Beckford, WILLIAM

Beckford, WILLIAM, son of Alderman Beckford, was born at Fonthill, Wiltshire, 1st October 1760. On his father's death in 1770 he inherited an enormous property, consisting for the main part of Fonthill and of estates in Jamaica, and estimated at a million of money, upwards of £100,000 a year. Young Beckford evinced unusual intellectual precocity; for in his seventeenth year he composed a satirical essay, entitled Biographical Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters, in which he did not spare living artists, and assailed the cant of criticism with the polished weapon of wit. In 1777 he visited the Continent, and met Voltaire at Paris. Three years thereafter he started on a grand continental tour, and spent twelve months in rambling through Flanders, Germany, and Italy, revisiting the last in 1782. In 1783 he married Lady Margaret Gordon, daughter of Charles, fourth Earl of Aboyne; and in the following year he entered parliament as one of the members for Wells. In 1787 Vathek appeared in French. Beckford informs us that he wrote this tale, as it now stands, at twenty-two years of age, and that it was composed at a single sitting. 'It took me,' he says, 'three days and two nights of hard labour. I never took off my clothes the whole time. The severe application made me very ill.' An English version of Vathek, made from an unpublished manuscript, had been issued in 1786. Beckford professed not to know the translator (understood to have been Samuel Henley, D.D.), but thought his work well done. In 1787 Beckford sought distraction from the loss of his young wife, a year before, in a visit to Portugal. In 1790 he sat for Hindon; in 1794 he accepted the Chiltern Hundreds, and again left England. Revisiting Portugal, he purchased an estate near Cintra, and occupied for a time that 'paradise' which Byron commemorates in Childe Harold. He returned to England in 1796; and in 1801 the splendid furniture of Fonthill was sold by auction, and the next year his valuable collection of pictures was disposed of in London. These dispersions were no sooner made than he began a new collection of books, pictures, furniture, curiosities, and proceeded to erect a new building at Fonthill, the most prominent feature of which was a tower 278 feet high. Beckford resided at Fonthill till 1822, when in one of those strange vagaries of feeling of which his life was so full, he sold the estate and house, with all its rare and far-gathered contents, to Colonel Farquhar for £330,000. Three years later the great tower, which had been raised on an insecure foundation, came to the ground. On the sale of Fonthill, Beckford removed to Bath, and immediately proceeded to erect another lofty tower. While residing there, he did not mingle in Bath society, and the most improbable stories concerning the rich and morose genius in their neighbourhood were circulated among the citizens. During all his life, Beckford was a hard-working student, devoured by a passion for books. Some of his purchases were perfectly imperial in their way. He bought Gibbon's library at Lausanne, to amuse himself when he happened to be in that neighbourhood. He went there; read in the fierce way that he wrote, three days and two nights at a sitting; grew weary of his purchase; and handed it over to his physician, Dr Scholl. Up till 1834 he had published nothing since Vathek, but in that year the literary silence of half a century was broken by the appearance of a series of letters, entitled Italy, with Sketches of Spain and Portugal, in two volumes. In the same year he republished his Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters; and in 1835 he issued another volume, entitled Recollections of an Excursion to the Monasteries of Alcobaça and Batalha, made in June 1794. From the period of this last publication till his death, which took place on the 2d of May 1844, he lived in the deepest retirement. Beckford, since the publication of his Arabian tale, has been a power in English literature. His wit, his sarcasm, his power of graphic description, may be seen in his journal and letters; and his higher faculties of imaginative conception and delineation reign in the unmatched passages that shadow forth in gloom and glory the 'Hall of Eblis.' His library was sold by his great-grandson, the twelfth Duke of Hamilton, in 1882-83, when 5978 lots fetched no less a sum than £43,368. See the Life of Beckford, by Cyrus Redding (2 vols. 1858), the reprint of Vathek by M. Mallarmé (Paris, 1876), and the English edition by Garnett (1893).