Born, at Fonthill, Wilts, 1 Oct. 1760. Privately educated. At Geneva with tutor, 1777–79. Visit to Netherlands, 1780; to Italy, 1782. Married Lady Margaret Gordon, 5 May 1783; lived partly in Switzerland until her death, 26 May 1786. M.P. for Wells, 1784–90. Visit to Portugal and Spain, 1787. In Paris, 1791–92; at Lausanne, 1792–93. Visit to Portugal, 1794. M.P. for Hindon, 1806–20. Lived in seclusion at Fonthill Giffard, 1796–1822; obliged to sell estate, 1822. Removed to Bath. Died there, 2 May 1844; buried there. Works: “Dreams, Waking thoughts and Incidents” (anon.), 1783; “Vathek,” in English (anon., surreptitiously published in London by S. Henley, who translated from Beckford’s MS.), 1786; in French (anon.), Paris, 1787 (another edn. same year, published at Lausanne with author’s name); “Modern Novel Writing: or, The Elegant Enthusiast” (under pseud. of Lady Harriet Marlow), 1796; “Amezia” (under pseud. of “Jacquetta Agneta Marianna Jenks”), 1797; “Biographical Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters” (anon.), 1824; “Italy, with Sketches of Spain and Portugal,” 1834; “Recollections of … the Monasteries of Alcobaça and Batalha” (anon.), 1835. He translated: “Al Ravni,” 1783. Life: by Cyrus Redding (anon.), 1859.

Personal

  His mind was vigorous, his spirits were good, and he displayed his wonted activity of body nearly to the last. He declared to the present writer, in his seventy-sixth year, that he never felt a minute’s ennui in his life. To this the great variety of his mental resources, as well as his bodily temperament, which would never permit him to remain inactive, greatly contributed. He was the most accomplished man of his time; his reading was perhaps the most extensive. Besides the classical languages of antiquity, he spoke five modern European tongues, writing three of them with great elegance. He read the Persian and Arabic, was an excellent designer with the pencil, and a perfect master of the science of music. The last he was taught by Mozart, to whom he was so attached, that when the great musician settled in Vienna, he made a visit to that capital, as he said himself, “that he might once more see his old master.”… I walked towards the further end of the room, from whence Mr. Beckford, then in his seventy-fourth year, but in appearance some years younger, came to meet me…. In person he was scarcely above the middle height, slender, but well formed, with features indicating great intellectual power. His eyes were wonderfully acute, his apprehension exceedingly quick, his enunciation rather more rapid than that of the average of speakers in general. His constitution had not, according to his own account, been strong. In early life he had been unable in consequence to remain in parliament, though he had sat both for Wells and Hindon. By activity, temperance, and care, more than all by spending as much time as possible in the open air, with plenty of exercise, he had rendered himself comparatively hale. He was dressed in a green coat with cloth buttons, a buff striped waistcoat, breeches of the same kind of cloth as the coat, and brown topboots, the fine cotton stockings appearing over them, in the fashion of a gentleman thirty or forty years ago. I never saw him in any other costume when indoors.

  We should perhaps hardly prolong this article by an account of the abbey, but for the fact that it avenged the Vandalism that attended its erection by crippling the owner, and that its celebrity is now only historic; for after passing from Beckford to Mr. Farquhar, a wealthy miser, in whose hands the great central tower, its distinctive feature, fell, it passed again out of aristocratic keeping to Mr. Morison, a tradesman, who died in 1858, leaving twenty millions of dollars, thus ending about where Beckford began…. The building was in the form of a cross, the arms of which were nearly of the same length, although differing in breadth. The exterior measurement was two hundred and seventy feet from east to west, and from north to south three hundred and twelve. In the axis of the cross rose the central octagon tower, to the vast height of two hundred and seventy-six feet. The interior was divided into numberless halls, staircases, galleries, saloons, libraries, oratories, drawing-rooms, and cabinets. Everything like convenience was sacrificed to grand effect, to long perspective aisles and arches. One octagonal room, formed by the great tower, was thirty-five feet only in diameter, and one hundred and twenty-eight feet high. In the huge fabric there were but seventeen bed-rooms, thirteen of which were at a most distressing height; and the whole far better merited the satire of Pope on Blenheim, than the sumptuous palace of Marlborough:—

  The life that the youthful Beckford not only dreamed but carried out was exactly that which Tennyson has pictured in his “Palace of Art,”—a life of luxurious self-culture, apart from the cares, loves, and concerns of men. It is only fair to say that Beckford seems to have extracted more happiness from such a life than the poet has conceived possible. But we should remember that before he gave himself up to it he had loved purely and fondly; and probably the death of the wife he adored, after three years of unclouded happiness, had much to do in determining the eccentric recluseness of his later life.

  Mr. Beckford left two daughters, the eldest of whom, Susan Euphemia, was married to the Marquis of Clydesdale in 1810, and became Duchess of Hamilton. The tomb at Lansdown, with its polished granite, emblazoned shields, and bronzed and gilt embellishments, was not long cared for; since, in 1850, it presented in its neglected state a lamentable object.

Vathek

  “Vathek” is, indeed, without reference to the time of life when the author penned it, a very remarkable performance; but, like most of the works of the great poet who has thus eloquently praised it, it is stained with some poison-spots—its inspiration is too often such as might have been inhaled in the “Hall of Eblis.” We do not allude so much to its audacious licentiousness, as to the diabolical levity of its contempt for mankind. The boy-author appears already to have rubbed all the bloom off his heart; and, in the midst of his dazzling genius, one trembles to think that a stripling of years so tender should have attained the cool cynicism of a Candide.

  This romance is very much what Byron would have written in prose—the same splendid, vivid, and ever fresh pictures of the external nature of the most beautiful and interesting region of the world, the same intensity of passion, the same gloomy colouring of unrepenting crime…. This is the “Gil Blas” of Oriental life…. Perhaps there is no work in the world which gives so vast, so lively, and so accurate a picture of every grade, every phase of Oriental existence.

  His true monument is his novel, “Vathek,” though he spent enormous amounts of money in building his wonderful edifice of Fonthill. His great tower, 300 feet high, fell down, was rebuilt, and fell again; but “Vathek” remains.

  Never was a more homogeneous creation. It bears in every line an impress of audacious and weird imagination, which gives it a place as far apart from all the originals of Eastern romance as from the imitations of them. The wonder is the greater if we remember the time when it was written, the mingled decorousness and flatulence, pomposity and poverty of invention in its many Eastern Tales and Apologues. Compare “Vathek” with the best of these, “Rasselas.” It is like comparing a glacier with a lava stream as it comes out of the burning mountain.

  “Vathek” is, perhaps, the most interesting Oriental story ever written. It abounds in scenes of surpassing beauty and magnificence. Its splendor of description, varied liveliness of humor, gorgeous richness of fancy, and wild and supernatural interest, are perhaps unequalled in the whole range of fictitious literature. It seems as if all the sweets of Asia are poured upon it. It is full of glittering palaces, and temples, and towers; of jeweled halls, tables of agate, and cabinets of ebony and pearl; of crystal fountains, radiant columns, and arcades, and perfumes burning in censers of gold.

  Many a reader has got through “Vathek” at a sitting, but very few authors indeed could or would emulate Beckford’s feat of writing it at one. True the sitting was a long one, for it lasted three days and two nights, and it cost him a severe illness—which, some will think, and perhaps he thought, served him right.

  Of all the glories and prodigalities of the English Sardanapalus, his slender romance, the work of three days, is the only durable memorial…. There is astonishing force and grandeur in some of these conceptions. The catastrophe possesses a sort of epic sublimity, and the spectacle of the vast multitude incessantly pacing those halls, from which all hope has fled, is worthy the genius of Dante. The numberless graces of description, the piquant allusions, the humour and satire, and the wild yet witty spirit of mockery and derision—like the genius of Voltaire—which is spread over the work, we must leave to the reader. The romance altogether places Beckford among the first of our imaginative writers, independently of the surprise which it is calculated to excite as the work of a youth of twenty-two, who had never been in the countries he describes with so much animation and accuracy.

  Byron considered this tale superior to “Rasselas.”… “Vathek” gives evidence of a familiarity with oriental customs, and a vividness of imagination which are remarkable in so youthful an author. The descriptions of the Caliph and of the Hall of Eblis are full of power. But in depth of meaning, and in that intrinsic worth which gives endurance to a literary work, it bears no comparison to “Rasselas.” The one affords an hour’s amusement; the other retains its place among those volumes which are read and re-read with constant pleasure and satisfaction.

  Not much need be or can be said about the literary qualities of “Vathek.” Alive with undiminished vitality after a century’s existence, it has proved its claim to a permanent place in literature by obtaining it; nor, at any period of its history, has it been a book which criticism could greatly help or hinder, or which allowed sound criticism much scope for controversy. Its beauties are by no means of the recondite order; and inability to appreciate them is one of those innate distastes, not for the book but its genre, against which expostulation is impotent.

  A stronger work than Walpole’s romance is the “Vathek” of William Beckford. “The History of the Caliph Vathek,” as its full title reads, is yet more grotesque and wilder in its freaks of fancy than is “The Castle of Otranto;” but its Oriental setting, its remarkable likeness to some tale among the thousand and one of the “Arabian Nights,” above all, its consistency in the fantastic character assumed and the extraordinary imaginative power of its author, have given to this tale a popularity and a length of life shared by no other of the grotesque romances of this period. “Vathek” reappears regularly in edition after edition, delighting lovers of the marvellous in fiction to-day as it did a hundred years ago.

  Has maintained its position as the finest Oriental tale written by an Englishman. The breath of the Romantic movement stirs in it, and distinguishes it in kind from the exquisitely witty Oriental tales of Count Anthony Hamilton, on which it was modelled. The grotesque extravagance of Eastern supernaturalism only tickled the fancy of Count Hamilton; it held the imagination of Beckford.

  Well worth your reading on a spare day, and which in its English version has made his fame, and keeps his name alive, now that his great houses and moneys are known and reverenced no more.

  Although the romantic school of fiction has had its day, the gorgeous, almost Miltonic tale “Vathek,” the admiration of Lord Byron, who preferred it to “Rasselas,” still survives after more than a hundred years. The statement made by its author to Mr. Redding, that it was produced at the age of twenty-two, in one sitting of three days and two nights, is a piece of imagination of like character with the work itself. The time taken to write it appears to have been about three months, but however long its production may have occupied, it stands, in a fashion, unique in the language, and had the author but been visited with a little pecuniary misfortune, it might have proved the precursor to a delightful series of imaginative stories.

  Its debts to the old Oriental tale are more apparent than real; those to the fantastic satirical romance of Voltaire, though larger, do not impair its main originality; and a singular gust is imparted to its picture of unbridled power and unlimited desire by the remembrance that the author himself was, in not such a very small way, the insatiable voluptuary he draws. The picture of the Hall of Eblis at the end has no superior in a certain slightly theatrical, but still real, kind of sombre magnificence, and the heroine Nouronihar is great.

  In his sarcasm, Beckford carried on this humorous treatment of Eastern fable. The kicking of “the stranger” through the apartments, down the steps, through the courts of the Caliph’s palace, and then through the streets of Samarah, is a piece of extravagance as delightful as anything in the romances of Voltaire. In his love of grotesque horror, Beckford is brought into line with Walpole. His Caliph, in league with the Intelligences of Darkness, commits to admiration every form of crime simply because he has nothing else to do. His bloated Giaour, “with ebony forehead and huge red eyes” drinks the aristocratic blood of fifty beautiful youths, and still his thirst is not slacked. The tale closes with a cleverly devised punishment for the damned. In the magnificent Hall of Eblis, strewn with gold dust and saffron, amid censers burning ambergris and aloes, they walk a weary round for eternity; their faces corrugated with agony, and their hands pressing upon hearts enveloped in flames.

General

  Beckford wishes me to go to Fonthill with R.; anxious that I should look over his “Travels” (which were printed some years ago, but afterwards suppressed by him), and prepare them for the press. Rogers supposes he would give me something magnificent for it—a thousand pounds, perhaps; but if he were to give me a hundred times that sum I would not have my name coupled with his. To be Beckford’s sub, not very desirable.

  Mr. Beckford’s book is entirely unlike any book of travels in prose that exists in any European language; and if we could fancy Lord Byron to have written the “Harold” in the measure of “Don Juan,” and to have availed himself of the facilities which the ottava rima affords for intermingling high poetry with merriment of all sorts, and especially with sarcastic sketches of living manners, we believe the result would have been a work more nearly akin to that now before us than any other in the library…. We risk nothing in predicting that Mr. Beckford’s “Travels” will henceforth be classed among the most elegant productions of modern literature: they will be forthwith translated into every language of the Continent—and will keep his name alive, centuries after all the brass and marble he ever piled together have ceased to vibrate with the echoes of Modenhas.

  Beckford’s book greatly offends me in all that relates to Holland and Germany, often offends me even in Italy, but for the most part delights me in Portugal and Spain. The vile, sneering, morbid tone that more or less pervades the first volume is detestable to me.

  His celebrity as a remarkable personage would have endured had he never written anything; and as an author he achieved a renown which he probably valued more than literary fame of the first order, the distinction of being the most brilliant amateur in English literature. Hardly any other man has produced such masterpieces with so little effort. “Vathek” was written at a sitting, and his letters betray no trace of unusual pains. These works are masterpieces nevertheless. European literature has no Oriental fiction which impresses the imagination so powerfully and permanently as “Vathek.” Portions of the story may be tedious or repulsive, but the whole combines two things most difficult of alliance—the fantastic and the sublime. Beckford’s letters display a corresponding versatility and union of seemingly incongruous faculties. He is equally objective and subjective; his pictures, while brilliantly clear in outline, are yet steeped in the rich hues of his own peculiar feeling; he approaches every object from its most picturesque side, and the measure of his eloquence is the interest with which it has actually inspired him. His colouring is magical; he paints nature like Salvator, and courts like Watteau. His other works make us bitterly regret the curse of wealth and idleness which converted a true son of the muses into an eccentric dilettante. As a literary figure Beckford occupies a remarkable position, an incarnation of the spirit of the eighteenth century writing in the yet unrecognised dawn of the nineteenth, flushed by emotions which he does not understand, and depicting the old courtly order of Europe on the eve of its dissolution.