He was briefly trained in music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart,[8] but his drawing master, Alexander Cozens, was a greater influence, and Beckford continued to correspond with him for some years until they fell out.

However, he was bisexual and after 1784 chose self-exile from British society when his letters to William Courtenay, later 9th Earl of Devon, were intercepted by the boy's uncle, who advertised the affair in the newspapers.

Although Beckford was never charged with child molestation, fornication or attempted buggery, he subsequently chose to exile himself on the continent with his long-suffering wife, who died in childbirth aged 24.

[13] Having studied under Sir William Chambers and Cozens, Beckford journeyed in Italy in 1782 and wrote a book about his travels: Dreams, Waking Thoughts and Incidents (1783).

Soon came his best-known work, the Gothic novel Vathek (1786), written originally in French; he boasted that it took a single sitting of three days and two nights, though there is reason to believe that this was a flight of imagination.

[14] His other main writings were Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters (1780), a satirical work, and Letters from Italy with Sketches of Spain and Portugal (1834), with brilliant descriptions of scenes and manners.

Although he avoided the classical marbles typically sought by well-educated English collectors, much of his collection was of 18th-century French furniture and decorative arts, then priced enormously high compared with paintings, by modern standards.

He put Fonthill Abbey up for sale, for which 72,000 copies of Christie's illustrated catalogue were sold at a guinea apiece; the pre-sale view filled every farmhouse in the neighbourhood with visitors from London.

[23] Hazlitt was unaware that the sale had been salted with lots inserted by Phillips the auctioneer that had never passed Beckford's muster: "I would not disgrace my house by Chinese furniture," he remarked later in life.

Beckford entered parliament as member for Wells and later for Hindon, quitting by taking the Chiltern Hundreds; but he lived mostly in seclusion, spending much of his father's wealth without adding to it.

After his death at Lansdown Crescent on 2 May 1844, aged 84, his body was laid in a sarcophagus and placed on an artificial mound, as was the custom of Saxon kings from whom he claimed to be descended.

Beckford had wished to be buried in the grounds of Lansdown Tower, but his body was interred at Bath Abbey Cemetery in Lyncombe Vale on 11 May 1844 (accessible from Ralph Allen Drive).

Beckford's self-designed tomb, a massive sarcophagus of polished pink granite with bronze armorial plaques, now stands on a hillock in the cemetery surrounded by an oval ditch.

On one side is a quotation from Vathek: "Enjoying humbly the most precious gift of heaven to man – Hope", and on another lines from his poem, A Prayer: "Eternal Power!

As a writer, Beckford is remembered for Vathek, of which the reception from every quarter may have satisfied his ambitions for a career in belles-lettres, and for his travel memoir, Italy: with some Sketches of Spain and Portugal.

Towards the end of his life he published collected travel letters, under the title Recollections of an Excursion to the Monasteries of Alcobaca and Batalha (1835), the memoir of a trip made in 1794.

Beckford wrote a considerable amount of music, much of it with the assistance of his amanuensis, John Burton, with whom he collaborated on his largest composition: Arcadian Pastoral.