In the Library
Vathek
William Beckford, 1786
- Form
- Form Novella
- Reading time
- Reading time 2.5 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by Samuel Henley
- Chapters
- Chapters 1
- Length
- Length 36k words
£1.99
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About the book
A caliph trades his soul for forbidden knowledge and descends through ruined Persepolis toward the subterranean Hall of Eblis, where the damned wander forever clutching their burning hearts. William Beckford wrote this oriental fantasia in French across a single feverish stretch in 1782, at twenty-two, the richest commoner in England, spending his fortune on a Wiltshire abbey designed to collapse under its own ambition. The tale follows Vathek, grandson of Haroun al-Rashid, as a smiling Giaour leads him through one transgression after another in pursuit of pre-Adamite treasures hidden beneath the mountains. Sumptuous and cruel, fluent in the pleasures of cruelty, the book invented Gothic orientalism and gave Byron the atmosphere of his eastern tales. The descent does not end. It only widens.