William Beckford, aged twenty-one. Engraved by T.A. Dean after a portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds.


Beckfordian research has experienced a boom in recent years, thanks to the efforts of scholars and critics such as Kenneth W. Graham, Jon Millington, E.S. Shaffer and Robert J. Gemmett - to mention only a few. Websites devoted to Beckford have been less frequent. Kevin Berland's The Beckford Project was the first to appear; it remains an important source of Beckfordiana which should be visited on a regular basis (click here to access The Beckford Project). Perhaps the most essential source of Beckfordiana is to be found at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. The Department of Western Manuscripts houses, under the knowledgeable auspice of T.D. Rogers, the largest collection of Beckford MSS in the world - The Beckford Papers (formerly known as The Hamilton Papers). The collection represents the bulk of Beckford's literary estate; drafts, letters, essays, unfinished prose fragments, journals, newspaper clippings, musical compositions, &c. Though some of these manuscripts have been published, many remain unknown to a wider audience and deserves recognition. Click here to access the homepage of the Department of Western Manuscripts;click here to visit the homepage of the Bodleian Library.

The Bodleian should also be commended for The Internet Library of Early Journals - click here to access - which provides consecutive volumes of several important magazines from the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. These may be searched for any mention of Beckford - a truly invaluable tool.

The second largest collection of Beckford manuscripts is housed in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. Click here to access the online catalogue of Beckfordiana. Beckford's place in the pantheon of Gothic writers is dealt with by Fred Frank in his site The Sickly Taper. Click here to go straight to Beckford.

Beckfordiana will attempt to offer a comprehensive bibliography on William Beckford. Though this resource will be subject to constant revision and expansion, it may be found - in a preliminary state - if you click here.

Beckford's genealogy is a complex subject. Beckford had much research done on his lineage and Beckfordiana presents three genealogical tables taken from John Rutter's Delineations of Fonthill (1823). They may be viewed through these links:
Table 1 ::: Table 2 ::: Table 3
Please be aware that these plates are large in size (this applies particularly to Table 2 which is more than 600 kb in size) so they may take some time to download with your browser.