THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES was born in Clifton in Bristol, the son of the renowned scientist and radical Thomas Beddoes and Anna, sister of the novelist Maria Edgeworth. He published The Bride's Tragedy (1822) to critical acclaim while still an undergraduate student at Oxford. Encouraged by this early success, he aspired to fame as a poet and dramatist: his passion for Shakespeare and early modern drama led him to draft several new tragedies in the Elizabethan / Jacobean style, which now exist only as a collection of fragments. In his reading of modern writers, Beddoes was a devout admirer of Shelley, assisting with the publication of his Posthumous Poems (1824). In 1825 Beddoes commited himself to the study of medicine, travelling to Germany, where he enroled at the University of Gottingen. At the same time as embarking on his medical studies, he began to write the text that was to become a lifelong obsession - Death's Jest Book. Beddoes had an uneven medical career, complicated at times by his involvement in radical political movements: he travelled widely, settling in various university cities in Switzerland and Germany. He frequently fell prey to depression; and became increasingly isolated from friends and family in England, claiming to be more at home in German than in his native language. Beddoes never published Death's Jest Book in his lifetime, but continued to revise and expand it right up to his death by suicide in 1849. Beddoes' work has never enjoyed unequivocal fame, but he is now widely recognised as one of the most intense and challenging of the late Romantic voices.