Thomas Forbes Kelsall: The Fareham Lawyer Who Preserved a Forgotten Poet

Thomas Forbes Kelsall was a lawyer and literary figure whose name became closely associated with the strange and brilliant poet Thomas Lovell Beddoes.

Kelsall was born in 1799 in the West Indies, the son of a plantation owner, and later settled in southern England. By the 1820s he was practising as a solicitor in Southampton. It was there, in 1823, that he met the young Beddoes, who had come to Southampton to study before returning to Oxford. The two formed a close friendship that lasted for the rest of Beddoes’s life.

Beddoes was an unusual figure: poet, dramatist, doctor and political radical, fascinated by death and the possibility of life beyond it. He spent much of his later life in Germany and Switzerland, writing continually but publishing very little. Kelsall remained one of his most faithful correspondents.

When Beddoes died in Basel in 1849, he left his literary papers to Kelsall, effectively making him his literary executor. Kelsall then took responsibility for preserving and publishing work that might otherwise have disappeared. In 1850 he edited Death’s Jest-Book, Beddoes’s major dramatic work, followed in 1851 by two volumes of posthumous poems and a memoir of his friend.

Kelsall’s role became even more important because Beddoes had published so little during his lifetime. Much of what later readers knew of the poet depended on the manuscripts, letters and memories that Kelsall preserved.

His literary connections extended beyond Beddoes. Kelsall corresponded with Robert Browning, who greatly admired Beddoes. A surviving letter written from Fareham in November 1867 shows Kelsall sending Browning some of Beddoes’s original manuscripts for study.

Kelsall married Frances Anne Harrison in 1829 and later lived in Fareham. He died in September 1872.

His memorial at St Peter & St Paul therefore connects Fareham with an unexpected corner of nineteenth-century literary history. Thomas Forbes Kelsall was never himself a famous poet, but his loyalty to a friend ensured that the work of Thomas Lovell Beddoes survived for later generations to read and study.