BECKFORD, WILLIAM (I the author of Vathek, was born on Oct. 1, 1760, and at the age of II inherited a princely fortune from his father, Alderman Beckford. He studied architecture under Sir W. Chambers and music under Mozart. In I 780 he published Biographical Memoirs of Extraor di:zary Painters, and in the same year went to Holland, Germany, Austria and Italy. He married Lady Margaret Gordon in 1783, and spent his brief married life in Switzerland. In 1783 also, his first travel book, Dreams, Waking Thoughts and Incidents, was printed, but he suppressed the whole edition, save six copies. After his wife's death (1786) he travelled in Spain and Portugal. In 1797 he published Azemia and in 1796, Modern Novel Writing, both satires on the minor novel. After his return to England he sold his old house, Fonthill Abbey, Wiltshire, and began to build a magnificent residence on which he expended in about 18 years the sum of £273,000. He was a famous collector of books, pictures and objects of applied art. His eccentricities, together with the strict seclusion in which he lived, gave rise to scandal, probably unjustified. In 1822 he sold his house, together with its splendid library (he had bought Gibbon's library at Lausanne), to John Farquhar, and soon after one of the towers, 26oft. high, fell, de stroying part of the villa in the ruins. Beckford built another great house on Lansdown Hill, near Bath, where he lived until his death. Beckford's great wealth and his endless eccentricities inevitably had their effect on the popular imagination, and prob ably added zest to the appreciation of his one great achievement, Vathek. But the extraordinary power of this short book of less than 40,00o words gives him a place of his own in i8th cen tury literature. Vathek is an oriental tale of a megalomaniac Arabian caliph who gives himself to the service of Eblis (the devil), moves from crime to crime, and in the end finds himself, with the beautiful Nouronihar, in the splendours of the hall of Eblis, tormented with a burning heart. Vathek was written by Beckford in French, and the translation, by the Rev. Samuel Henry, appeared in 1786, before the original, against Beckford's orders. The French translation appeared at Lausanne in 1787, and a revision thereof at Paris in the same year. A second re vision of the French version was published in London in 1815. The accompanying episodes to the main story were not published during his lifetime. Vathek stands apart from the numerous oriental tales of the time by what Mr. Saintsbury has called the "sombre magnificence" of the end, pages which are "hard to parallel in the later literature of prose fiction." In 1834 Beckford published Italy; with Sketches of Spain and Portugal, a com pressed and revised version of Dreams, Waking Thoughts and Incidents. In 1835 he issued perhaps his best travel book, Recol lections of an Excursion to the Monasteries of Alco baca and Batalha—a journey made in 1794. Beckford had a seat in parlia ment from 1784 to 1793, and again from 1806 to 18 20. He left two daughters, the elder of whom was married to the loth duke of Hamilton.
See Cyrus Redding, Memoirs of William Beckford of Fonthill (1859) ; S. Mallarme's preface to Le Vathek de Beckford, a reprint of the Paris edition (1876) ; Dr. R. Garnett's introduction to his edition of Vathek (1893) ; Lewis Melville, Life and Letters of William Beck ford (1910) ; S. Lane-Poole, "The Author of Vathek," in the Quarterly Review (Oct. 1910) ; The Episodes of Vathek, trans. by Sir F. T. Marzials, introd. by Lewis Melville (1912) ; Herbert B. Grimsditch, "William Beckford's Minor Works" in the London Mercury (Oct. 1926).