October 1, 1760

William Beckford, (October 1, 1760 to May 2, 1844) is recalled by historians as a English writer and art collector. He was quite wealthy. We include below some excerpts from his ODNB biography with the intent of a pointillistic sketch of the cultural life of Beckford's times.

First though, a glance at his letters, as collected in The Life and Letters of William Beckford, of Fonthill ...(1910). This description of a friend of Beckford's, in Geneva, was written by the
the author of Vathek (1782) one of the novels that defined the category of "Gothic" in English literature.

'Voltaire has asked me to spend two or three Days at Ferney ; he adores, worships and glorifies Ariosto as well as myself so we shall agree very [well] I believe, and as
soon as the Snow takes itself away I shall set off. At present that I have no Mountains to resort to or lovely prospects to describe, when every object is buried in Snow and every Fir Tree glistening with Icicles, wonder not that I have recourse to the imaginations of others to entertain you ; for really my own is ...., so gloomified by uniformly dull Weather, that literally, without the assistance of my Italian poetry and the pleasing recollections of those hours I used to pass in hearing you admire its vagaries ....this Epistle would, I believe, exceed in dulness even those which you have before received from me. The way of living at Geneva is far from gay; but in return it is very improving. The Societies are composed of so many clever people that notwithstanding a certain form and solemnity that prevails in them, they do not altogether displease me. 

'Another circumstance I like, is the number of original Characters to be met with here. In the first rank of these, shines my Friend [Jean] Huber whose particular excellence would be very hard to discover, as he is as changeable as the wind and sometimes as boisterous. One day he wanders with his Falcons over Hill and Dale, marsh and river, wood and garden ; the next, shut up in his Cabinet he will reflect on the nature of the Universe and the first principle of all things. The following week perhaps he is totally engaged in drawing caricatures and saying the queerest drollest things imaginable, and if he writes during this humour, probably it will be a dissertation upon the nature of Cats' whiskers. ....A few hours elapse. ... and you will find him in a coarse jacket feeding his Birds of prey, all over filthiness and garbage. ....

'The next Night very likely he would be seen sunk in his Arm chair by the Fire side .... and seems to have forgot all that activity of Mind and Body for which he is sometimes so remarkable. He will now read nothing but romances....'

Beckford's travels and collecting were not unusual for members of his class.

We read:

'Beckford came into his inheritance in September 1781, an event celebrated at a cost of £40,000 by lavish entertainments at Splendens. At the Christmas party that year he hired the theatrical designer Philip de Loutherbourg to convert Splendens into a scene of hedonistic richness, full of light and colour. None the less, the delights of Italy proved more attractive than those of Wiltshire, and he departed for Naples in the following year. ...

'Plans were now ongoing to secure Beckford the social position his birth deserved. His family decided that he should find a wife, and in May 1783 he married Lady Margaret Gordon, aged twenty-one and daughter of the impoverished earl of Aboyne; their first child, Maria Margaret Elizabeth, was born in 1784. At his coming of age Lord Shelburnehad endeavoured to interest Beckford in politics, but without much success. However on 2 April 1784 he wrote to his guardian, Lord Thurlow, that he was willing to sit in parliament and he was duly elected MP for Wells, a seat once held by his maternal grandfather. A letter to his cousin Louisa Beckford implies that William had taken his seat in the Commons, but that he was already pressing Lord Thurlow to procure him a peerage. A title was approved, and his name was included in published lists of forthcoming creations, but it was then his world collapsed about him in consequence of his infamous relationship with William Courtenay [which seemed to be about homosexuality but the details leave that vague].....[H]is reputation was destroyed, and henceforth he was a social outcast among English communities at home and overseas.

'Obliged by Beckford's family to go abroad, the Beckfords travelled to Switzerland and in July 1785 took up residence .... near Vevey. ... [where he continued working on] his oriental novel, Vathek, written in French between January and May 1782. The novel, which remains his best-known literary work, relates the story of the Caliph Vathek and his journey to Eblis, or hell, ... Beckford faced more personal anguish when on 26 May 1786, soon after the birth of a second daughter, Susan Euphemia, his wife, Margaret, died. Beckford was devastated, and further wounded by accusations in the press that she had died in consequence of his ill-treatment....

'Beckford returned to England from Switzerland in January 1787, a grieving widower whose two small children were put in the care of his mother. The whiff of scandal remained, and the family decided to send him to Jamaica, ... He sailed on 15 March, but decided to disembark at Lisbon, the first port of call. Robert Walpole, the English ambassador, was well aware of his reputation and refused to introduce him to Queen Maria, an action which automatically excluded him from official functions and the English community. ......

'Beckford was in Paris during the early part of the revolution in 1791, when he acquired certain possessions of fleeing aristocrats which were being sold by the state. .....

'....... In 1796–7 he bought Edward Gibbon's entire library for £950, 'to have something to read when I passed through Lausanne … I shut myself up for six weeks from early in the morning until night … The people thought me mad. I read myself nearly blind' ....

'In 1797 Joseph Farington, whose social circle included most of the architects and artists then active, confided to his diary that Beckford's income in this year was £155,000; that he had just received news of seven of his ships arriving uninsured, by which he had saved a further £12,000; and that he paid £75,000 duties on his sugar to the government. Backed by this reassuringly comfortable flow of money, Beckford had determined to pull down Splendens and to surround his tower with a complete building, which became Fonthill Abbey......

'[The Abbey was the setting for] the ....important visit in December 1800 of Horatio Nelson, Sir William Hamilton, and his second wife (and Nelson's mistress), Lady Emma. The party was accommodated at Splendens and taken to the abbey for an evening of theatrical display—the only recorded social event at Fonthill....Beckford's (in truth fluctuating) fortune was by now legendary. Writing in 1809 Byron, who greatly admired Beckford's writing, included a reference to him in his Childe Harold's Pilgrimage—addressing him 'There thou too, Vathek! England's wealthiest son' ....

'.... Following ...September 1813, Beckford's megalomania was unrestricted. He devised a baronial hall on the second floor celebrating the signatories of Magna Carta, from all of whom he claimed descent, but it was never built. In addition to the structure itself Beckford built a wall 12 feet high surrounding the most elevated part of his 5000 acres to exclude sightseers, and planted numerous pines and firs, hoping to recreate a romantic alpine landscape. Hares and game animals roamed free. Few visitors were invited, but he surrounded himself with youthful servants, causing a certain amount of jealousy between himself and Franchi. Poor parents were eager to place their sons in his service in the hope of being able to blackmail him; he was spied on and his letters opened, but Beckford was now too wary in his behaviour to give cause for such accusations...

'Notwithstanding its magnificence the abbey continued to be a source of frustration for the ....architect. Beckford complained that there were no convenient living rooms, ....[though] by 1818 there were eighteen bedrooms, .... It was again a period of declining sugar prices, which left him heavily in debt. With his Jamaican estates mortgaged, Beckford faced reality and held his first sale. ....

'..... To his father's art collection Beckford [had] added fine paintings from all periods. Two landscapes by Claude, The Landing of Aeneas and The Sacrifice of Apollo, were bought in Paris in 1799 for 6500 guineas and were sold in 1808 for 10,000 guineas (now in Anglesey Abbey, Cambridgeshire). Other works by Claude, Poussin, Murillo, Rembrandt, and Hogarth were also bought and sold during his lifetime, usually at a good profit. His Italian primitives included The Cruxifixion in the style of Orcagna, Giovanni Bellini's Doge Leonardo Loredan, and Perugino's Virgin and child with St John (all National Gallery, London).

'Throughout his later years Beckford was in almost daily communication with his booksellers, dealing in London with William Clarke and then with his son George, from whom he ordered numerous books for examination and kept only those few that pleased him. In his description of Beckford's library the elder Clarke noted a long series of Spanish and Portuguese chronicles, Elzevier classics, Gibbon's library, voyages, and travels, and remarked on the fine bindings, both from private libraries and commissioned by Beckford. The library also held cabinets of folio prints of old masters, all choice impressions. It was notable for the absence of Greek and Latin classics ....Beckford presented Gibbon's library of some 6000–7000 books to his physician, Frederic Schöll, and was still able to bequeath 10,000 books and 80 manuscripts to his daughter Susan.

....
'By the 1820s Beckford's income from Jamaica had fallen catastrophically and was continuing to diminish. He was in huge debt to his West India merchants; mortgages on Fonthill were £70,000, with interest mounting relentlessly on all these debts. Some of his Jamaican estates were sold, but with falling sugar prices their value was now small. Beckford's son-in-law, the tenth duke of Hamilton, though eager to be master of Fonthill, nevertheless declined to advance £80,000 to deal with his most pressing debts. Eventually there was no option but to sell Fonthill. .... Beckford ....negotiated a private sale of the abbey through the auctioneers Phillips; it was bought by John Farquhar, a gunpowder millionaire, for £300,000—more than Beckford had dared to hope for. Later sales in 1823 attracted many visitors to this previously inaccessible building and disposed of much of his art. Two years later Farquhar saw his own investment collapse into ruins.

'On leaving Fonthill Beckford ... retired with a choice selection of his art to a pair of houses in Lansdown Crescent. These he linked by a gallery room to span the intervening lane: he later sold the smaller house. Beckford bought several small farms in order to own the fields between his house and Lansdown Hill, .... From the tower belvedere he could look out over five counties before rearranging his various treasures within the rooms.'

According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography:'Beckford, William Thomas (1760–1844), writer and art collector, was born on 29 September 1760 .... the only legitimate son of William Beckford (bap. 1709, d. 1770), sugar planter and politician in Jamaica and London, and his wife, Maria, néeHamilton, granddaughter of the sixth earl of Abercorn. ....' You will note that Wikipedia has Beckford's birth day wrong.  That is hardly unusual, but gives us a number to fit into the Almanac.