

Transcribed from the 1887 Cassell & Company edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org

                        CASSELL'S NATIONAL LIBRARY

                                * * * * *





                               THE HISTORY
                                  OF THE
                              CALIPH VATHEK


                                    BY
                            WILLIAM BECKFORD.

                        [Picture: Printer's mark]

                       CASSELL & COMPANY, LIMITED:
                _LONDON_, _PARIS_, _NEW YORK & MELBOURNE_.
                                  1887.




INTRODUCTION


William Beckford, born in 1759, the year before the accession of King
George the Third, was the son of an Alderman who became twice Lord Mayor
of London.  His family, originally of Gloucestershire, had thriven by the
plantations in Jamaica; and his father, sent to school in England, and
forming a school friendship at Westminster with Lord Mansfield, began the
world in this country as a merchant, with inheritance of an enormous West
India fortune.  William Beckford the elder became Magistrate, Member of
Parliament, Alderman.  Four years before the birth of William Beckford
the younger he became one of the Sheriffs of London, and three years
after his son's birth he was Lord Mayor.  As Mayor he gave very sumptuous
dinners that made epochs in the lives of feeding men.  His son's famous
"History of the Caliph Vathek" looks as if it had been planned for an
Alderman's dream after a very heavy dinner at the Mansion House.  There
is devotion in it to the senses, emphasis on heavy dining.  Vathek piqued
himself on being the greatest eater alive; but when the Indian dined with
him, though the tables were thirty times covered, there was still want of
more food for the voracious guest.  There is thirst: for at one part of
the dream, when Vathek's mother, his wives, and some eunuchs "assiduously
employed themselves in filling bowls of rock crystal, and emulously
presented them to him, it frequently happened that his avidity exceeded
their zeal, insomuch that he would prostrate himself upon the ground to
lap up the water, of which he could never have enough."  And the
nightmare incidents of the Arabian tale all culminate in a most terrible
heartburn.  Could the conception of Vathek have first come to the son
after a City dinner?

Though a magnificent host, the elder Beckford was no glutton.  In the
year of his first Mayoralty, 1763, Beckford, stood by the side of
Alderman Wilkes, attacked for his No. 45 of _The North Briton_.  As
champion of the popular cause, when he had been again elected to the
Mayoralty, Beckford, on the 23rd of May, 1770, went up to King George the
Third at the head of the Aldermen and Livery with an address which the
king snubbed with a short answer.  Beckford asked leave to reply, and
before His Majesty recovered breath from his astonishment, proceeded to
reply in words that remain graven in gold upon his monument in Guildhall.
Young Beckford, the author of "Vathek," was then a boy not quite eleven
years old, an only son; and he was left three years afterwards, by his
father's death, heir to an income of a hundred thousand a year, with a
million of cash in hand.

During his minority young Beckford's mother, who was a granddaughter of
the sixth Earl of Abercorn, placed him under a private tutor.  He was
taught music by Mozart; and the Earl of Chatham, who had been his
father's friend, thought him so fanciful a boy--"all air and fire"--that
he advised his mother to keep the Arabian Nights out of his way.  Happily
she could not, for Vathek adds the thousand and second to the thousand
and one tales, with the difference that it joins to wild inventions in
the spirit of the East touches of playful extravagance that could come
only from an English humourist who sometimes laughed at his own tale, and
did not mind turning its comic side to the reader.  The younger William
Beckford had been born at his father's seat in Wiltshire, Fonthill Abbey;
and at seventeen amused himself with a caricature "History of
Extraordinary Painters," encouraging the house-keeper of Fonthill to show
the pictures to visitors as works of Og of Basan and other worthies in
her usual edifying manner.

Young Beckford's education was continued for a year and a half at Geneva.
He then travelled in Italy and the Low Countries, and it was at this time
that he amused himself by writing, at the age of about twenty-two,
"Vathe