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William Beckford
At 18, William Beckford, son of the Lord Mayor of London, had a dream like
the one Coleridge recorded in Kubla Khan:
Meanwhile my thoughts were wandering into the interior of Africa and dwelt
for hours on those Countries I love. Strange tales of Mount Atlas and
relations of Travellers amused my fancy. One instant I imagined myself
viewing the marble palaces of Ethiopian princes seated on the green woody
margin of Lakes...
Some few minutes after, I found myself standing before a
thick wood listening to impetuous water falls...I was wondering at the Scene
when a tall comely Negro wound along the slopes of the Hills and without
moving his lips made me comprehends I was in Africa, on the brink of the
Nile beneath the Mountains of Amara. I followed his steps thro' an
infinity of irregular Vales, all skirted with Rocks and blooming with an
aromatic vegetation, till we arrived at the hollow Peak and...a wide Cavern
appeared before us....
We entered the Cavern and fell prostrate before the
sacred source of the Nile which issues silently from a deep Gulph in the
Rock.
(Cited in Lewis Melville, The Life and Letters of William Beckford of
Fonthill, London, pp. 62-63).
So here we have another writer enamored of these travelers' tales, dreaming of a visit to the source of the Nile. But this record of his
dream was not published until 1910, and even Lowes does not argue that
Coleridge had stumbled on this tale so like his own. But Lowes does suppose
that Coleridge read a novel that Beckford wrote a few years later.
At 22, Beckford wrote The History
of the Caliph Vathek in French, in the course of two days, and three nights,
nonstop. Beckford had absorbed the Arabian Nights, and in his novel,
invented a similar story, with even more fantastic imaginings, some of which
spoofed English politics of the period, in this indirect way. So this
Voltairian tale played in the uncertain realm between pure fiction and true
satire.
Ironically, someone stole his manuscript, and had a man named Henley
translate it into English, in 1784. Beckford issued his French
original three years later. (And in 1789, Beckford witnessed the storming of
the Bastille.)
Retreating to his home at Fonthill, in England, Beckford devoted himself to
building a three-hundred foot tower, which collapsed.
In preparing for his hymns to the moon and the
sun, Coleridge was reading travel literature for interesting tidbits about natural
phenomena, weather lore, and pagan ceremonies. Lowes confesses that he
cannot prove Coleridge read Vathek:
I wish I could say, with the complete assurance which is based on evidence,
that Coleridge had read Vathek. As it is, I have neither doubt nor proof.
398
Vathek, The history of the Caliph Vathek, (trans. Henley) London,
1786. |
 Other sources
William Bartram
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