William Beckford (novelist)
William Thomas Beckford (29 September 1760 – 2 May 1844) was an English novelist, art critic, planter and politician.[1] He was reputed at one stage to be England's richest commoner. The son of William Beckford and Maria Hamilton, daughter of the Hon. George Hamilton, he served as a Member of Parliament for Wells in 1784–1790 and Hindon in 1790–1795 and 1806–1820. Beckford is best known for writing the 1786 Gothic novel Vathek, for building the Fonthill Abbey in Wiltshire and Beckford's Tower in Bath, and for his extensive art collection.
William Beckford
29 September 1760
English
Writer, art collector, politician
Vathek (c. 1781); Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters (1780); Letters from Italy with Sketches of Spain and Portugal (1835)
As a writer, Beckford is remembered for Vathek, of which the reception from every quarter may have satisfied his ambitions for a career in belles-lettres, and for his travel memoir, Italy: with some Sketches of Spain and Portugal. He followed Vathek with two parodies of current cultural fashions, the formulaic sentimental novel, in Modern Novel Writing, or, The Elegant Enthusiast (1796)[42] and Azemia, a satire on the Minerva Press novels, written as "Jacquetta Agneta Mariana Jenks, of Belgrove Priory in Wales";[43] and also published Biographical Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters (1780), a literary prank burlesquing serious biographical encyclopaedias. Towards the end of his life he published collected travel letters, under the title Recollections of an Excursion to the Monasteries of Alcobaca and Batalha (1835), the memoir of a trip made in 1794.
Legacy[edit]
Beckford left two daughters, the younger of whom (Susanna Euphemia, sometimes called Susan) was married to Alexander Hamilton, 10th Duke of Hamilton, and inherited the majority of his collection, which was then moved north to Hamilton Palace, now demolished. The elder, Margaret Maria Elizabeth Beckford, married Lt-Gen. James Orde.[44]
Beckford was portrayed by Daniel Massey in the 1982 Central Television production I Remember Nelson, and has been the subject of several biographies in recent decades.
Beckford wrote a considerable amount of music, much of it with the assistance of his amanuensis, John Burton, with whom he collaborated on his largest composition: Arcadian Pastoral. The music manuscripts, which had lain among Beckford's effects at Hamilton Palace, were bought and presented to Basil Blackwell as a leaving present. He in turn bequeathed them to the Bodleian Library. In 1998, Michael Maxwell Steer edited and published all Beckford's music, including the collection of Modinhas Brasileiras which had been copied for him during his stay at Sintra in 1787. These are particularly interesting as they are the second surviving example of this Portuguese song form. The edition is available in six volumes from The Beckford Edition.[45] It can be consulted in the Bodleian, and elsewhere.
Cultural references[edit]
According to E. H. Coleridge, Beckford is the person referred to in Lord Byron's short poem "To Dives – A Fragment". Byron describes a person of great wealth, "of Wit, in Genius, as in Wealth the first", who feels "Wrath's vial on thy lofty head burst" when he is "seduced to deeds accurst" and "smitten with th' unhallowed thirst of Crime unnamed". Byron also refers to him in Childe Harold, Canto I, stanza 22.
In 1974, Aubrey Menen published Fonthill: A Comedy, a satirical portrait of Beckford.
Cousin, John William (1910), "Beckford, William", A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature, London: J. M. Dent & Sons – via Wikisource
Works