Sydney Thompson Dobell was born on 5 April 1824 at Cranbrook in Kent, into a family whose circumstances placed him close to the commercial and dissenting middle-class culture of provincial England rather than to the aristocratic literary world. His father, Thomas Dobell, was a wine merchant, and the business of buying, selling, accounting, travelling, and maintaining credit would remain an important fact of Sydney’s…
“Death has been so exacting near me these last weeks that all earthly separation looks by contrast but like another form of union.”
Neighbourhood:
Romantic Poets, Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality
Thomas Lovell Beddoes was born on 30 June 1803 at Clifton, then a fashionable suburb near Bristol, and died at Basel, Switzerland, on 26 January 1849. He occupies an unusual and enduring position in English literature: neither comfortably Romantic nor Victorian, neither wholly a poet nor wholly a dramatist, neither merely a physician nor merely an eccentric amateur of science. His work belongs to the dark afterlife o…
“I am a poet, and therefore I am a liar.”
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, Decadent Poets, Dramatic Poets, Metaphysical Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Despair
