Transcribed from the 1887 Cassell & Company edition byDavid Price,
cassell’snational library
THE HISTORY
of the
CALIPH VATHEK
by
WILLIAM BECKFORD.
CASSELL & COMPANY, Limited:
LONDON, PARIS, NEW YORK & MELBOURNE.
1887.
INTRODUCTION
William Beckford, born in 1759, the year before the accessionof King George the Third, was the son of an Alderman who becametwice Lord Mayor of London. His family, originally ofGloucestershire, had thriven by the plantations in Jamaica; andhis father, sent to school in England, and forming a schoolfriendship at Westminster with Lord Mansfield, began the world inthis country as a merchant, with inheritance of an enormous WestIndia fortune. William Beckford the elder becameMagistrate, Member of Parliament, Alderman. Four yearsbefore the birth of William Beckford the younger he became one ofthe Sheriffs of London, and three years after his son’sbirth he was Lord Mayor. As Mayor he gave very sumptuousdinners that made epochs in the lives of feeding men. Hisson’s famous “History of the Caliph Vathek”looks as if it had been planned for an Alderman’s dreamafter a very heavy dinner at the Mansion House. There isdevotion in it to the senses, emphasis on heavy dining. Vathek piqued himself on being the greatest eater alive; but whenthe Indian dined with him, though the tables were thirty timescovered, there was still want of more food for the voraciousguest. There is thirst: for at one part of the dream, whenVathek’s mother, his wives, and some eunuchs“assiduously employed themselves in filling bowls of rockcrystal, and emulously presented them to him, it frequentlyhappened that his avidity exceeded their zeal, insomuch that hewould prostrate himself upon the ground to lap up the water, ofwhich he could never have enough.” And the nightmareincidents of the Arabian tale all culminate in a most terribleheartburn. Could the conception of Vathek have first cometo the son after a City dinner?
Though a magnificent host, the elder Beckford was noglutton. In the year of his first Mayoralty, 1763,Beckford, stood by the side of Alderman Wilkes, attacked for hisNo. 45 of The North Briton. As champion of thepopular cause, when he had been again elected to the Mayoralty,Beckford, on the 23rd of May, 1770, went up to King George theThird at the head of the Aldermen and Livery with an addresswhich the king snubbed with a short answer. Beckford askedleave to reply, and before His Majesty recovered breath from hisastonishment, proceeded to reply in words that remain graven ingold upon his monument in Guildhall. Young Beckford, theauthor of “Vathek,” was then a boy not quite elevenyears old, an only son; and he was left three years afterwards,by his father’s death, heir to an income of a hundredthousand a year, with a million of cash in hand.
During his minority young Beckford’s mother, who was agranddaughter of the sixth Earl of Abercorn, placed him under aprivate tutor. He was taught music by Mozart; and the Earlof Chatham, who had been his father’s friend, thought himso fanciful a boy—“all air and fire”—thathe advised his mother to keep the Arabian Nights out of hisway. Happily she could not, for Vathek adds the thousandand second to the thous