour; alternatively Beddoes feeds off us, like a vampire sustaining his un-dead literary existence. All these figures occur in Beddoes, and all have been turned to account in critical writing on him. The pressure of Beddoes's own self-consciousness, the sense of his having been there beforehand, often seems palpable and unnerving.