Spectacle, Exoticism, and Display in the Gentleman’s House: The Fonthill Auction of 1822

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Eighteenth-Century Studies, Volume 41, Number 4, Summer 2008,pp. 543-563 (Article)

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Nellis / The Fonthill Auction of 1822 543

Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 41, no. 4 (2008) Pp. 543–63.

Spectacle, exoticiSm, and diSplay in the Gentleman’S houSe: the Fonthill auction oF 1822

Anne Nellis Richter

Late in the summer of 1822, thousands of tourists from all over Britain and Europe descended on a village in Wiltshire, ninety miles from London, called Hindon. The village, despite its picturesque charms, was not the object of their curiosity; they were coming to see Fonthill Abbey, the country house built by notori-ous writer and traveler William Beckford, who had lived there in seclusion for the previous fifteen years. Beckford’s once great fortune had dwindled to a fraction of its former size, forcing him to hire Christie’s auction house to manage the sale of Fonthill and its contents, which was scheduled to begin on 17 September 1822.1 In the weeks leading up to the planned auction, the house was opened to the public and suddenly thrust into the national spotlight. Newspaper and magazine corre-spondents were dispatched to the countryside to record their reactions to Fonthill’s opulence. As one observer wrote, “almost every one of the monthly, weekly, and daily magazines and papers contained something about Fonthill, whereby its notoriety was augmented, and public curiosity was stimulated . . . Fonthill soon attracted the swarm, and was filled to overflow, by the buzzing tribe.”2

As a result of the media circus surrounding it, the Fonthill exhibition became one of the most written-about spectacles of 1822. The most notable of the essays reporting on the auction, written by William Hazlitt, appeared in the London Magazine, but important articles were also printed in the New Monthly Magazine, the Literary Gazette, the Wiltshire Gazette, and the Times, among others. These publications represent a range of political and social viewpoints; all

Anne Nellis Richter is currently working on a manuscript about private galleries in London as social and architectural spaces used to maintain cultural and political authority in the early nineteenth century. She received her Ph.D. from Brown University in 2003 and is a Research Associate at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Wash-ington, D.C.

Eighteenth-Century Studies 41 / 4544

evince a complex, usually ambivalent, reaction to the house, its contents, and the exhibition itself.3 While they were often openly admiring of the architecture of the house itself and the cost, rarity, and beauty of the objects in Beckford’s collection, these thoughts were coupled with disdain for the manner in which the exhibition took place and its influence on public taste. Press responses to the auction also drew liberally on the rhetoric of contemporary debates about commerce, luxury, and empire. In doing so, they exposed the fault lines between older economic models, represented by the paternalistic and land-based world of the country house, and newer ones based on international trade and the open market.4

In short, Fonthill Abbey and its exhibition occupied a cultural, social, and geographic space crucial to a variety of competing discourses in early nine-teenth-century England, none of which could be easily reconciled. This confluence of discourses made the exhibition the focus of a remarkably complicated public response. Yet, it is possible to discern three distinct yet mutually interdependent sets of concerns within the criticism. First, the perception that the auction introduced aspects of urban exhibition culture into the countryside; second, that it further introduced this urban culture into an ostensibly domestic environment; and third, that it conflated the elevated pleasures of looking at art with the more mundane pleasures of shopping. In this essay, I will analyze the responses to the exhibition that appeared in the periodical press in order to illuminate and draw together the myriad threads of aesthetic and social commentary that run through them. When considered together, they shed light on the larger issues at stake in the art world in the early nineteenth century, such as how the circumstances of the display of art impacted upon the development of public taste, and the implications of acknowl-edging art as a commodity in the marketplace.

The details of both Beckford’s life and the auction have been thoroughly documented elsewhere.5 Beckford was a writer, traveler, and man-about-town whose vast fortune derived from his family’s Jamaican plantations. At age twenty-four he became embroiled in a public scandal prompted by his romantic infatuation with the son of the second Viscount Courtenay, William, who was eight years his junior.6 Shunned by polite society, Beckford went abroad, where he remained for many years. His reputation gradually became that of an eccentric, whose bizarre contributions to the literary world, including his orientalist-gothic novel Vathek (1786), marked him as marginal to conventional society. After returning to Eng-land, he began designing a new structure for the grounds of his family estate, Fonthill Splendens in Wiltshire. This building, which Beckford called Fonthill Abbey, evolved from an early concept for an elaborate “pleasure building” into a full-fledged gothic-style house large enough to accommodate his extensive (and expanding) collections of art, French furniture, and curios; its most prominent feature was a 175-foot tower [Figure 1].7 The Abbey was regarded as yet another manifestation of Beckford’s unconventional tastes. As the conservative Literary Gazette remarked, “The minds most nearly allied to genius are the most apt to plunge to these extremes: a Beckford builds a Babel by torchlight; a Byron writes a Cain with exultation; and an Eratastratus burns the Temple of Diana, to gain an immortal, though infamous celebrity.”8

By 1822, however, Beckford’s finances were in dire straits. The price of sugar, the main source of his wealth, crashed.9 As Beckford prepared to retrench


Figure 1. “South West View of Fonthill Abbey, Wilts.” Frontispiece in John Rutter, A description of Fonthill Abbey and demesne (Shaftesbury, J. Rutter, 1822). National Gallery of Art Library, Wash-ington D.C.

to Bath, the contents of the house—with the exception of some of his most prized possessions—were broken up into more than one thousand lots and readied for sale.10 Catalogs with tickets for admission to the house were sold for one guinea at locations in London and provincial towns in southern England, as well as in Amsterdam, Brussels, and Paris [Figure 2]. The auction was cancelled at the last minute after Beckford agreed to sell the entire estate to gunpowder manufacturer John Farquhar for £300,000, but not before the exhibition had become one of the most talked about spectacles of the year.

Journalists and other visitors to the long-closed Abbey described a house stuffed to overflowing with furniture, pictures, books, porcelain, metalwork, and curiosities; Beckford also had a large collection of paintings which included works by artists such as Guercino, Domenichino, Veronese, Teniers, and Salvator Rosa.11 A view of the drawing room, for example, suggests an interior richly decorated with motifs of both Gothic Revival and neoclassical inspiration, hung with Old Master paintings and accessorized with objects like the hookah displayed at the center of the table [Figure 3]. According to the New Monthly Magazine, Beckford’s collection was “the most gorgeous and costly assemblage of the kind that was ever collected together under one roof, in this portion of the globe at least; . . . they go near to give one a glimmering and indistinct notion of the treasures of the preadamite sultans themselves!”12 How the objects were actually displayed in the rooms, however, cannot be precisely reconstructed. During the years Beckford used Fonthill as his primary residence he had not opened the house to visitors, so tourists’ accounts cannot be used for this purpose. Interior views were largely conventional, and most


Figure 2. Title page, Magnificent effects at Fonthill Abbey, Wilts. to be sold by auction, by Mr. Christie (1822) Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, Connecticut.


(like the view of the drawing room illustrated above) were published after the house and collections had been sold to Farquhar, making it difficult to discern whether they at all reflect the display of objects during the exhibition.13

Before delving more deeply into the written accounts, it is worth noting that among the most significant factors driving the criticism were the very circumstances of the exhibition, namely, that the objects were on display only because they were about to be put up for auction. Auctions in general were vulnerable to censure in this period because of their status as commercial enterprises. They became addition-ally problematic when they were held in private houses rather than in an auction house proper. Objects owned by private citizens, often furniture and personal effects closely associated with the daily lives of the household’s residents, were tagged and readied for sale to the highest bidder. Such auctions turned the space of the home, so often celebrated as a haven from the unseemliness of the market, into a public marketplace, a “morning lounge” in which the upper classes could perform their rituals of social display and anyone else could watch and even buy.14 In other words, the practices and rituals associated with auctions flaunted the accepted norms of behavior in private houses; the sale at Fonthill Abbey was no exception.

Because art auctions were also largely urban phenomena, an auction in a country house was doubly troublesome; it not only blurred the line between

Figure 3. “The Grand Drawing Room” in John Rutter, Delineations of Fonthill and its Abbey (London, 1823). The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.


domestic and commercial space, but it encouraged in a rural setting a type of viewing more typical of the city.15 The countryside was generally regarded as a preserve of traditional English life and as a space of withdrawal from the hubbub of the metropolis.16 Before visiting Fonthill, tourists had to first make their way to the village of Hindon, situated in rural Wiltshire thirty miles from the fashionable resort of Bath. Visitors from London might have perceived Hindon as a picturesque country village, though its location on one of the main roads made it a popular stopping point for travelers and it was home to a number of inns and coaching establishments.17

In contrast, London’s status in the early nineteenth century as a cultural center for Great Britain and as a center of international commerce was unques-tioned—though whether this was considered a positive or a negative trait depended upon one’s point of view.18 London functioned as a point of contact with the world beyond England—particularly the exotic outposts of the empire—its cultural and social anarchy out of place in a country village. Yet, an account found in the local paper, the Wiltshire Gazette, claimed that during the rush of visitors, conditions in Hindon did not conform to the stereotypical notion of a sleepy country town:

Coming from London, travellers first meet with their troubles about Salisbury. The languages of France, of Holland, and of Germany; the peculiarities (in tongue) of Scotland and Ireland, the broad dialect of Somersetshire, the tinkling accent of Wales, and the more polished tones of metropolitan residents, are all, at the same moment, heard clashing and contending together; there are bells ringing, and chambermaids screaming, horses prancing and postboys swearing, wheels are clattering, waiters are jostling, guests are threatening, and the hub-bub is the order of the day.19

In this passage, the breadth of nationalities and classes represented in the audi-ences at the exhibition rhetorically collapse into a shouting mass of strangers who descend upon the village and transform its character.

Several writers chose to focus on this very dissonance, finding comedy in the jarring contradictions between urban and rural life. The Wiltshire Gazette claimed that “ostrich plumes are seen nodding at a casement window over a depopulated poultry yard, and not a pig in all Hindon but must get his breakfast betimes, lest the slumbers of a person of property should be broken by his gruntings.” The New Monthly Magazine exclaimed that Fonthill’s gate, “which would not hitherto have moved at the mandate of all the Sovereigns of Europe . . . now flies open of itself a hundred times a time, at the mere sight of a half-sovereign, presented by the perchance, soiled fingers of a London cockney or country boor!” (WG; “DFA,” 369). The perceived social chaos in Hindon represented a confrontation between sophisticated metropolitans and ignorant provincials, a distinction which was defined along both geographical and class lines. The country house was the symbolic marker of authority and continuity within the world of the countryside; a country-house visit represented an homage to this world and a retreat from the cities, especially London. The crowds flocking into Wiltshire for the exhibition upended this symbolic economy.

Many journalists responded by deploying tropes long used to describe the relative merits of country and city life. The Wiltshire Gazette commented, “it is


not the immediate road to the Abbey alone which is fruitful of scenes full of whim and of gaiety; the great influx of company and consequent dearth of adequate entertainment converts that into a scene of masquerade which would otherwise be merely a scene of carnival” (WG). Juxtaposing notions of “masquerade” and “carnival,” the Gazette’s writer evokes the collapse of the village’s usual simplicity into a potentially harmful metropolitan culture, one characterized by the myriad of entertainment venues available at all times to distract the urban populace.20

The apprehensive response to the exhibition was thus engendered in part by the invasion of the countryside by fashionable urbanites and the transformation of a private country house into an entertainment venue reminiscent of the Royal Academy or the Egyptian Museum21 Gentlemen’s houses were not supposed to entertain; their purpose was to elevate the mind and embody the traditional landed values of the upper classes, among them the figure of the gentleman as a virtu-ous and manly paragon. It was the importance of the gentleman’s collection as a standard-bearer for public taste that was most at stake in the devastating critique leveled against the Fonthill exhibition in the pages of the London Magazine by radical critic and essayist William Hazlitt. Hazlitt wrote frequently about suitable spaces for the improvement of middle-class taste, which he championed in essays on both private collections and other venues for looking at the arts written in the 1810s and 1820s.22 Hazlitt’s ideal collection consisted of a group of Old Masters of the highest quality, displayed freely to an educated audience. He extolled the virtues of country-house art collections that fulfilled precisely this role in a series of essays written around the same time as the Fonthill auction.23 In his essay on Fonthill, however, the admiration he usually expressed for grand houses filled with Old Masters gave way to nearly irrational loathing of the Abbey’s “ostentatious magnificence”: “. . . all the miniature splendour of Solomon’s Temple is displayed to the view—whatever is far-fetched and dear-bought, rich in the materials, or rare and difficult in the workmanship, but scarce one genuine work of art, one solid proof of taste, one lofty relic of sentiment or imagination!”24

Hazlitt’s visceral response to Fonthill should certainly be understood within the context of his own body of writing on art, which made frequent use of the themes of excess, loss, and desire, all of which are prominently deployed in the Fonthill essay.25 Yet, his vexed reaction to Fonthill was a complicated one, and he evokes these themes in order to address the problem of personal taste and its con-nection to public morality. In Hazlitt’s view, it was the duty of the art-owning elite to expose the masses to only the finest works possible, rather than pander to the whims of the crowd as he so frequently accused exhibitors at the Royal Academy of doing.26 Hazlitt’s ideas about taste were indebted to eighteenth-century philosophical criticism, which, as Andrew Hemingway has argued, attempted to establish a set of principles for taste in response to its vulnerability to the “corrupting effects” of luxury and over-refinement.27 Hazlitt clearly felt that the Fonthill exhibition had fallen victim to such corruption:

Fonthill Abbey, after being enveloped in impenetrable mystery for a length of years, has been unexpectedly thrown open to the vulgar gaze, and has lost none of its reputation for magnificence—though perhaps, its visionary glory, its classic renown, have vanished from the public mind for ever. It is, in a word, a desart [sic] of magnificence, a glittering waste


of laborious idleness, a cathedral turned into a toy-shop, an immense Museum of all that is most curious and costly, and, at the same time, most worthless, in the productions of art and nature. (“FA,” 18:173)

Hazlitt’s choice of vocabulary is particularly significant: phrases like “glittering waste,” “toy-shop,” and “curious and costly” would have evoked the long-stand-ing and still controversial question of whether consumption was a sign of moral degeneracy or national pride.28

Hazlitt’s language is not generically critical of luxury, however, but ex-plicitly evokes the connection between luxury and exoticism, from his mention of “lamps of solid gold,” to his distasteful notice of “Chinese pagodas and Persian tapestry” (“FA,” 18:173). Many of the responses to the auction are shot through with such passing remarks, which seem calculated to remind the reader of Beckford’s fascination with foreign cultures. The New Monthly Magazine described “. . . a scene which was said to surpass the fictions of eastern fancy, and which was cre-ated apparently only that it might not be seen! And what is the ‘Open Sesame!’ which is at last to dissolve the charm, and lay bare these mysterious inclosures to the rude and vulgar gaze of all comers? Alas! A little bit of gold!—Gold . . . the only true Talisman of Oromanes.”29 The charge of Eastern luxury seems to also be leveled at objects of European provenance by association; The Times described “vases of sardonyx, topaz, and crystal; pictures and carvings by the first artists in the world; pieces of furniture and plate which have been the property of monarchs, and bijouterie which has graced the toilets of beauties no more.”30

The preoccupation with luxury and exoticism found in almost all the Font-hill accounts suggests that the spectacle of the auction was particularly compelling because it drew together discourses on empire and consumption, which were live and urgent issues in post-Waterloo London. By 1822, the dependence of Britain’s economic and political power upon both the growth of the empire and the morally compromised practice of slavery was a hotly debated topic.31 Beckford was particu-larly implicated in such matters, not only by his long-standing interest in Middle Eastern culture, but also because his wealth conspicuously came mainly from his family’s West Indian sugar plantations. Jill Casid has argued that Fonthill Abbey and its extensive landscaped grounds were in part designed to cleanse Beckford of the problems associated with the Jamaican plantation.32

Moreover, the very system of traditional agriculture that the country house represented was itself under attack. The debate over the Corn Laws, protectionist laws benefiting landowners enacted during the Napoleonic Wars, was at a peak in the years around 1820. Political economist David Ricardo, among others, argued that the landed classes’ tendency to spend their money on luxuries rather than on further improvement of their estates was destructive to both the British economy and to the well-being of the lower classes, who were suffering bread shortages. At the moment of the auction, the countryside had thus become central to national political debate in a way that it had not been for some time.33 Fonthill seemed a case par excellence of the country house that did not function in its traditional role but acted merely as a glorification of its owner: the grounds highly cultivated but unproductive, the house a monument not to Englishness or even Britishness, but to its owner’s personal and highly idiosyncratic desires.


From this point of view, Beckford’s admiration of exotic objects was deeply problematic—such objects did not elevate the mind or soul, since the whimsy and opulence with which they were associated connoted not serious works of art, but rather luxuries. Descriptions of the exhibition were occasionally reminiscent of the accounts of London markets crammed with luxury goods from around the world that appeared frequently in travel diaries and periodicals.34 They also shifted the focus from the beauty or quality of the objects on display to their rarity and mon-etary worth. In its column detailing “Provincial Occurrences,” the New Monthly Magazine reported:

It is universally allowed, that so vast is the grandeur, and so numerous and various the curiosities of Fonthill Abbey, that it is impossible to form an idea of the fabric and its contents without viewing them. The building of the Abbey, though not yet complete, is reported to have cost nearly a millions [sic] of money. The first object that strikes a visitor is a pair of doors 33 feet high at the entrance of the building; these doors move on wrought iron hinges of 22 cwt. and are thrown open, as if by magic, on the approach of the visitor.35

The focus in this passage on amounts, sizes, and weights, with a little “magic” thrown in for good measure, owes more to the rhetoric of a fairground barker than to the tone of impressed deference usually adopted by fashionable journals writing about private collections.

The Literary Gazette took a similar approach. “We have heard that when a young man in Italy, [Beckford’s] income exceeded 90,000l per annum,” their writer commented, though the Abbey cost in their estimation only “four hundred thousand pounds.” If these figures were not enough to dazzle the reader, the Literary Gazette writer noted, “the four hinges of the great west door cost 1500l, and weigh more than a ton!”36 Such rhetoric could be found in most accounts of Fonthill, even those meant to be utterly respectful. For example, John Rutter’s catalog enthuses that the Grand Drawing Room contains, standing “upon a carpet of extraordinary costli-ness,” “a table of Egyptian marble, the largest slab of the kind in Europe.”37 The awe previously manifested at the Abbey’s construction and at Beckford’s cracked genius has shifted slightly and been exposed as crass commercial desire.

The writers’ fascination with the value of the objects on display had serious repercussions. A writer for the Literary Chronicle suggested, “from beginning to end, the Fonthill business has seemed to me to have been carried on, as far as the public has been concerned, with too much of the tradesman, or rather, perhaps, showman-like spirit; it has been made too much of a shop.”38 The ultimate con-sequences of this were dire, in this writer’s view, from the standpoint of national pride: “I am afraid, [the auction will] furnish another plausible reason for the term applied to us by foreigners—, that we are a nation of shopkeepers.”39 It was sug-gested variously that the house was “fitted up” like a “goldsmith’s,” “jeweller’s,” or “toy-shop.” The type of shops these writers had in mind were most likely the sort depicted in Ackermann’s Repository of Arts, a periodical published throughout the 1810s and 1820s which concerned itself largely with fashion and happenings in London. The shop interiors depicted in the Repository were generally piled high with luxury goods like fabrics, silver plate, and china [Figure 4].40 Beckford’s collect-


ing practice had brought the luxuries available in such places into the countryside and, via the auction, transformed Fonthill into a metropolitan shop. The Times’s reviewer mocked the pretensions of people gawking at the wares, drawing a con-trast between the metropolitan objects on display and the less sophisticated viewers looking at them: “as for the country folks who come to the place, their brains are absolutely turned by the sight. They talk of Paul Varnish, Tin-cars, and Nicholas Push-in, as familiarly as their own great grandfathers and grandmothers.”41 Overall, the impression emerges from the criticism that visitors to the exhibition were not engaged in an act of viewing as much as they were “shopping.”42

“Shopping” was a heavily weighted term, as demonstrated by a wealth of scholarship produced in the past twenty years.43 These studies have suggested that the practice of shopping was increasingly gendered feminine and was linked to moralistic judgments about acquisitiveness, excess, and the role of fashion in society. They also suggest that the association of shopping with femininity may have arisen to deflect the charges of luxury and greed from the business practices associated with commerce and trade, which retained an air of masculine respect-ability.44 By the 1820s, however, voices supportive of Britain’s vibrant economy and the acquisitive spirit that drove it had become much louder. As Ann Bermingham has recently observed, the modern urbanity associated with London had become so intertwined with practices of collecting, viewing, and art making that they could hardly be separated. A critic like Hazlitt, who was a supporter of political reform but an elitist in matters of taste, found the city’s commercial environment lacking in the qualities necessary to support the kind of exhibitions that would elevate the public taste.45 Yet Hazlitt’s encomium on John Angerstein’s collection, located in London’s fashionable Pall Mall (and written shortly before it was transformed into the National Gallery), depends upon its location in the city:

Figure 4. “Wedgwood & Byerley” in The Repository of Arts (February 1809). The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.


What signify the hubbub, the shifting scenery, the fantoccini figures, the folly, the idle fashions without, when compared with the solitude, the si-lence, the speaking looks, the unfading forms within?—Here is the mind’s true home. . . .46

Contrasting the gallery’s quiet and private interior with the bustling and frivolous metropolitan environment just outside its walls, Hazlitt’s approach affirms the necessary connection between interior and exterior, imagining the gallery interior as both an extension of and a break from the street. Despite Fonthill’s location ninety miles from London, the auction had brought the qualities of the urban setting into the space of the gentleman’s collection. As a result, in Hazlitt’s view it paradoxically could not provide as ideal an experience of art as a private collection in the city.

Hazlitt’s fear that art was being displayed as if it were in a shop had sev-eral implications. Some were moral. As the heir of eighteenth-century aesthetic theorists who argued that environments that aroused the senses (such as the city or the marketplace) were inimical to the cultivation of the “pleasures of the imagi-nation,” Hazlitt was certain that any art that appealed to the eye was sure to do so at the expense of the mind and soul.47 The mode of display at Fonthill, which combined Old Masters with “trinkets and baubles,” gave the lie to the fiction of the former’s status as timeless and perfect specimens of art, emanating from its ostensible disengagement from the market. Hazlitt’s response to this problem was to argue that the expensive and gaudy decorative objects filling Fonthill’s interior degraded the experience of looking at art, turning it from aesthetic revelation into inquisitive ogling; a space which could have been one of “visionary glory” has been crammed with objects that manage only to be “curious and costly” (“FA,” 18:173).48 His rhetorical strategy of characterizing the pictures and other objects in Beckford’s collection as merchandise denies them any status as aesthetic and mor-ally elevated works: “The face of a Madonna . . . is a shrine, a consecrated source of high and pure feeling, a well-head of lovely expression, at which the soul drinks and is refreshed . . . What soul can you look for in a gilded cabinet or a marble slab?” (“FA,” 18:176). Hazlitt’s repeated ejection of decorative objects from the category of “art” emphasizes that he regards them as luxury items that represent the collecting practice of the effete amateur rather than the lifetime devotion of a truly knowledgeable connoisseur. In essence, Hazlitt’s essay transforms the as-semblage of objects in Fonthill Abbey from logical and masculine “collection” to effeminate “acquisition.”

The problems of masculinity and effeminacy in relation to Fonthill’s status as a domestic space are raised sporadically in the responses to the auction. Beckford’s scandalous reputation disturbed the notion that the house was a domestic haven for the country gentleman.49 This is hinted at in Richard Colt Hoare’s essay about the exhibition, which appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine: “After admiring the rich collection of porcelaine [sic], plate, gems, books, and paintings, contained within the Abbey walls, the eye looks around for comfort, and a snug corner for reading, conversation, or contemplation; but alas! It searches in vain. Finery and shew seem to be the ruling Genii of the place.”50 It is fitting that Colt Hoare should make such a pronouncement; he had successfully cultivated what might be described as the refined, gentlemanly “other” to Fonthill in his own country house, grounds, and collections at Stourhead. At Fonthill, in the eyes of an onlooker like Colt Hoare,


objects and the pursuit of luxury had completely obliterated what should be the proper uses of the gentleman’s house. Fonthill was lavish, but Colt Hoare seemed most worried about the lack of a “snug corner” as the ideal palliative for the Abbey’s ostentatious display.

Perhaps Hoare’s concern was not so much the glitter of the display as its unchecked nature—avaricious collecting unaccompanied by the modest virtues of the domestic sphere to provide balance. This view was echoed by the Wiltshire Gazette: “Fonthill Abbey! The dwelling-house of an English gentleman! Many an old useless religious edifice has been turned into a handsome and useful home, but who ever heard of an abbey new built to be inhabited as a house? It may be all that an abbey should be, but it is not all that a house should be.”51 In other words, the qualities that made a fitting residence for Catholic clerics (who lived in all-male enclaves) were certainly not those that made a “home,” with its attendant associations of coziness and heterosexual domesticity. In its report on the house and auction, the New Monthly Magazine explicitly connected Fonthill with the dangerous domestic spaces of the gothic novel, suggesting that the Abbey’s “mys-terious recesses” and “dim vestibules” imaginatively transported the visitor into Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho.52 From this viewpoint, Fonthill failed to conform to the ideal of a space for masculinity in repose, highlighting instead the luxury and acquisitiveness of Beckford’s collecting practice, characteristics which gave the space of the Abbey a curiously hybrid nature.

These comments may not on their face seem to have anything to do with Beckford’s personal conduct and reputation, but the assertions of Beckford’s ca-priciousness, desire for luxurious objects, and taste for the foreign that appeared repeatedly in responses to the exhibition would have been understood as symptoms of effeminacy, a sign of both personal and cultural weakness. As Felicity Nussbaum has argued, effeminacy brought to mind a range of behaviors flouting norms of upstanding, “polite” masculine behavior, including self-interestedness, vanity, fri-volity, instability, and an interest in luxury goods.53 Effeminacy connoted a fluid identity that could not be categorized effectively as either masculine or feminine, and was appropriate to neither the demands of public life nor private morality. In Beckford’s case, the range of behaviors listed above in addition to his reputa-tion for sexual license, not same-sex desire per se (though this may have played a part), marked him as an effeminate figure.54 While acknowledging that Beckford’s sexual conduct was an important element of his personal notoriety, I would like to suggest that a larger cultural norm was at stake: the ideal of masculinity as it was commonly deployed as a marker of taste and cultural authority. Effeminacy was seen as a threat to public life in a number of ways; when describing the country seat of an English gentleman, still viewed as an important marker of the health of the nation, it was a devastating accusation.

Beckford’s fascination with “trinkets and baubles,” then, was perceived as one that could only come at the expense of masculine authority and good taste. “The motive for the production of such toys is mercenary,” Hazlitt wrote, “and the admiration of them childish or servile” (“FA,” 18:175). The evocation of servility here is particularly telling. Neither children nor slaves possessed the qualities neces-sary for participation in public life emblemized by the notion of English freedom. Proponents of middle-class values frequently asserted that British identity was rooted


in “freedom” that was antithetical to French despotism and the court culture that thrived under it—the very culture which had produced many of the objects found in Beckford’s collections. Hazlitt finds all participants in the process—craftspeople and artists, patrons, and viewers—equally guilty of a servility that stands as a marker for effeminacy and national weakness. He condemns decorative paintings and objects as trinkets that can neither enhance the creation of a properly domestic environment nor provide an edifying experience for art lovers.

Hazlitt was not alone in expressing this point of view. The New Monthly Magazine’s writer commented that the “pictures, cabinets, vases, candelabras, and curious objects of various kinds,” making up the collection, “however rare and valuable many of them may be . . . are, in fact, altogether unadapted to the situation in which we find them.” As a space for the display of “rare and valuable” artworks, this writer found Fonthill sadly wanting, describing it as an interior marked by “crowding,” “profusion,” and “distraction” rather than one inspiring thoughtful contemplation (“DFA,” 374). The Literary Gazette fretted, “we are not, under any circumstances, very ardent admirers of houses or palaces fitted up like goldsmith’s and jeweller’s shops. A moderate collection of elegant and remarkable productions, serves to amuse visitors . . . but a whole Museum of trinkets, china, rarities, and precious bijouterie, can afford no satisfaction to the intelligent mind, and only for a brief space amuse the weak and barren.”55 Fonthill is specifically described as a collection that is immoderate. The objects within are only amusing, rather than elegant, the whole failing to elevate its audience. Beckford’s sale, in other words, did not represent a sober and restrained approach to the business of selling one’s possessions, but rather an excessiveness that undermined the status of the gentleman as arbiter of taste and his house as a site for reflection and moral elevation.

Fonthill Abbey had been defiled by the intrusion of commerce, fashion, and the puffery of professional salesmen. It was ultimately transformed, via the auction, into a venue where serious connoisseurs rubbed shoulders with people who viewed exhibitions as little more than spectacular entertainment. Within the traditional framework of country-house visiting, the ideal tourist remained at a respectful distance and “identifie[d] with the values of the landowner without actually coveting his possessions,” as Carole Fabricant has argued.56 By opening Fonthill under the conditions of a sale, Beckford subverted the expected hierarchies and controls on the desiring gaze of the visitor. Objects were presented not only as delectations for the gaze, representatives of the good taste of the upper classes, and tangible reminders of the social hierarchies of English life, but also as objects for sale; the life of the country gentleman was visibly and publicly for sale to the highest bidder. More importantly, the circumstances of the auction exposed the difficulties inherent in claiming the private gentleman’s house as one that necessarily supported ideal modes of looking at fine art. Under ideal conditions, the private house could be represented as the best place for the instruction of the eye to take place, in a state of retreat from society and nestled in the domestic sphere. As the case of Fonthill Abbey made clear, the success of a private collection was predicated on its owner’s adherence to strict social codes in terms of personal conduct and the circumstances under which collections were made available to audiences. When these social codes were not observed or were otherwise subverted, the country house system itself was at stake.


It is clear that the commercial and the aesthetic formed a fatal combina-tion in the eyes of liberal, middle-class critics like Hazlitt who were focused on denouncing both the effete and elitist practices of the aristocracy and the free-for-all populism dictated by the market. The sale of the Abbey and its contents laid bare the financial transactions that underlay the collections of fine art and furniture contained in the grand estates of England’s countryside. Fonthill was, after all, not a shop in London but a private house located in rural England, one intimately connected to the vagaries of global markets since it was financed by sugar revenues gleaned from a West Indian colony. The auction opened up a gap in the public perception of Fonthill, between its status as a gentlemanly estate and its identity as a site of commercial exchange and popular entertainment. This gap is embodied by two images printed the year following the auction [Figures 5 and 6]. The first of these views, dated April 1823, appeared in the context of Graphical and Literary Illustrations of Fonthill Abbey (1823), written by the antiquarian John Britton. The second appeared in August of that year, when the house was about to reopen to the public in anticipation of a second, somewhat anticlimactic auction. The sec-ond exhibition and sale were held by Fonthill’s new owner, John Farquhar, whose own fortune in gunpowder dated from his years in the East India Company. It was probably an attempt to liquidate some of his new possessions while the notoriety of the previous year’s auction still guaranteed a measure of publicity.57

In the wake of the previous year’s auction, Britton’s view works mightily in conjunction with his text to reconnect Fonthill with a traditionally English and implicitly Protestant system of social relations. Britton paints Fonthill with the same brush he had used to highlight other country houses in earlier works such as The Beauties of England and Wales (1801–16). No longer “possessed by the haughty and tyrannical baron,” He argues, they are now

generally the abode of benevolence, urbanity, hospitality, and elegance. . . . True English comfort and English luxury are the characteristics of the Englishman’s country seat: and nothing has tended more to adorn and enrich Great Britain than the distribution of these over its surface.58

In this passage, Britton touches on all of the themes that made country houses so powerful as loci of Englishness. They were private residences whose benevolent owners preserved English cultural heritage, in the form of architecture, furniture, books, and Old Masters, for the public benefit. The private house was regarded by many as the space where such cultural preservation could most effectively take place, where “true English comfort and English luxury” cosseted private possessions within the comforting and traditional setting of upper-class privilege.

Britton’s illustrated guide invoked the rhetoric of nationalism and gentle-manly duty to cement Fonthill’s place within the network of country estates, stating that “the mansion and parks of many of the English nobility and gentry are proper objects of curiosity and interest to the inquisitive traveller.”59 The accompanying plate, depicting Fonthill from a distance, mobilizes all the visual tropes of rural Englishness, placing it at the top of a winding road cutting through a dense forest [Figure 5]. The forest, made up of a variety of tree species, darkly frames the sunlit Abbey and its spire, which rise from the clearing in the center of the print. In the foreground, two tiny figures (accompanied by a dog) gesturing toward the building


Figure 5. “Fonthill Abbey, Distant View from S.W.” in John Britton, Graphical and literary illustra-tions of Fonthill Abbey (London, 1823). National Gallery of Art Library, David K.E. Bruce Fund, Washington, D.C.

Figure 6. “The Pavilion and the Lake in the Old Park,” in The Repository of Arts (August 1823). The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.


place this image in the familiar context of views of country estates commemorating their status as long-established cultural sites. Such a traditional image disallows the possibility of other modes of representing the country estate that would be in keeping with changing conceptions of its place in the social order.

Shortly after Britton’s conventional representation appeared, however, a very different view of Fonthill was published in the Repository of Arts, accompa-nying an article about Farquhar’s auction scheduled to begin September 23, 1823. The Repository’s illustration focuses upon the pavilion newly erected on Fonthill’s grounds to provide lodging and refreshment for tourists and exhibition-goers [Figure 6]. As the magazine was devoted to the latest fashions, interior decor, and house-hold amenities for the upwardly mobile, its sympathies clearly lay with promoting an economy based on consumption as the key to a prosperous future for Britain. It is thus fitting that in the Repository’s pages, Fonthill was transformed from an imposing Gothic Revival house on a hilltop to a semipermanent structure embel-lished with a jauntily striped awning.60 The text informed readers that to alleviate the “inconveniencies” of the previous year’s exhibition, arrangements for the pa-vilion had been made with the utmost view toward “propriety and comfort.” The Repository went on to note that public breakfasts were available every morning, and that refreshments of the “most simple or of the most luxurious kind” could be “reasonably purchased at all times.”61 The provision of such amenities would result in an even greater influx of visitors than in the previous year, “curious to obtain a sight of the glories of this celebrated place before the hammer of the auctioneer, not less potent than the wand of the fairy enchantress, bids them disappear for ever.”62Rather than strive for the illusion of uncomplicated gentlemanly propriety, the Abbey’s new owner chose to cater to the tourist trade. The Repository of Arts, for its part, clearly felt that its readers would be more interested in the refreshment pavilion than in the array of furniture and objects still contained in Fonthill’s interior or the tower dominating the surrounding countryside. The Abbey’s iconic spire is nowhere in sight; it has been pushed aside in favor of an image of sociability and commercial exchange.63

These two portrayals of Fonthill Abbey illustrate how the “public mind” could be turned from the edifying possibilities of the gentleman’s house to the more transient, and private, pleasures of the auction (“FA,” 18:173). The illusions of the country house, and by extension, the private collection, as bastions of English values and high moral character were subverted by Beckford’s decision to open his house to the public for the purposes of personal financial gain. By the time the auction was over, the notion of an awe-inspiring, visionary feat of architecture and collect-ing had been thoroughly undermined by the spectacle and publicity surrounding the sale. More importantly, the circumstances of the auction provided a showcase for the difficulties inherent in claiming the private gentleman’s house as necessarily supporting ideal modes of looking at fine art, in a state of retreat from society and nestled in the domestic sphere. As the case of Fonthill Abbey made clear, the success of private collections was predicated on their owners’ adherence to strict social codes in terms of personal conduct and the circumstances under which collections were made available to audiences. When these social codes were not observed or were otherwise subverted, the fitness of the private house for the display of art to the public was open to question, and could not be easily defended.


NOTES

The research for this article was supported in part by a Robert Wark Fellowship from the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. I have benefited greatly from the comments and suggestions of many colleagues while writing this article. I would like to especially thank Amy Freund, Daniel Harkett, Dian Kriz, Melinda McCurdy, Stacey Sloboda, and the anonymous readers for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

1. The second printing of the catalog indicates that the date of the auction was subsequently moved to 8 October 1822.

2. John Britton, Graphical and Literary Illustrations of Fonthill Abbey (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1823), 15.

3. Important to my understanding of early nineteenth-century periodical literature is Jon Klancher’s The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832 (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1987). On the political leanings of prominent journals at this time, see John O. Hayden, The Romantic Reviewers, 1802–1824 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1968).

4. I have found a number of studies extremely useful for thinking about developments in the Brit-ish economy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A classic work on this subject is Christopher Hill, Reformation to Industrial Revolution: The Making of Modern English Society, vol. 1, 1530–1780 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1967), esp. 184–95. Also important are Joyce Oldham Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (1978; repr., Los Angeles: Figueroa Press, 2004); Appleby, “Consumption in Early Modern Social Thought,” in Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. John Brewer and Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1993); and R. J. Holton, The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985). There is an excellent discussion of these issues in Erin Mackie, Market à la mode: Fashion, Commodity, and Gender in the Tatler and the Spectator (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1997), as they pertain to the early eighteenth century.

5. Biographical accounts of William Beckford’s life are numerous and take a variety of approaches. The substantial body of work on Beckford’s life and activities as a collector and writer has tended to revolve around Beckford’s compelling personality, while the Fonthill auction has generally been char-acterized as just one of many scenes in the Beckfordian melodrama. See Tim Mowl, William Beckford: Composing for Mozart (London: John Murray, 1998); Malcolm Jack, William Beckford: An English Fidalgo (New York: AMS Press, 1996); Brian Fothergill, Beckford of Fonthill (London: Faber & Faber, 1979); Boyd Alexander, England’s Wealthiest Son (London: Centaur Press, 1962); Guy Chapman, Beckford (New York: Scribner’s, 1937); J. W. Oliver, The Life of William Beckford (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1932), and Sacheverell Sitwell, Beckford and Beckfordism: An Essay (London: Duckworth, 1930).

6. See Mowl, William Beckford, and Alexander, England’s Wealthiest Son, for further details.

7. Beckford is quoted as referring to the structure as a “pleasure-building” in John Wilton-Ely, “The Genesis and Evolution of Fonthill Abbey,” Architectural History 23 (1980): 42.

8. “Visit to Fonthill,” Literary Gazette (1822), 527.

9. Wilton-Ely, “Genesis,” 47–48.

10. An excellent source for details on the auction is Frank Herrmann’s The English as Collectors: A Documentary Sourcebook (London: John Murray, 1999), 210–19.

11. Jeannie Chapel, “William Beckford: Collector of Old Master Paintings, Drawings, and Prints,” in, William Beckford, 1760–1844: An Eye for the Magnificent, ed. Derek E. Ostergard (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2001), 232–35.

12. Beckford’s achievements in various fields of collecting have been examined in Ostergard, William Beckford, the catalog of an important exhibition about his life and collecting practice. Quote from “A Day at Fonthill Abbey,” New Monthly Magazine, (1822), 374. (Hereafter cited as “DFA.”)

13. Very few, if any, views exist of the interior as it appeared before the auction. The problems with reconstructing the interior have also been noted by Bet McLeod, “A Celebrated Collector,” in Ostergard,


William Beckford: 155–75, 161. McLeod’s article is the best source for information on the display of objects at Fonthill Abbey.

14. Cynthia Wall argues, “the auction, as a public place of sale, is as much a theatrical performance, a spectacle, as it is a commercial event, and the bidders are not simply purchasers but simultaneously part of both performance and audience” (“The English Auction: Narratives of Dismantlings,” Eigh-teenth-Century Studies 31.1 [1997]: 18).

15. On the relationship between codes of viewing and the country house, see Peter de Bolla, The Education of the Eye: Painting, Landscape and Architecture in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2003).

16. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973). For an overview of attitudes toward the country in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Christiana Payne, Toil and Plenty: Images of the Agricultural Landscape in England, 1780–1890 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1993), 23–45. The very notion of the picturesque English countryside in this period was one packaged to appeal to nostalgic urban audiences, who were comforted by the idea of a stable and timeless rural culture. See Andrew Hemingway, Landscape Imagery and Urban Culture in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992).

17. For a history of the village see Richard Dewhurst, Crosstracks to Hindon (Salisbury: Hobnob Press, 2005).

18. Jon Klancher, “Discriminations, or Romantic Cosmopolitanism in London,” in Romantic Me-tropolis: The Urban Scene of British Culture, 1780–1840, ed. James Chandler and Kevin Gilmartin (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005). For a general survey of the state of London political and cultural life in the early nineteenth century, see the exhibition catalog London: World City, 1800–1840, ed. Celina Fox (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1992).

19. Wiltshire Gazette, 2 October 1822. (Hereafter cited as WG.)

20. The Wiltshire Gazette’s writer’s concern echoes accounts of masquerades written throughout the eighteenth century, which, as Terry Castle has argued, were “persistently associated with diabolical foreign influence, imported corruption, the dangerous breach of national boundaries, contamination from without” (Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century Culture and Fiction [Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1986], 7). Country fairs had long been seen as places where “provincial habits” were disrupted by cosmopolitanism, transforming what would ordinarily be an innocent country carnival by virtue of the dissimulation and aristocratic license associated with “mas-querade”; see Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1986), 37.

21. On entertainment venues in London, see the now-classic Richard Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1978). As Ann Bermingham has pointed out, Art exhibitions had enjoyed a particular popularity in 1822—that year saw what have been described as among the first “blockbuster” exhibitions of art in Britain. John Martin’s Belshezzar’s Feast and David Wilkie’s Chelsea Pensioners both drew crowds of spectators when they were exhibited in London earlier in the year. Ann Bermingham, “Urbanity and the Spectacle of Art,” in Chandler and Gilmartin, ed., Romantic Metropolis, 166. See also David Solkin’s important Art on the Line: The Royal Academy Exhibitions at Somerset House, 1780–1836 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2001).

22. Kay Dian Kriz, The Idea of the English Landscape Painter: Genius as Alibi in the Early Nine-teenth Century (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1997). Such spaces included the London galleries of men like the Marquises of Stafford and Westminster, who were praised, not scorned, in the popular press for their opulence. Those collections were opened only to a carefully selected and fashionable urban elite, and used the appearance and rhetoric of privacy and domesticity to distance themselves from the taint of commerce. See Anne Nellis, “‘The Shrine of Art’: Rhetorics of Collection and Display in Early-Nineteenth-Century London” (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 2003).

23. In these essays, later collected in Sketches of the Principal Picture-Galleries in England (1824), Hazlitt rhapsodically described the pleasures of looking at pictures in private houses. Hazlitt’s essay on Fonthill, however, which appeared in the November 1822 issue of the London Magazine, was not included in the Sketches, and differed markedly from them in tone.


24. William Hazlitt, “Fonthill Abbey,” in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe. 21 vols. (London: J. M. Dent, 1933), 18:173. (Hereafter referenced as “FA.”)

25. On the use of these and other tropes in Hazlitt’s writing on art, see Jonah Siegel, Desire and Excess: The Nineteenth-Century Culture of Art (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2000), 167–78.

26. For an overview of accepted English taste in this period, see Francis Haskell, Rediscoveries in Art: Some Aspects of Taste, Fashion and Collecting in England and France (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1976). For an excellent discussion of Hazlitt’s critiques of the Royal Academy exhibition, see Andrew Hemingway, “Art Exhibitions as Leisure-Class Rituals in Early Nineteenth-Century London,” in Towards a Modern Art World, ed. Brian Allen (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1995).

27. Hemingway, Landscape Imagery, 48–49.

28. These schools of thought are usefully outlined in Appleby, “Consumption,” 162–73. Such language was used by critics and in the burgeoning discipline of political economy to refer to com-modities that were considered “luxuries” (as distinct from “necessities”). Adam Smith, for example, used words like “trinkets” and “baubles,” which appear frequently in the Fonthill criticism, to register this distinction. See Neil de Marchi, “Adam Smith’s accommodation of ‘altogether endless’ desires,” in Consumers and Luxury: Consumer Culture in Europe 1650–1850, ed. Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1999), 24; and Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger, “The Rise and Fall of the Luxury Debates,” in Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires, and Delectable Goods, ed. Berg and Eger (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 21.

29. The “Talisman of Oromanes” is a reference to a story in Tales of the Genii, the purported translation of the Arabian Nights written by the Rev. James Ridley and published under the pseudonym Sir Charles Morell in 1764. The quote is from “DFA,” 369.

30. “The Fonthill Effects,” The Times, 2 October 1822, 2a.

31. Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Viking Penguin, 1985), 68. On the abolition movement, see J.R. Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery: The Mobilisation of Public Opinion against the Slave Trade, 1787–1807 (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1995).

32. Casid argues this in connection with Beckford specifically and with English and French landscape gardening in general in Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2005), see esp. 57–74.

33. Payne, Toil and Plenty, 12–13.

34. “It is impossible not to be astonished in seeing these riches displayed. Here the costly shawls from the East Indies, there brocades and silk-tissues from China, now a world of gold and silver plate, then pearls and gems shedding their dazzling lustre, home manufactures of the most exquisite taste, an ocean of rings, watches, chains, bracelets, and aigrettes, ready-dresses, ribbons, lace, bonnets, and fruit from all the zones of the habitable world—attract, tempt, and distract, astonish your eyes. You are carried along by the current; otherwise you would stop at every pace, to gaze, to admire and to covet.” Letters from Albion to a friend on the Continent, written in the years 1810, 1811, 1812, and 1813, v. 1 (London, 1814), 79–80.

35. “Provincial Occurrences: Wiltshire,” New Monthly Magazine n.s. 6 (1 October 1822): 479–80.

36. “Sketches of Society,” Literary Gazette (1822): 520.

37. John Rutter, Delineations of Fonthill and its Abbey (London: John Rutter, 1823).

38. “The Fonthill Mania,” Literary Chronicle and Weekly Review (1823): 603–4.

39. Ibid.

40. On Ackermann see Simon Jervis, “Rudolph Ackermann,” in London: World City, 1800–1840, ed. Celina Fox (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 97–109, and Ann Bermingham, Learning to Draw: Studies in the Cultural History of a Polite and Useful Art (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2000), 129–45.


41. “The Fonthill Effects,” The Times (2 October 1822): 2a.


43. Most of these appeared following the publication of Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J.H. Plumb’s The Birth of a Consumer Society (1982). There are several studies that deal with the early to mid-eighteenth century; see, for example, Erin Mackie, Market aÌ la mode and Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping, and Business in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1997). On the early nineteenth-century, see Alison Adburgham, Shopping in Style: London from the Restoration to Edwardian Elegance (London: Thames & Hudson, 1979), and Kathryn A. Morrison, English Shops and Shopping: An Architectural History (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2003).

44. On the connections between shopping and respectability, see Woodruff D. Smith, Consumption and the Making of Respectability, 1600–1800 (New York: Routledge, 2002).

45. Ann Bermingham, “Urbanity and the Spectacle of Art,” in Chandler and Gilmartin, eds., Ro-mantic Metropolis.

46. Sketches of the Principal Picture Galleries in England, in Howe, Works, 10:7.

47. John Brewer, “The Most Polite Age and the Most Vicious.’ Attitudes towards Culture as a Commodity, 1660–1800,” in The Consumption of Culture 1600–1800: Image, Object, Text, ed. Ann Bermingham and John Brewer (London: Routledge, 1995), 352. See also Brewer’s The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1997), 87–98.

48. “Fonthill Abbey,” in Howe, Works, 18:173.

49. Notions of comfort and domesticity were increasingly linked to private morality and public authority in this period. This domesticity was initially linked primarily with the middle classes, but was certainly not limited to this group. The classic work on this subject is Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall’s Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 1987). For an analysis of how notions about how private morality became central to pub-lic discourse in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, see Dror Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c. 1780–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995).

50. [Richard Colt Hoare], “Fonthill Abbey. On its close.” Gentleman’s Magazine 92 (October 1822): 291–92.

51. Wiltshire Gazette (19 September 1822). See The Fonthill Abbey Sales of 100 Years Ago. [Clip-pings from the Wiltshire Gazette, Aug. 23, 1923–Dec. 6, 1923.] Huntington Library, Reference DA690.F6.W5.

52. “A Day at Fonthill Abbey,” New Monthly Magazine (October 1822), 372. For an analysis of the Gothic novel in this context see Kate Ferguson Ellis, The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989).

53. Felicity Nussbaum, The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003), 72–73.

54. The question of precisely how the figure of the homosexual, who was not identified as such until the end of the nineteenth century, may have been understood by late eighteenth-century society has been the subject of lively and ongoing debate. See Michael McKeon, “Historicizing Patriarchy: The Emergence of Gender Difference in England, 1660–1760,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 28 (Spring 1995), 311; George Haggarty, in Men in Love: Masculinity and Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1999), 10; Randolph Trumbach, “The Birth of the Queen: Sodomy and the Emergence of Gender Equality in Modern Culture, 1660–1760” in Hidden from History: Reclaim-ing the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. Martin B. Duberman et. al. (London: Penguin, 1991); and Carter, “Masculinity and Eighteenth-Century Social Documentary,” 430. Andrew Elfenbein has suggested that in the late eighteenth century the cultural type of the homosexual was already becoming associated with particular approaches to collecting, arguing that Beckford’s collecting practice was a knowingly transgressive one. Andrew Elfenbein, Romantic Genius: The Prehistory of a Homosexual Role (New


York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1999), 39–62. See also Whitney Davis, “Homoerotic Art Collection from 1750 to 1920,” Art History 24 (April 2001): 247–77.


56. Carole Fabricant, “The Literature of Domestic Tourism and the Public Consumption of Private Property,” in The New Eighteenth Century, ed. Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown (New York: Methuen, 1987), 255.

57. Brian Fothergill, Beckford of Fonthill (London: Faber & Faber, 1979), 314.

58. John Britton, Graphical and Literary Illustrations of Fonthill Abbey, (London, 1823), 23.

59. Ibid.

60. On the cultivation of women’s taste in the pages of the Repository of Arts, see Ann Bermingham, Learning to Draw, 140.

61. “Fonthill Abbey,” Repository of Arts (August 1823): 103–105.

62. Ibid.

63. There was at least one other view like this, a view showing alterations made to Fonthill’s Fountain Court to use it as a refectory in the summer of 1823. This print was apparently made to be bound into copies of John Rutter’s Delineations (1823).

Spectacle, Exoticism, and Display in the Gentleman’s House: The Fonthill Auction of 1822

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