Oxford in April 2011 is all daffodils and sunshine. In the window at Blackwell’s, a display of books by the evolutionary biologist and atheist Richard Dawkins celebrates his seventieth birthday. The scientific spirit is now more dominant at Oxford, but two hundred years ago the university was governed by a disposition the poet Thomas Lovell Beddoes would later characterise as an ‘Anglico-theological faculty of insanity’. When Beddoes’s hero Percy Bysshe Shelley co-authored a pamphlet on ‘The Necessity of Atheism’, it was displayed in a bookseller’s bow window on High Street for scarcely twenty minutes before it was spotted by a cleric from New College (where Dawkins is now emeritus fellow), who ‘ordered all copies to be burned at the back of the shop’, and University College expelled the author. This alone would have recommended Shelley to Beddoes, who had made a career of defying authority at school, and affected to care little for academic achievement, still less for religious pieties. Shelley’s reckless pamphleteering throughout the country after his expulsion also set the example for Beddoes’s later political activism in Germany. But he idolised Shelley for his poetry first and foremost.

‘The genius at school is usually a disappointing figure, for as a rule, one must be commonplace to be a successful boy. In that preposterous world, to be remarkable is to be overlooked’, wrote Lytton Strachey in his essay on Beddoes. Tom Beddoes’s schooldays at the Charterhouse came to an end at the ...