William Beckford’s Vathek and the American Book Trade

Abstract

When William Beckford’s Vathek was first published in England in 1786, it was recognized as a unique and compelling work of fiction that successfully displayed the customs, character, and elements of the ‘marvellous’ associated with Eastern culture. It was also applauded for the way in which it intermingled the convention of moral instruction with the rising emphasis in literature on the imaginative appeal of the remote and exotic. Paul Henry Maty, in an unsigned review which appeared almost simultaneously with the publication of Vathek, described it as a ‘work of genius’ and a ‘literary comet’ that successfully employed ‘a machinery, not only new, but wild and sublime [that] seizes on the mind, and pervades the whole composition’. In recognition of the novel’s Faustian theme of the unbridled quest for knowledge and power that leads to damnation, Maty also believed it inculcated ‘a moral of the greatest importance’. He noted that ‘there is no other work of the same extent, from which so much knowledge can be derived of the peculiar manners and customs of the East’ and then concluded by comparing Beckford’s writing to the ‘the sombrous grotesque of Dante; and the terrific greatness of Milton’.