New Publications · 2026
Some New Beckford Publications
William Beckford, Sogni, visioni e accadimenti in una serie di lettere da varie parti d'Europa translated and edited by Daniele Niedda.
When William Beckford returned from his first Grand Tour he wrote to his tutor John Lettice: ‘I am extremely impatient to look over my Italian Journey and will do my best to make it worth looking at … You know I have set my heart on the success of my book and shall not at all relish its being only praised as a lively, picturesque excursion’. The volume was finished in the winter of 1782–3 after his second tour, printed as Dreams, Waking Thoughts and Incidents in March 1783 and suppressed on publication, with only a handful of copies surviving. Over fifty years later, Beckford published a revised edition in Italy; with Sketches of Spain and Portugal (1834).
Modern editions of Dreams were published by Robert J. Gemmett (1971 and 2006), with translations in French by Roger Khan (1988–9) and Dutch by Gerlof Janzen (1991). Now, Daniele Niedda has translated Beckford's travels into Italian, together with an introduction and 42 illustrations from the watercolours and drawings of John Robert Cozens, the artist who accompanied Beckford on his second tour.
Daniele Niedda is Vice-President of the Beckford Society. He teaches at the Università degli Studi Internazionali, Rome, and has published extensively on travel literature and eighteenth-century English aesthetics.
Dianne Barre, The Social Life of a Georgian Novelist: Elizabeth Hervey and her Journals.
William Beckford's half-sister was twelve years older than her brother. She read stories to him and introduced him to foreign literature. Theirs became a competitive relationship when Elizabeth became a novelist, and after a quarrel in 1798 they never met again.
Her journals were stored away for 200 years. Now, Dianne Barre vividly reveals the life and times of Elizabeth Hervey, whose journals give a revealing account of Beckford and a fascinating view of numerous personalities of late Georgian and Regency society.
