The Beckford Society

William Beckford

William Thomas Beckford (1760–1844) — novelist, collector, patron, builder — and heir to a Jamaican sugar fortune built on the forced labour of enslaved Africans.

A brief chronology

1760

Born on 1 October at 22 Soho Square, London, the only legitimate child of Alderman William Beckford (1709–1770), twice Lord Mayor of London, and Maria Hamilton, daughter of the Hon. George Hamilton.

1770

Death of his father. William becomes heir to the Jamaican plantations and to English lands in Wiltshire, Somerset, Gloucestershire, Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire and London. His guardian is Lord Chancellor Thurlow. He is nine years old.

1777

Moves to Geneva in the company of his tutor, the Rev. John Lettice, and Colonel Edward Hamilton, a relative of his mother's. His private education up to this point has been under Robert Drysdale and Lettice; he studies drawing under Alexander Cozens, architecture under Sir William Chambers, and receives brief musical instruction from the young Mozart.

1780 – 1782

First Grand Tour of Europe with Lettice, travelling as far as Naples in 1780. Publishes Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters (1780). His overture to the ballet Phaeton, published in Paris in c. 1781.

1781

Comes of age in September and formally inherits the family fortune. The occasion is marked by elaborate celebrations at Fonthill Splendens said to have cost £40,000. Byron later described him as "England's wealthiest son".

1782

Writes Vathek — in French, reputedly at a single feverish sitting at Fonthill. Issued in an unauthorised English translation in 1786. May - November, second Grand Tour to Italy with retinue including the artist John Robert Cozens and musician John Burton.

1783

Dreams, Waking Thoughts and Incidents, the journals of his Grand Tour, is suppressed on publication. Marries Lady Margaret Gordon, daughter of the 4th Earl of Aboyne, on 5 May. Two daughters follow — Margaret Maria Elizabeth (1785) and Susanna Euphemia, 'Susan' (1786).

1784

Elected Member of Parliament for Wells. Later the same year the 'Powderham Scandal' — an alleged intimacy with the young William Courtenay, heir to the earldom of Devon — is seized upon by Courtenay's uncle, Lord Loughborough, Beckford's political enemy, and turned against him in the press. No formal charges follow, but the scandal closes the doors of polite society to him for much of the remainder of his life.

1786

Death in Switzerland of Lady Margaret following the birth of their younger daughter. Beckford travels on the Continent for much of the next decade — Portugal, Spain, Italy, France — collecting books, manuscripts, paintings and objects of vertu.

1787

First visit to Portugal, where he meets Gregorio Franchi, who will be his companion for the next 35 years.

1790 – 1797

Approaches the architect James Wyatt with a commission for what will become Fonthill Abbey. Wyatt exhibits the first plans at the Royal Academy in 1797; by 1798 the design has grown, and the tower now reaches for 300 feet. Beckford returns to Parliament as Member for Hindon (1790–94, and again 1806–20). He is not an active legislator, though he comments publicly on the question of abolition in 1796.

1793 – 1795

Resides in Portugal. The letters and journals of this period are later reworked as Italy; with Sketches of Spain and Portugal (1834) and Recollections of an Excursion to the Monasteries of Alcobaça and Batalha (1835).

1807

Moves into Fonthill Abbey. Construction continues until 1809. There he assembles one of the most remarkable private collections of art, books, and decorative art ever formed in Britain including Italian pietre dure, Mughal hardstone carvings, lacquer, Asian metalwork and ceramics, Italian Quattrocento paintings, and a great trove of French royal and aristocratic furniture acquired in Paris in the aftermath of the Revolution.

1822

Under the pressure of his extravagances and the falling price of sugar from the Jamaican estates, Beckford sells Fonthill Abbey, together with much of the contents, to the former East India merchant John Farquhar for £330,000. He moves to Bath

1823

Farquhar auctions the art and furnishings — the 'Fonthill sale' — the spectacle of the Regency art world, reviewed with notable scorn by William Hazlitt. Beckford himself, together with his son-in-law the 10th Duke of Hamilton, is among the most significant buyers, in several instances reacquiring works from his own former collection at prices below what he had originally paid for them.

1823 – 1827

Commissions Henry Goodridge to build Lansdown Tower above Bath, 154 feet in height. Remodels the interiors of Nos 19 and 20 Lansdown Crescent into his final residence.

1825

21 December: The Great Tower at Fonthill collapses.

1833 – 1834

The Slavery Abolition Act receives royal assent in 1833; slavery is formally abolished across most of the British Empire from 1 August 1834. Those enslaved on Jamaican estates in which Beckford held interests enter a further period of compulsory 'apprenticeship' until 1838.

1835 – 1836

Under the Slave Compensation Act, Beckford is paid four awards as the legal owner of four Jamaican estates — three in Clarendon (Dank's Estate, Beckford's Rock River, Retreat Estate) and one in St Dorothy (Bodle's Pen) — totalling £12,803 2s 10d. The enslaved receive nothing.

1844

Dies at Lansdown Crescent, Bath, on 2 May, aged 83. Buried initially at Lyncombe Cemetery. The residue of his estate — valued at under £80,000, and including some 10,000 books and 80 manuscripts — passes to his younger daughter Susan, Duchess of Hamilton.

1848

Susan presents Lansdown Tower and its grounds to the Rector of Walcot parish so that her father might rest there; the land is consecrated and Beckford is reinterred beside the tower.

1882

The art, books and decorative objects that Beckford had kept, or bought back, at Lansdown — which had passed on his death to Susan and thence to the Dukes of Hamilton — are dispersed at the Hamilton Palace sale, one of the greatest art-market events of the nineteenth century. Works from Beckford's collection are in the V&A, the British Museum, the National Gallery, the Wallace Collection, the National Museum of Ireland, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Frick Collection, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Huntington Library and Art Gallery, and many other public and private collections across Europe and North America.

The family's wealth, Jamaica, and slavery

The Beckford fortune was made in Jamaica. From the middle of the seventeenth century the family established, inherited, purchased and ran sugar plantations on the island, and at its peak the estate — held in various shares by successive generations — stretched across the parishes of Clarendon, Westmoreland, St James, St Ann, St Mary, St Dorothy and St Thomas-in-the-East. By the death of Alderman William Beckford in 1770 the family was among the largest absentee proprietors of Jamaican sugar estates in Britain, holding many thousands of acres, and at various points many thousands of enslaved African men, women and children, whose forced labour produced the sugar on which successive generations of the Beckfords lived.

William Thomas Beckford is recorded by the UCL Legacies of British Slavery project as owner, at various points between 1770 and 1834, of at least fifteen Jamaican properties: Ackendown, Strathbogie and the Bog Estate in Westmoreland; Beckford's Rock River, Dank's Estate, Kays, Moore's and Retreat in Clarendon; Catherine Hall in St James; Drax Hall and Fonthill in St Ann; Esher in St Mary; Bodle's Pen in St Dorothy; and Harbour Head and Stanton in St Thomas-in-the-East. The art collections, libraries, travels, and the buildings for which he is remembered — the Abbey at Fonthill, Lansdown Tower, the manuscripts and paintings, the literary works themselves — were paid for, directly or indirectly, by that system. When slavery was abolished in the British Empire in 1833–34, compensation under the Slave Compensation Act was paid by the British Treasury to the former legal owners of the enslaved; Beckford was among them. The enslaved themselves received nothing.

Compensation records

Four awards are recorded against William Thomas Beckford in the UCL Legacies of British Slavery database (person record 22232):

Total awarded: £12,803 2s 10d. The number of enslaved men, women and children whose lives these awards purported to value is recorded against each claim in the LBS database, to which readers are referred.

The Society's position

The Beckford Society exists to study and to understand the life and work of William Thomas Beckford — his writing, his patronage, his architecture, his collecting, and the extraordinary, contradictory figure he cut in his age.

The Society unequivocally abhors the trade in human beings and the institution of chattel slavery, which was continued on the Beckford estates throughout William's lifetime and which in large measure contributed to his wealth. We believe that any serious account of William Beckford must reckon plainly with that fact. Understanding the sources of his fortune is not a footnote to his life: it is an essential part of it, and the Society is committed to research and discussion that acknowledges, without evasion, the human cost on which his world was built.