William Beckford
eBook - ePub

William Beckford

Composing for Mozart

  1. English
  2. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

William Beckford

Composing for Mozart

About this book

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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Yes, you can access William Beckford by Timothy Mowl in PDF and/or ePUB format. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Publisher
Faber & Faber
Year
2013
eBook ISBN
9780571300488
Edition
0

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Landing Page
  3. Title Page
  4. Dedication
  5. Contents
  6. List of Illustrations
  7. Acknowledgements
  8. INTRODUCTION: The price of a Romantic sensibility
  9. CHAPTER ONE: To the formidable and inaccessible Vathek himself
  10. CHAPTER TWO: Aesthetic education and a second Emile
  11. CHAPTER THREE: The dangerous facility of a teenage author
  12. CHAPTER FOUR: The sorrows of an English Goethe
  13. CHAPTER FIVE: A paedophile as literary hero
  14. CHAPTER SIX: Italy, with castrati
  15. CHAPTER SEVEN: A soft but criminal delight
  16. CHAPTER EIGHT: A quest for the talismans of Solomon
  17. CHAPTER NINE: No wife, no heir, and daughters lost
  18. CHAPTER TEN: Lisbon and a pilgrim for St Anthony
  19. CHAPTER ELEVEN: Sintra and the flight from friends
  20. CHAPTER TWELVE: Madrid – The winter of reacceptance
  21. CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Beckford in transit, 1788–93
  22. CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Portugal as a prelude to the Abbey
  23. CHAPTER FIFTEEN: ‘Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine’ the Abbey
  24. CHAPTER SIXTEEN: A Gothic villain for a Gothic abbey
  25. CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: ‘I adore Buhl’ – Beckford as collector and interior decorator
  26. CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: Bath – the Tower, and the Disraeli factor
  27. Manuscript Sources
  28. Select Bibliography
  29. Index
  30. Plates
  31. Copyright