VATHEK (A Gothic Novel)

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William Beckford. VATHEK (A Gothic Novel)

VATHEK

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Introduction

The History of the Caliph Vathek

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William Beckford

The History of the Caliph Vathek

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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, Vathek in French, at a single sitting; but he gave his mind to it and the sitting lasted three days and two nights. An English version of it was made by a stranger, and published without permission in 1784. Beckford himself published his tale at Paris and Lausanne in 1787, one year after the death of a wife to whom he had been three years married, and who left him with two daughters.

Beckford went to Portugal and Spain; returned to France, and was present at the storming of the Bastille. He was often abroad; he bought Gibbon's library at Lausanne, and shut himself up with it for a time, having a notion of reading it through. He was occasionally in Parliament, but did not care for that kind of amusement. He wrote pieces of less enduring interest than Vathek, including two burlesques upon the sentimental novel of his time. In 1796 he settled down at Fonthill, and began to spend there abundantly on building and rebuilding. Perhaps he thought of Vathek's tower when he employed workmen day and night to build a tower for himself three hundred feet high, and set them to begin it again when it fell down. He is said to have spent upon Fonthill a quarter of a million, living there in much seclusion during the last twenty years of his life. He died in 1844.

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