#anna beddoes

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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.

from Anna Beddoes' letter to Humphry Davy dated December 26, 1806. 

as quoted in The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes

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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.

from The Age of Wonder

by Richard Holmes