Life at Fonthill
Beckford’s eccentric approach to the building of Fonthill Abbey was easily matched by his lifestyle whilst living there. However, the Abbey was not a comfortable place to call home, and suffered from its terrible design (largely due to Beckford): many rooms were higher than wide, poorly lit and ill-ventilated. Incredibly, Beckford lived there alone (his wife died in childbirth after only three years of marriage), occupying only one room for his purposes despite the vast number on offer. Unlike most hermits, Beckford lived in the opulent style that he had come to be known for and the house itself demanded.
For just as Beckford’s enormous tower resembled that built by his self-indulgent alter-ego, Vathek, so too did his lifestyle imitate his own art. Despite dining alone, he would occasionally order a banquet for twelve served by twelve servants, and eat only one dish before departing. He owned 20, 000 books, all bound in his personal style, along with paintings by Titian, Rembrandt, and Canaletto, and numerous sculptures and fine Oriental objets d’art. One of his servants was a Spanish dwarf, put in charge of opening the 38-foot-high front doors to guests in order to make them seem even bigger.
Apart from servants, the only permanent residents were his beloved dogs: Viscount Fartleberry, Mrs. Fry, Nephew, and Tring. Frequent billows of smoke were seen rising from Fonthill, and rumours spread of what Beckford was up to behind the enormous wall. One man scaled the wall to win a bet, and was shown around by a person he assumed to be the gardener. It was, in fact, Beckford, who invited the trespasser to a charming dinner before excusing himself, and later sending a servant to advise the man to be careful of the bloodhounds in the garden on his way out.
Behind the high wall, Beckford was also up to no good (by nineteenth-century standards). His servants at Fonthill Abbey were almost all nubile young men, to whom Beckford gave homoerotic nicknames: ‘infamous Poupee’, ‘Miss Long’, ‘Miss Butterfly’ (nineteenth-century slang for a catamite). It seems that he collected attractive young menservants as he did fine art, as he once remarked in a letter that ‘it’s cruel to hear of fair boys and dark Jade vases and not to buy them’. He was known to bathe with some of his servants, and complained of the frustrating frigidity of some of them.
Today, all that remains of Fonthill Abbey is a small, Grade II-listed, section of the north wing of the cruciform house. Just as this represents a sad and depleted remnant of a once-great house, so too Beckford has been largely forgotten by history. Yet Beckford left behind an impressive artistic legacy, and Vathek remains a titillating tale even today. Twenty of the artworks he loved so much are now in the National Gallery, London, and others are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. This eccentric, supremely talented, and unfairly oppressed man deserves to be better remembered.
Where did we find this stuff? Here are our sources:
Beckford, William. Vathek. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Caufield, Catherine. The Man Who Ate Bluebottles and Other Great British Eccentrics. 2006.
Norton, Rictor. “A Visit to Fonthill”. Gay History & Literature.
Norton, Rictor. “William Beckford The Fool of Fonthill”. Gay History & Literature.