Lisbon in the years 1778 according to the Diary of William Beckford

Abstract

William Beckford (1760-1844) is a fascinating character of English culture at the turn of the 19^th century. The way he showed off his fabulous wealth and the scandal of his publicly reported homosexuality earned him celebrity status, but he was also recognized for his literary works. His most famous novel, Vatheck, shows his attraction to oriental exoticism, a characteristic of romantic aesthetics. This extraordinary man – as a child he played piano with Mozart and was taught by the architect William Chambers and the painter Alexander Cozens – set foot in Lisbon in 1787. He was thus interrupting a recently initiated trip supposedly headed for Jamaica, base of his family’s wealth. During this first stay, between 1787 and 1788, Beckford kept a diary which he published partially and with significant changes towards the end of his life (Italy; with Sketches of Spain and Portugal, 1834). In 1954 Boyd Alexander, his most noted biographer, published The Journal of William Beckford in Portugal and Spain, 1787-1788, making known for the first time the source of the Sketches. For the purpose of this paper I will use the Portuguese version of the Journal (translated by João Gaspar Simões and revised in its 1983 2^nd edition) in order to piece together the image of Lisbon suggested by Beckford. Surprisingly, he does not seem to have understood the reconstruction of Lisbon after the 1755 earthquake, a programme he never even mentions.