William Beckford had two lives: one real and sensational, the other an elegant forgery he invented in retirement after the young Disraeli mischievously sent him a homoerotic epic based loosely on Beckford's own career. Biographers have been bemused by Beckford's faked letters and dream encounters with celebrities, but his real life was far more significant: he is the pivotal Romantic between Horace Walpole and Byron.
Beckford was reared in exotic isolation in a Palladian palace where he grew up obsessed with dark grottoes, towers and images of the living dead. Rushed into marriage by an apprehensive mother, he indulged his actual passions (both legal and paedophile) until a Tory administration staged a sex scandal that exiled him. In his absence his novel, Vathek was treacherously pirated. Returned to England, Beckford flung his wealth into the creation of Fonthill Abbey, which, by its shadowy vistas and glamorous camp furnishings, paved the way for the wildest excesses of Victorian taste.
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Information
Publisher
Faber & FabereBook ISBN
9780571300488
Year
2013Table of contents
- Cover
- Landing Page
- Title Page
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- INTRODUCTION: The price of a Romantic sensibility
- CHAPTER ONE: To the formidable and inaccessible Vathek himself
- CHAPTER TWO: Aesthetic education and a second Emile
- CHAPTER THREE: The dangerous facility of a teenage author
- CHAPTER FOUR: The sorrows of an English Goethe
- CHAPTER FIVE: A paedophile as literary hero
- CHAPTER SIX: Italy, with castrati
- CHAPTER SEVEN: A soft but criminal delight
- CHAPTER EIGHT: A quest for the talismans of Solomon
- CHAPTER NINE: No wife, no heir, and daughters lost
- CHAPTER TEN: Lisbon and a pilgrim for St Anthony
- CHAPTER ELEVEN: Sintra and the flight from friends
- CHAPTER TWELVE: Madrid – The winter of reacceptance
- CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Beckford in transit, 1788–93
- CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Portugal as a prelude to the Abbey
- CHAPTER FIFTEEN: ‘Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine’ the Abbey
- CHAPTER SIXTEEN: A Gothic villain for a Gothic abbey
- CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: ‘I adore Buhl’ – Beckford as collector and interior decorator
- CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: Bath – the Tower, and the Disraeli factor
- Manuscript Sources
- Select Bibliography
- Index
- Plates
- Copyright