Beddoes Raising Hell in Germany: A Tale of Student Mobility

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.