SOURCE: An introduction to Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Oxford University Press, 1935, pp. xxivlv.

In the following essay, Donner traces Beddoes's literary history and discusses the difficulty in compiling a complete collection of the dramatist's work.

No task could appear more simple than that of editing the works of a poet whose publications did not reach beyond a single volume of poetry, one play, and a few poems and articles separately published; the bulk of whose manuscripts have unaccountably disappeared, while the majority of the rest are known to have perished either at his own hands or those of other people; whose works were edited by an executor, as conscientious as enthusiastic, in an edition to which little has been added later. But it was not always thus. The poet's devoted friend and literary executor, Thomas Forbes Kelsall, who first edited his works in 1851, had to grapple with...