Such an interest was not taken to be a suitable pursuit for a future English gentleman. He dreamed of the gorgeous, the horrible, the absurd, and the magical, and by the age of twelve he was a confirmed Orientalist. He was tutored in the seclusion of the family home of Fonthill Splendens, but his mind grew enraptured by tales of the East gleaned from his dead father’s library. Four years later, upon the death of his father, he inherited vast sugar plantations in the West Indies and an annual income of some 100,000 pounds a year. At the age of six, he received music lessons from Mozart, himself aged nine. Within days, London newspapers were talking of the “detestable scene lately acted in Wiltshire, by a pair of fashionable male lovers.” The scandal blossomed, spurred on by the fact that Beckford was, as Byron would later christen him, “England’s wealthiest son.”īorn the sole heir to the Lord Mayor of London, Beckford had lived a life of the utmost privilege. The incident had been espied by a servant with calamitous results. On a visit to Powderham Castle the previous year, the married Beckford had dallied with the seventeen-year-old William Courtenay, the future Earl of Devon. In 1785, at the tender age of twenty-five, William Beckford, Lord of Fonthill, began the self-imposed exile that was expected of him. And never has the calamitous obliteration of a grand building been so entwined with one man’s fate as in the strange instance of William Beckford and Fonthill Abbey. Indeed, the fall of a tower, whether in ancient Babylon or modern America, cannot help but suggest the terrible consequences of hubris. It should come as no surprise that the Tower card in the Tarot deck-which portrays a stone column being struck by lightning-signifies destruction, loss, and ruin. Edgar Allen Poe, The Fall of The House of Usher An air of stern, deep, and irredeemable gloom hung over and pervaded all. I felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow. Many books and musical instruments lay scattered about, but failed to give any vitality to the scene. The general furniture was profuse, comfortless, antique, and tattered.
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