THE histories of the Beckfords, father and son, present several points of eccentricity, although in very different spheres. William Beckford, the father, was famed for his great wealth, which chiefly consisted of large estates in Jamaica; and the estate of Fonthill, near Hindon, Wilts. He was Alderman of Billingsgate Ward, London, and a violent political partisan with whom the great Lord Chatham maintained a correspondence to keep alive his influence in the City. When Beckford opposed Sir Francis Delaval to contest the borough of Shaftesbury, the latter said—
Art thou the man whom men famed Beckford call?
To which Beckford replied—
Art thou the much more famous Delaval?
Alderman Beckford died on the 21st of June, 1770, in his second mayoralty, within a month after his famous exhibition at Court, when, after presenting a City Address to George III., and having received his Majesty's answer, he was said to have made the reply which may be read on his monument in Guildhall, but which he never uttered. The day before Beckford died, Chatham forced himself into the house in Soho Square (now the House of Charity), and got away all the letters he had written to the demagogue Alderman. His house at Fonthill, with pictures and furniture to a great value, was burnt down in 1755. The Alderman was then in London, and on being informed of the catastrophe, he took out his pocket-book and began to write, and on being asked what he was doing, he coolly replied, 'Only calculating the expense of rebuilding it. Oh! I have an odd fifty thousand pounds in a drawer, I will build it up again; it won't be above a thousand pounds each to my different children.' The house was rebuilt.
The Alderman had several natural sons, to each of whom he left a legacy of 5,000l.; but the bulk of his property went to his son by his wife, who was then a boy ten years old, and is said to have thus come into a million of ready money, and a revenue exceeding 100,000l. Three years later, Lord Chatham, who was his godfather, thus describes him to his own son William Pitt—"Little Beckford is just as much compounded of the elements of air and fire as he was. A due proportion of terrestrial solidity will I trust come and make him perfect." The promise which his liveliness and precocity had given, was fulfilled by a jeu-d'esprit, written by him in his seventeenth year. This was a small work published in 1780, entitled Biographical Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters, and originated as follows. The old mansion at Fonthill contained a fine collection of paintings, which the housekeeper was directed to show to applicants; but she often told descriptions of the painters and the pictures, which were very ludicrous. Young Beckford, therefore, to methodize and assist the housekeeper's memory, wrote their lives, which she received from her youthful master as matters-of-fact. Thus, after descanting on Gerard Douw, she would add the particulars of that artist's patience and industry in expending four or five hours in painting a broomstick. There were other extravagancies which she believed; a few copies of the book were printed to confirm her belief; hence the book is very rare. Beckford, in after-life, spoke of it as his Blunderbussiana. It was, in fact, a satire upon certain living artists, and the common slang of connoisseurship.
Young Mr. Beckford had been educated at home: he was quick and lively, and had literary tastes; he had a great passion for genealogy and heraldry, and studied Oriental literature. He had visited Paris, and mixed in the society of that capital, in 1778, when he met Voltaire, who gave him his blessing. He had fine taste for music, and had been taught to play the pianoforte by Mozart.
Mr. Beckford travelled and resided abroad until his twenty-second year, when he wrote in French Vathek,[1] a work of startling beauty. More than fifty years afterwards he told Mr. Cyrus Redding that he wrote Vathek at one sitting. "It took me," he said, "three days and two nights of hard labour. I never took off my clothes the whole time. This severe application made me very ill.... Old Fonthill had a very ample loud echoing hall—one of the largest in the kingdom. Numerous doors led from it into different parts of the house through dim, winding passages. It was from that I introduced the Hall—the idea of the Hall of Eblis being generated by my own. My imagination magnified and coloured it with the Eastern character. All the females in Vathek were portraits of those in the domestic establishment of old Fonthill, their fancied good or ill qualities being exaggerated to suit my purpose." An English translation of the work afterwards appeared, the author of which Beckford said he never knew; he thought it tolerably well done.
At twenty-four, Mr. Beckford married the Lady Margaret Gordon, daughter of Charles, fourth Earl of Aboyne, but the lady died in three years. In 1784 he was returned to Parliament for Wells; in 1790 he sat for Hindon; but in 1794 he accepted the Chiltern Hundreds, and again went abroad. He now fixed himself in Portugal, where he purchased an estate near Cintra, and built the sumptuous mansion, the decoration and desolation of which some years afterwards Lord Byron described in the first canto of his Childe Harold, in the stanza beginning—