Alderman Beckford had somehow managed to maintain the relationship of the metropolis and the colonial periphery in equilibrium and to fashion a narrative in which the centers of British life were seamlessly connected to his periphery. In this narrative, the dominant forms of eighteenth-century political culture seemed to be untroubled by the residual forms of colonial slavery.116 Where colonial money fed political power and social standing there was no need for repressing a colonial background. Oblivious to the oppositional values assigned to metropole and colony in the English imagination, the alderman would not have been troubled by the disjunctive relationship between the two houses he had bought or built—one in Wiltshire, in the heart of Englishness, the other in Jamaica, the biggest sugar and slave colony in the British empire. What about the son? How did he deal with his ambiguous inheritance?
7
If the key to understanding Alderman Beckford was his adoption of the cultural style of the Whig aristocracy, including its preferred mode of building, his son's life can best be understood in relation to the expensive objects he set out to accumulate. For the younger Beckford, collecting would come to reflect deep anxieties about the self and its place in society, and would eventually mark the limits of the culture of consumption itself. In fact, as David Watkin has noted in his insightful discussion on the psychology of collecting in the age of Enlightenment, some of the great British collectors of the eighteenth century—John Soane, Thomas Hope, and William Beckford—were “outsiders in some ways, facing real or imaginary opposition.”117 He also remarks on “the trauma experienced by men of taste at finding themselves at war with France, a country that they regarded as the most civilized in Europe.”118
Isolated in Britain in the second half of his life because of various scandals, Beckford, who had turned to Paris for solace, was certainly traumatized by the outbreak of hostilities between England with France. There was, however, an even greater source of trauma that has not adequately been accounted for in existing accounts of Beckford's struggle to define himself in relation to the culture of taste: the fact that he was oppressed by the constant reminder that his sense of self as a modern subject was built on fortunes made in the complex of sugar and slaves. Slavery was the greatest repressed force in Beckford's life. He knew that his wealth depended on it, yet he could not acknowledge its presence in his life. The few commentators who have paid attention to Beckford's connection to Jamaican slave life have underscored “his near total detachment from the source of his wealth, his Jamaican plantations, and most certainly his complete disregard for the slave laborers who produced his wealth.”119
Writing of a period later than the one covered here, Raymond Williams has noted that repression was one of the defining characteristics of the emerging bourgeois in the first half of the nineteenth century. He has further argued that “the repressed culture is that consequence of the bourgeois failure to recognize even the facts of its own experience and above all its sexuality.”120 In this case, Beckford can be seen as the figure of the proto-bourgeois subject emerging out of the culture of taste, driven by the conviction that the self-fashioning was enabled by repression or disavowal. Thus, while Jamaica is rarely mentioned in accounts of Beckford's life, when it is, biographers have been struck by what has appeared to be the dissonance between the man of taste and his colonial possessions. Although Beckford was known to be a generous landlord in Wiltshire, noted one observer, he apparently did not feel any responsibility toward “those laboring to build his fortune, and it is true that he did not in the least concern himself about his Jamaican slaves.”121 Is it possible that Beckford's disregard for his Jamaican slaves was a form of disavowal rather than neglect or disregard? The distinctions here are crucial, for while neglect is self-conscious and deliberate, disavowal is a defense mechanism. Indeed, disavowal in the Freudian sense is a mode of defense “which consists of the subjects refusing to recognize the reality of a traumatic perception.”122
Jamaica could be absent from Beckford's biography, but this does not mean he was not aware of the extent to which his ability to live the lavish life of an aesthetic subject depended on his slaveholdings. We find acknowledgment of this connection in a letter to Lady Craven in 1790: “One of my new estates in Jamaica brought me home seven thousand pounds last year more than usual. So I am growing rich, and mean to build Towers, and sing hymns to the powers of Heaven on their summits, accompanied by almost as many sacbuts and psalteries as twanged around Nebuchadnezzar's image.”123 But dependence on colonial fortunes could also create deep anxieties. On a grand tour in Portugal in 1794 and 1795, Beckford worried about the effects of sugar prices, slave revolts, and legal challenges to his Jamaican holdings on his ability to maintain Fonthill House, which he had inherited from his father. By 1819 the family's plantation in Jamaica, Drax Hall, was in severe financial crisis, and this was affecting Beckford's standard of living and his precarious position in the culture of taste. Nevertheless, the language used to express these colonial anxieties was one of denial, avoiding the subject at hand, refusing to recognize the source of the trauma, to be drawn close to it, or even to speak its language.
Hiding behind the clichéd language of lawyers and agents, and using citations and indirect discourse, Beckford worked hard to distance himself from the unnamable event that was his legacy. In his correspondence on the political economy of slavery, then, Beckford preferred to recite what he called the “scorpionish” letters from his lawyers rather than to clarify matters himself:
Since the beginning of the scorpionish letter is in rather ornate style, I'm taking the trouble to copy it down: “My dear Sir, I am sorry to be the herald of bad news but the uncontrollable Elements having occasioned serious mischief upon your Draxhall Estate, I am unwillingly obliged to be so.” Poor Besti-fownes will be cruelly afflicted, and rightly so: the merchants, in their fine honeyed tones one knows so well, will doubtless beg me “to be so indulgent to them and to my own affairs as to revert to the £750 instead of £1000 (quarterly) etc. etc. I await a thousand torments reproduced in a thousand forms.124
Here, Beckford had sought sanctuary behind the ornate style of his lawyers and avoided the dreadful realization that his holdings were collapsing and he was in deep financial trouble, or that his identity as a man of taste was tied to the changing fortunes of West Indian sugar and slavery.
Denial was Beckford's mode of existence in the numinous zone between English freedom and African bondage, between Britain and Jamaica. He was aware that his success as a collector and man of taste was tied to slavery and sugar, but any direct association with black bondage was injurious to the social standing of a modern subject, especially toward the end of the eighteenth century, when slavery was no longer in vogue. One of the great ironies of Beckford's life was that it was built around powerful, if not radical, notions of freedom. His whole life “was a protest against those inventions of society that made men and women into machines. He had at an early age determined not to sink his individuality, and to the end he preserved his striking personality.”125 In this context, Beckford's role as a collector raises an even more intriguing question: was the collection of expensive aesthetic objects an attempt to assimilate and sublimate the excesses of the material world, to bring some order to the residuality that remained in him, consciously or unconsciously, of that other world—of slaves and imaginary Orientals?
This is not a far-fetched question, for there is an implicit connection between collecting and nervousness about the world. In their classical work on collecting, John Elsner and Roger Cardinal have noted that beneath the “houses and masterpieces” of the collectors, “there is much to be learned by listening in to the quieter, subversive voices rising out of that ‘unacceptable’ residue lying in culture's shadow.” They further observe that at the margins of the social conventions associated with collecting, there lie “urges sublimated in careful arrangements and informative labels: desires for suppression and ownership, fears of death and oblivion, hopes of commemora
tion and eternity.” The compulsion for collecting is the desire for another world, one at odds with the dominant culture system of the collector:
Collections gesture to nostalgia for previous worlds (worlds whose imagined existence took place prior to their contents being collected) and also to amusement. Across history there have been innumerable “trivial” collections (few of which have survived, for obvious reasons), based on ironic whim, on personal reverie, on casual caprice. Yet even amusement (which hints at the muses and at museums) is in some sense an aesthetic category, so that casual pleasure—no less than social climbing—bears testimony to the standards and rules of the mighty cultural system of which collecting is part.126
Collecting is associated with deep cultural fears of the underworld of “the mighty cultural system”—a fear of what is uncultured.
Can we, then, suppose that the devotion to art that marked Beckford's life was indeed a mechanism for dealing with the terror of slavery as much as the probity associated with homosexuality?127 The enigma of Beckford is that he used his money to amass the most significant collection of art and decorative objects, thus continuing his father's project, but then chose to direct these insignias of civility against the culture of taste itself. Beckford is now remembered for his “social excesses” and for his failure to control the “socially disruptive” forces that threatened his cherished desire to master civic virtue as defined by late eighteenth-century culture. This struggle between passion and virtue is most apparent in his repressed sexuality and his art. Beckford's love for William Courtenay, which began when the former was nineteen and continued into middle age, has come to be seen as the signifier of his romanticism and a certain longing for “freedom from moral responsibility” and an expression of the “wayward passion” that an aesthetic education was intended to contain.128 Similarly, Beckford's literary works, especially his gothic novel, Vathek, have come to be read as a conduit for his social excesses and thus a manifestation of how the ordered life of the aesthete was continuously at odds with disruptive passions.
Undoubtedly, ownership of art located Beckford in the public sphere, but it also enabled him to negotiate those aspects of his life that were excessive of the authorized cultural space. In this sense, he fits the model of the collector, who, in Jean Baudrillard's words, divests the object of its function and makes it relative to his own subjectivity; the system of collection thus becomes “the basis of which the subject seeks to piece together his world, his personal microcosm.”129 One curious aspect of the massive Beckford collection at Fonthill, notes McLeod, is that “there is an obvious discrepancy between the large quantities of objects noted as being housed in the rooms, and the scarcity of objects on view.”130 McLeod goes on to speculate that “showing a massed arrangement of relatively small-scale objects, would have upset the visual harmony and staged setting that work so successfully in portraying the grandeur and scale of the Abbey.”131
Beckford was not eager to display his collection, because he was actually hoarding it. As a matter of fact, it is possible to argue, following Baudrillard, that in the system of collecting, any given object one has can either be utilized or be possessed, but it cannot serve both functions: “The first function has to do with the subject's project of asserting practical control within the real world, the second with an enterprise of abstract mastery whereby the subject seeks to assert himself as an autonomous totality outside the world.”132 Baudrillard goes on to note how collecting, premised on the divestment of the object of its function, can become a form of fanaticism: “Surrounded by the objects he possesses, the collector is pre-eminently the sultan of a secret seraglio. Ordinary human relationships, which are the site of the unique and the conflictual, never permit such a fusion of absolute singularity and indefinite seriality. This explains why ordinary relationships are such a continual source of anxiety: while the realm of objects, on the other hand, being the realm of successive and homologous terms, offers security.”133
Beckford's system of collection supports these presuppositions powerfully. As I have already noted, he turned to collecting as a way of dealing with his own insecurities, not least the fact that he, England's wealthiest son, was the owner of slaves in Jamaica. We have also seen that the collection of objects was a form of asserting the autonomy of self against demands of social convention. Through the system of collecting, Beckford could exist inside and outside his culture—inside because he had complete ownership and control over the most valuable objects, and outside because the collection, which was rarely on display, could not connect him to the English public sphere. And if we recall that a crucial aspect of the modern self was its ability to exist as a public self, a point discussed at length in earlier chapters, we can see how Beckford's retreat into the inner sanctum of his imaginary castles and abbeys deprived him of a constitutive element of modern selfhood. Trapped between an elaborate interior and a recalcitrant public sphere, Beckford would turn his collection into the expression or mediator of his own phantasmal relationship to England and its colonial others. This phantasm was to find expression in Fonthill Abbey (fig. 3.12), the Gothic house that Beckford built in rebellion against his father's Whig Palladianism. Judging from his correspondence with his distinguished architect, Sir James Wyatt, Beckford's goal was to build, as an addition to his father's Palladian house at Fonthill, a new dwelling that would call into question the central categories of the culture of taste into which he had born. Variously described as a tabernacle or abbey, the anticipated house would reflect a style that was radically at odds with the sense of order and proportion associated with Palladianism.
On its completion, Fonthill Abbey was to become a living monument to the nature of English Gothic, and it is in its Gothicness that it is now read as an affront to the whole discourse on the ordering of the arts that had dominated the eighteenth century. Defined against the Protestantism associated with English Palladianism, Fonthill Abbey was designed to resemble what James Lees-Milne has aptly called “a Catholic cathedral in Protestant England.”134 Like the tower rising from its center, Beckford's new house stood out as a sign of defiance and deviancy; it was the angry statement of a person who, having worked so hard to be accepted as a true-born Englishman, a person of good breeding and status, had been rejected by the culture into which he had poured his wealth and fortune. In these circumstances, the journey from the Palladianism of the father to the Gothicism of the son is a symptom of the changes that were taking place as the dominant idea of the aesthetic—good taste, judgment, proportion, and control—began to collapse under its own strains, just as Fonthill Abbey began its slow descent into a ruin, its once opulent and magnificent halls reduced to rumble.
Many critics were to complain that the abbey had no utilitarian function, let alone taste; architectural historians derided “its scale as the vulgar concept of an eccentric millionaire not quite in his right senses.”135 But these critics were the ones who were still attached to aesthetic ideals that were being called into question by colonial events, most notably the Haitian revolutions. Beckford seemed, in an almost perverse way, to be attuned to the spirit of the times. Confronted with a financial crisis in his Jamaican estates, he had to borrow heavily to complete his building; still, it was his commission, made possible by what remained of colonial money, that enabled Wyatt, who was looking for a new architectural style, to explore the possibilities of Gothic buildings on the English landscape. Those critics who were to deride Fonthill Abbey as Beckford's folly seem to forget that this Gothic structure was also the manifest sign of Wyatt's “genius and his failings.”136 The radical nature of Wyatt's Gothic design for Fonthill Abbey becomes apparent if we compare his design for Beckford's tower to the neoclassical style of Dodington House, the mansion he had designed and built for Christopher Codrington in Avon. In Dodington House, Wyatt had chosen a symmetrical design dominated by Grecian columns and a staircase that incorporated materials from “old Fonthill.”137 In contrast, the design of Fonthill Abbey sought to emp
hasize the unevenness of form and display a provocative allegory. The house was planned on an irregular cross with a cluster of turrets and gables and an octagon steeple. Fonthill Abbey wore its religious character defiantly and exhibited its “Catholicism” in the very heart of Anglicanism.
3.12 John Gleghorn, Fonthill Abbey: The Grand Drawing Room. 1823. Engraving. Plate 5. From John Rutter, Delineations of Fonthill.
8
To conclude, there are many fronts on which the complex relationship between aesthetic reflection and the political economy of slavery can be explored. One could reflect on the fact that there was an intimate association between the Gothic and the sublime with colonialism; that two of the most important works of Gothic fiction in Britain (Beckford's Vathek and Matthew Gregory Lewis's The Monk) were written by heirs to West Indian plantations.138 But the one link I have sought to underscore in this chapter is the relation between the work of art, or rather its collection, and the questions of white identity and self-fashioning.
Consider Beckford's situation in 1799. Despite his education, ownership, and mastery of the economy of taste, he had failed in all of his efforts to be accepted by the English establishment; his greatest desire in life was to become a peer of the realm, but the fact that his childhood friend Pitt the Younger was now prime minister did not make much of a difference. Beckford's homosexuality and his colonial origins were used to frustrate all of his efforts to acquire gentility. At the same time, the plantation economy that had enabled the Beckfords rise to power in the first place was in convulsion, faced by the twin forces of revolution and emancipation.139 It is at this point of radical insecurity that Beckford built his abbey as a monument to St. Anthony of Padua, the ward against misfortune, and as a mausoleum for expensive objects. In the tower, art was there not so much to be enjoyed, but to be possessed; in this total ownership of valuable objects one could push the logic of aesthetic reflection to its limits. As he sat in his abbey in the last years of the long eighteenth century, lonely and melancholic, Beckford could embrace his pictures as empty signs for the lost slaves, sugar, and elusive gentility. He could content himself with the fact that what he had on his walls was the best collection of art in private hands in the whole of Europe, work by masters such as Giovanni Bellini, Rogier van der Weyden; paintings by Rembrandt and Rubens, Van Dyck and Van Eyck, even Velasquez's portrait of Pope Innocent X. This is what the mixture of slaves and sugar had brought Beckford; a collection of the most expensive and beautiful art objects in the world and social orphanage, complete isolation from the institutions and structures that would have given the self honor and esteem. But if art and taste had been Beckford's way of dealing with what one of his biographers has called his “displaced anxiety” and “sense of inadequacy,” then he had failed miserably.140 Ownership of art, as William Hazlitt observed in a scathing attack on Beckford's taste, did not guarantee its appreciation.141
Slavery and the Culture of Taste Page 20