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Michael Bradshaw has published extensively on late Romantic writing, including Beddoes, Darley, Hood and the Shelleys. He is the co-editor, with Ute Berns, of The Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Lovell Beddoes (Ashgate, 2007), editor of Disabling Romanticism: Body, Mind, and Text (Palgrave, 2016), and co-editor, with Gioia Angeletti of ‘Travel, Migration, Exile, a special issue of the journal La questione Romantica (2024). His research interests include literatures of the body, critical disability studies, textual fragmentation and modern allusion to Romantic poetry. Michael is Dean of the Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences at the University of Winchester.

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This article is © 2025–26 The Author and is the result of the independent labour of the scholar credited with authorship. Unless otherwise noted, the material contained in this journal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND) International License.
Date of acceptance: 12 March 2025.

Referring to this Article

M. BRADSHAW. ‘Beddoes Raising Hell in Germany: A Tale of Student Mobility’, Romantic Textualities: Literature and Print Culture, 1780–1840, 25 (Summer 2024)

Online: Internet (date accessed): https://www.romtext.org.uk/articles/rt25_n02/
PDF DOI:10.5281/zenodo.17103726

Beddoes Raising Hell in Germany

A Tale of Student Mobility

03 May 2026

Abstract Abstract

Abstract: This article reconsiders the poet and dramatist Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803–1849) as an international university student of the late Romantic period. With his propensity for ‘hell-raising’ of both occult and alcoholic varieties, Beddoes understood the performative quality of emerging Romantic myths of the student, characterised by recklessness and glamorous abandon. Beddoes also shows awareness of the connections between the study of medical science, with its demand for borderless freedom of ideas, and the climate of oppression, protest, and resistance in post-Napoleonic Germany. The revelling of activist students of the ‘Burschenschaft’ movement in Göttingen in 1826 is a possible model for the revolutionary central scene in Beddoes’ satirical tragedy Death’s Jest-Book (c. 1828). In university cities including Göttingen and Würzburg, Beddoes engaged in radical nationalist politics at a time when the Austrian ‘higher state’ operated oppressive systems to restrict and police expatriate students, who were suspected of promulgating French revolutionary influence. This uneasy climate in 1820s Hanover resonates with some of the contemporary anxieties about the part that university campuses play in debates about radicalisation, state security, and free speech in twenty-first-century Britan. With these contexts in mind, the article re-interprets the neglected narrative poem ‘Alfarabi the World-Maker’ (c. 1827): in this comic tale, the sorcerer Alfarabi is the very image of the student hell-raiser of Romantic lore, with a love of freedom, a burning will to create and discover, and a Byronic intolerance of cant. Beddoes’s image of the scholar is idealistic, disruptive, and ultimately parodic, possessing energies that are not easily contained in an institution of learning. Re-reading Beddoes’s checkered career in academia in relation to Romantic-era European politics shows continuity with contemporary debates about student identities and the function of universities, which are still with us today.

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