In July of 1848, lonely and racked by neuralgia, the poet and physician Thomas Lovell Beddoes opened an artery in his left leg with a razor. Before he could bleed to death, he was found and conveyed to a nearby hospital. Frustrated that his suicide attempt had been foiled, Beddoes tore the bandages from his wound. Gangrene set in. To save him from the inevitable deadly blood infection, Beddoes's leg was amputated from the knee down. Writing to his sister that October, Beddoes lied about the suicide attempt: ‘I fell with a horse … and broke my left leg all to pieces … the fractured limb was obliged to be sacrificed’. He promised her that he would soon be well and visit her in England. Six months later, Beddoes was dead—officially by fever-induced apoplexy and, unofficially, Beddoes's doctor Ecklin informed his friend Thomas Forbes Kelsall, by a self-administered poison, curare. For many years debate surrounded Beddoes's death, as his descendants sought to popularize the fever explanation. His 1928 biographer R.H. Snow, sympathetic to Beddoes family pressure, endorsed their version of events by expressing doubt that a man with an amputated leg could have made it to town to buy poison. But since Snow's evidence could not account for an important series of private letters written by Beddoes's friends, contemporary critics largely accept Ecklin's version.

Thomas L. Beddoes was a writer acutely aware of the intimate link between controlling one's death and controlling one's self. His suicide illustrates the complexity of acting on that intimacy. When Beddoes's first attempt failed, he rewrote it as a horse-riding accident so as not to worry his family; when his second attempt succeeded, friends like Kelsall and Dr. Alfred Frey, who first told Beddoes's relatives he had died of apoplexy, concealed it for decades. Yet scholars’ interest in the ‘true’ version of Beddoes's death tends to obscure his suicide's fascinating, if tragic, use of narrative agency. Through a combination of epistolary deception and a collaborative reliance on friends to keep his secret, Beddoes bifurcated the meaning of his death, giving his immediate family and the public a more acceptable narrative while reserving the darker reality for a private circle of trusted friends. Beddoes, it seems, understood the stakes of his own death story.