Vathek (A Gothic Novel: the Original Translation by Reverend Samuel Henley)

Vathek (A Gothic Novel: the Original Translation by Reverend Samuel Henley)
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This carefully crafted ebook: «Vathek (A Gothic Novel: the Original Translation by Reverend Samuel Henley)» is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents. This Beckford's novel, translated by Samuel Henley, was originally written in French when the author was 21. It was composed in French beginning in 1782, and then translated into English by Reverend Samuel Henley in which form it was first published in 1786. It is the story of Caliph Vathek, whose eye can kill at a glance, who makes a pact with the Devil, Eblis. The Caliph Vathek is dissolute and debauched, and hungry for knowledge. When the mysterious Giaour offers him boundless treasure and unrivalled power he is willing to sacrifice his god, the lives of innocent children, and his own soul to satisfy his obsession. Vathek's extraordinary journey to the subterranean palace of Eblis, and the terrifying fate that there awaits him, is a captivating tale of magic and oriental fantasy, sudden violence and corrupted love, whose mix of moral fable, grotesque comedy, and evocative beauty defies classification. Thomas Beckford ( 1760 – 1844), usually known as William Beckford, was an English novelist, a profligate and consummately knowledgeable art collector and patron of works of decorative art, a critic, travel writer and sometime politician, reputed at one stage in his life to be the richest commoner in England.

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William Beckford. Vathek (A Gothic Novel: the Original Translation by Reverend Samuel Henley)

Vathek

Table of Contents

Introduction

The History of the Caliph Vathek

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William Beckford

(A Gothic Novel: the Original Translation by Reverend Samuel Henley)

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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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