William Beckford

English · 1760 to 1844

Born on September 29, 1760, at 22 Soho Square in London, William Beckford was the only legitimate son of a twice Lord Mayor of London whose fortune rested on Jamaican sugar plantations worked by some three thousand enslaved people. His father died when the boy was ten, leaving him a million pounds in cash, the estate at Fonthill in Wiltshire, and a name newspapers would later attach to the phrase "the richest commoner in England." He was educated privately and lavishly. Among his tutors was the eight-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who gave him a handful of piano lessons, while the landscape painter Alexander Cozens shaped a lasting taste for the exotic and the sublime. At twenty-one he wrote Vathek (1786), a tale of a caliph whose hunger for forbidden knowledge delivers him to the halls of Eblis, composing it in French, by his own later legend in a single feverish sitting, only to see his hired translator publish an unauthorized English version before the original appeared. A scandal involving a young aristocrat, William Courtenay, drove him into years of European exile, recorded in the travel letters of Dreams, Waking Thoughts and Incidents (1783) and the later Italy, with Sketches of Spain and Portugal (1834). Returning home, he poured his wealth into Fonthill Abbey, a vast Gothic fantasy crowned by a tower that collapsed in 1825. He also wrote two satirical novels, Modern Novel Writing (1796) and Azemia (1797), and the serene Recollections of an Excursion to the Monasteries of Alcobaca and Batalha (1835). He died on May 2, 1844, in Bath, aged eighty-three, his great fortune long since spent.