#anna beddoes

Of all those who know you best I have most reason to value the qualities of your heart, and I believe at this moment you have not a more sincere admirer, no, not even amongst the young and beautiful, than she who has treated you with such ungentleness.

Her son, the poet Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803-49), would spend twenty-five years writing a strange, semi-dramatic poem entitled Death's Jest-Book, replete with grotesque imagery from medical surgery and his father's laboratory, which he could just remember. When he could write no more, Thomas committed suicide in Basle, at the age of forty-five.