Beckford, William

Beckford, William (1760–1844). English collector, writer, and eccentric. A pampered millionaire from boyhood (at the age of 5 he had piano lessons from the 8-year-old Mozart), he became a legendary figure in his own lifetime. One of his cousins referred to him as ‘a second Lucifer’ (a reference to both his youthful beauty and his depravity), and in 1784 he left England after a homosexual scandal involving a 13-year-old boy. For the next decade he travelled widely on the Continent and after his return to England he lived in eccentric seclusion at Fonthill in Wiltshire, where the architect James Wyatt built for him Fonthill Abbey (1796–1807, now mainly destroyed), a huge mansion dressed in ecclesiastical garb. He formed an excellent library and a vast collection of objects of every kind, both natural and artificial; it drew from William Hazlitt the wry comment that ‘the only proof of taste he has shown in this collection is his getting rid of it’, but it included some outstanding paintings (twenty of them are now in the National Gallery, London). In 1826, when his fortunes had declined, Beckford built Lansdown Tower, Bath, a lesser but still highly impressive classical folly that is now a museum devoted to him. Beckford's most famous literary work is the fantastic oriental tale Vathek, written in French, but published first in English in 1786, a successor to Walpole's The Castle of Otranto in the vogue for the Gothic novel. The nightmarish visions of Beckford's book were inspired partly, as he himself said, by Piranesi's engravings.