Phantom-Wooer: The Thomas Lovell Beddoes Web Site | Life

CHARLES DACRES BEVAN, 1851

“I first knew Thomas Lovell Beddoes at the Charter-house in 1817 or 1818. We were in the same house (Mr. Watkinson's No. 15 in the square). Beddoes was near the top of the school; I was his fag, and in constant attendance upon him. The expression of his face was shrewd and sarcastic, with an assumption of sternness, as he affected the character of a tyrant and bully, though really not much of either; but a persevering and ingenious tormentor, as I knew to my cost. With a great natural turn for humour, and a propensity to mischief; impatient of control, and indisposed to constituted authority over him, he suggested and carried out many acts of insubordination, in the contrivance of which he shewed as much wit, as spirit in their execution; and even when detected in positive rebellion, his invincible assurance and deliberate defiance of the masters, together with the grim composure of his countenance, was so irresistibly comic, that I have seen them unable to speak for laughing when he was brought up for punishment.”

(Letter to Revell Phillips, The Poems Posthumous and Collected of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, p. cxxviii)

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