Member-only story
The Chief Eunuch in William Beckford’s ‘Vathek’
An important character in this 1786 Gothic Orientalist novel
William Beckford (1760–1844) was the son of the mayor of London. His father, who had the same name, took political interest in the market for sugar. His mother, Maria Hamilton, was a strict Methodist.
When Beckford was a boy, his father died, and he inherited three thousand enslaved people on plantations in Jamaica. “He never went to Jamaica,” says a biographical sketch by Beckford’s Tower and Museum, “and as an absentee planter took little interest in the Jamaican estates, including the fate of those who worked on them.” He did take the money from the slave labor and spent it lavishly throughout his life.
He was privately tutored and learned to read Persian, Arabic, Latin, and Greek. At 18, he met Voltaire in Paris. He was in touch with Samuel Henley. At 21, he wrote Vathek, supposedly over a span of three days. It’s about 36,000 words, so it’s a short novel, one that today we might call a novella. He wrote it in French, but it wasn’t published until it was translated into English several years later. Lord Byron was a fan of the story.
Beckford tried to follow his father’s footsteps into politics, at least until society found out about his sexual affair with William Courtenay.
