'Beddoes Raising Hell in Germany: a Tale of Student Mobility'

The English poet and dramatist Thomas Lovell Beddoes travelled to Germany in 1825 to study medicine at the University of Göttingen. His involvement with the Germania Burschenschaft movement and other radical causes, as well as his propensity for 'hell-raising', resulted in his expulsion from Göttingen in 1829, and also from Würzburg in Bavaria three years later. This article discusses Beddoes's relationship with university life and political protest, in the context of a nascent myth of rebellious Romantic youth, and explores parallels with debates about the politics in / of universities in the UK in the twenty-first century.