Analysis & Investigation

Many people have a dream of leaving the rat race of London behind to start a new life free from the crime, congestion, noise, and pollution of a large city. These people believe they will find contentment, freedom, peace, and quality of life - in a village or small town in a rural location such as the West Country, Lake District or on a remote Scottish island. However one needs to be aware that the rural idyll is not always as it first appears, as rural life can be boring, expensive, inconvenient, narrow, restrictive and occasionally dangerous.

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William Beckford (1760-1844) was the heir of a Jamaican sugar plantation dynasty, whose wealth had been built on the exploitation of slave labour. In his own lifetime Beckford became an infamous social outcast, for a homosexual affair he had with William Courtenay. Beckford gained a mythical reputation not only for his fabulous wealth and a sex scandal, but also for the building of Fonthill Abbey on his estate in Wiltshire. The Abbey was a gothic palace constructed over a number of years, which included a tower that reached almost 300 feet into the sky. Its construction became Beckford’s own Tower of Babel, almost bringing him to financial ruin. He sold his Fonthill estate in 1822 in order to repay his debts. Beckford was lucky in this, as three years later the tower which had been poorly constructed collapsed. Brian Fothergill in ‘Beckford of Fonthill’ takes the reader beyond the myth of Beckford, to those influences that manifested themselves at Fonthill Abbey.

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