For all H. P. Lovecraft may have liked it, the literature of the eighteenth century seems to be little read in the twentieth. The Augustan Age of English letters was a golden age of satire, and satire does not age well. Even Jonathan Swift, I suspect, is more admired than read these days. The prose of the period contains a great deal of elegance and wit, but very little emotion. The verse is, to the modern ear, windy and stilted. The modern reader tends to prefer the later Romantics, or the Elizabethans. Tastes change with time. For all we know, the twenty-first century may prefer Pope to Shakespeare. But right now, the eighteenth century seems to be out.

In 1764 Walpolfe's The Castle of Otranto, the first Gothic, appeared. An explosion of ghastly, ghostly, wildly romantic tales followed. The sensibilities of these are a little more to the modern taste, but the Gothics aren't read much either, mostly for reasons of changing novelistic techniques, and the fact that, by any standard, most of the Gothics are simply awful.

William Beckford's Vathek (1786) stands as the most readable novel of its century, and also as a unique work of fantasy. Critics have long been trying to shoe-horn it into the Gothic school, but it never seems to fit. It is an extravagant romance based on The Arabian Nights, filled with magic, adventures in strange lands, supernatural beings, and, at the end, a descent into Hell. It has been enormously influential. Clark Ashton Smith obviously studied it closely. Peter Cannon's "The Influence of Vathek on H. P. Lovecraft's The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath" (in H. P. Lovecraft: Four Decades of Criticism) ably demonstrates another line of development.

The novel more resembles a modern, imaginary-world romance than a true Gothic. If you want to know what Gothics were like, read a few of the surviving specimens (perhaps Otranto or Melmoth the Wanderer or The Monk) or else consult Ann B. Tracy's The Gothic Novel, 1790-1830 (University Press of Kentucky, 1981) which contains synopses of almost two hundred of them. You will be struck by how little Beckford's masterwork resembles the "other" Gothics. They usually take place in the European Middle Ages, or in eighteenth century Italy, and have to do with gloomy castles, wicked noblemen, dispossessed heirs, imperiled heroines, and the like. Probably only about a third of them have any fantasy elements.

The reason Vathek doesn't resemble a Gothic, I have since discovered, is that it isn't one. This is not to say that a whole new genre suddenly leaped full-grown from William Beckford's forehead. I have not come to any definite conclusions yet, but it looks to me as if Vathek comes at the end of a long tradition, that of the pseudo-Oriental moralistic tale. The element of parody, I would suggest, is stronger than often supposed. (In the same way that Lucian of Samosata's True History is not so much a pioneering work of science fiction, but an outrageous parody of a long tradition of fantastic travel tales.)

But first, Dear Reader, as it would have been fashionable to address you in those days, we shall have a digression on the history of the English magazine.

The Tatler made its appearance in English coffeehouses in 1709. The coffee house being the center of social activity for literary men, it was only natural that the first magazines should be distributed through them. Such magazines were apparently single sheets in tiny print, containing a single essay per issue, almost always unsigned, frequently under the auspices of an editorial persona after whom the magazine was titled. Lovecraft's amateur magazine, The Conservative, is very much in this tradition.

The Tatler, editor of the paper of the same name, was really Richard Steele, was forced to discontinue in 1711 due to political problems. However, Steele soon teamed up with Joseph Addison and launched the enormously popular The Spectator, which came out several times a week for a total of 635 issues. Soon there came to be a host of imitators, The Rambler, The Connoisseur (an exception to the editorial rule, conducted by "Mr. Town"), The Adventurer, and the like. Copies of individual issues are now extremely scarce (I doubt there are many to be found outside of the British Museum and a few university libraries), but even as they were being published, they were quickly reprinted in book form. These rapidly became standard classics, and reprints of them, usually under collective titles like The British Classics or The British Essayists, are common from the first half of the nineteenth century. You can find them in college libraries, or even very cheaply in used bookstores and sales.

Another aside: My favorite (although horrible) book sale story involves a college library which was getting rid of all the old leather-bound books the librarians didn't want to repair. They were all five cents each. The dates of the books ranged from about 1580 to 1820. There wasn't much of literary interest, but I did snatch ten out of twelve volumes of The Spectator, two out of four Adventurer, and three out of four Connoisseur. "Oh," said the attendant. "We didn't know anybody would want them. We're already burned most of them!" More recently I was browsing in another college library and found a complete set of British Classics from 1827, all in their original bindings, in almost perfect condition. From all evidence, they'd never been checked out. Such has been my introduction to eighteenth century magazines. The competition, to put it mildly, is not fierce.

Imagine my surprise when I found fantasy fiction in these neglected tomes. Most of the contents of The Spectator and the like are comparable to the "Talk of the Town" section of The New Yorker, short pieces on manners, morals, literature, and anything else that might have been on the writer's mind. However, there was a small amount of fiction. Spectator 578 contains an untitled story of King Fadallah and his lover Zemroude, allegedly translated from the Persian Tales by a Mr. Phillips. (Zemroude's beloved comes to her in the form of a nightingale. This motif occurs in English ballads, so we might question the authenticity of the tale, but then, these motifs are so universal you never can tell.) Issues 584 and 585 contain a pseudo-biblical account of "Shalum and Hilpa," with a sequel, both by Addison.

The 1827 set contains The Adventurer complete, and this, I found, contained quite a bit of fiction. It bears further examination.

The Adventurer was largely the work of John Hawksworth, although there were other contributors, including even the illustrious Dr. Samuel Johnson. Hawksworth (1715-73) was born into an undistinguished family of religious dissenters, and doesn't seem to have had much education. However, he made up for it somehow, became a lawyer, got bored with that, and turned to literature. His first literary job was as a successor to Johnson, recording Parliamentary speeches for The Gentleman's Magazine (1744). Some years later, after Johnson's own The Rambler was defunct but still fresh in the public mind, he followed up with The Adventurer, which ran 140 numbers, of which he wrote about half. The ostensible purpose of this magazine was the moral and ethical instruction of the readership, and Hawksworth was sufficiently good at it that the Archbishop of Canterbury bestowed a Doctor of Civil Law degree on him as a reward. This went to Hawksworth's head, and he soon became arrogant enough to alienate most of his literary friends. However, his career continued, and included a "fairy entertainment" (apparently a novel), Edgar and Emmeline (1761), and an "Eastern Tale" Almoran and Harriet (2 vols., 1761). He translated Telemachus by Fenelon into English, a fantasy novel (sequel to The Odyssey) by a French bishop of Louis XIV's reign. In 1773, the year of his death, he published an account of exploratory voyages, taken from the accounts of sea captains (including Captain Cook), which, much to his chagrin, was widely criticized for being too racy. As a result, his reputation declined.

Considering that The Adventurer was intended as a vehicle for moral instruction, the amount of fiction it contained is surprising. However, as Hawksworth remarked in an early number, often a point can be made more memorable if linked to a vivid story. "Those narratives are most pleasing," he tells us, "which not only excite and gratify curiosity but engage the passions." Further, ". . . the most extravagant, and yet perhaps the most generally pleasing of all literary performances, are those in which supernatural events are every moment produced by Genii and Fairies. . . . It may be thought strange, that the mind should with pleasure acquiesce in the open violation of the most known and obvious truths. . . . But it is not, perhaps the mere violation of truth or probability that offends, but such a violation as perpetually recurs. The mind is satisfied, if every event appears to have an adequate cause . . . the action of the story proceeds with regularity, the persons act upon rational principles, and such events take place as may naturally be expected from the interposition of superior intelligence and power; so that though there is not a natural, there is at least a moral probability preserved, and our first concession is abundantly rewarded by the new scenes to which we are admitted, and the unbounded prospect that is thrown open before us. " (Issue #4)

In other words, introduce the fantastic premise, then treat it realistically, with the characters behaving like real people so that the story makes an emotional sense. Hawksworth's "moral probability" is very similar to the distinction made by Le Guin between the true and the factual.

For all he was part of a very different literary scene, Hawksworth was a fantasy writer, almost in the modern sense. His professed didacticism is present, but his stories are more than sermons. He delights in exotic locales and supernatural devices. His "Eastern Tales" are actually a kind of imaginary-world fantasy, since to the Englishman of 1750, the Islamic countries were about as far away as Mars. Hawksworth makes numerous errors in cultural details and attributes Christian teachings to Muslims, but then he wasn't writing about the real East (then, mostly the Ottoman Empire), but an imaginary one. This convention persists up until Lord Dunsany.

Hawksworth also wrote "domestic" fiction, which does not concern us. His Eastern Tales are as follows:

"Imperceptible Deviation to Vice --- Moral Use of Punishment --- Remonstrances of Conscience Universal --- Amurath, an Eastern Story" (Issues 20-22):

Amurath, Sultan of the East, inherits the throne from his virtuous father. He is then visited by a spirit, the Genius Syndarac, who gives him a magic ring which will pinch his finger if he does evil. This way he can stay on the path of righteousness. However, the spiteful sultan soon resents having his every action controlled and becomes wicked out of sheer spite. He degrades his worthy vizier Alibeg and lusts after his daughter Selima. She disappears. Amurath becomes a tyrant in his rage. Tired of being tormented by the ring, he takes it off, whereupon the Genius appears, rebukes him, and turns him into a monster, half wolf, half goat. He is captured and put on display in his own capital. His keeper beats him into submission, and gradually he becomes less fierce. He saves his keeper from a tiger and (as a reward) is transformed into a dog. Now given run of the palace, he learns that he is presumed dead and Alibeg is the new sultan. As a dog, he has a vision of a marble wall, on which is an inscription, "Within this wall liberty is unbounded . . . nature is not oppressed by the tyranny of religion, nor is pleasure awed by the frown of virtue."

He goes in. Within there is rape, riot and murder. Still as a dog, he comes beneath a window, through which come sounds of dancing and music, then cries of distress. A piece of meat is thrown out. He eats it, is poisoned, and dies. Now the Genius moves his soul into the body of a dove. Trying to escape from the strange land, he is overcome by a "sulpherous vapor" and alights at the mouth of a cave. Inside is a hermit, and, much to his amazement, the missing Selima. She confesses how she nearly gave in to Amurath's advances, then found herself in the riotous land. It was she who was almost poisoned with the treacherously supplied meat. The hermit explains the need for restraint. Amurath is returned to human form. He weds Selima in good faith, and they live happily and moderately ever after, having been returned to the kingdom by Syndarac.

(This is the best and most elaborate of the stories. Note the plot similarities to Vathek, which is also about a sultan given to wickedness out of sheer spite. Vathek, lacking a Genius to correct him, however, is not redeemed.)

"Religion the Only Foundation of Content" (Issue 32):

Omar, a holy hermit, meets Hassan, who is in great distress. Hassan, a poor man of Mecca, has been content in his labors for many years, until he is visited by the Caliph Almalic in disguise. The Caliph, seeing how well Hassan has adjusted to life, reveals who he is, and says that he was thinking of raising him to a high estate. Now, he sees, that is unwise. As soon as the Caliph leaves he sorely regrets having missed such an opportunity. He becomes wretched, neglecting his work. The Caliph visits him again, sees what has happened, and makes him a hanger-on at the palace. Hassan lives in luxury until he finds himself jaded to every pleasure. Then the Caliph dies, and Hassan is kicked out by his successor. Having known luxury, he can't return to simple life, and is worse off than before. The hermit explains that only by religion can one be content. Hassan becomes pious.

"No Life Pleasing to God That Is Not Useful to Man" (Issue 38):

Mirza, a governor under the sultan Abbas Carascan, wants to resign. The sultan doesn't like the idea, but says he will consider. Three days later, Mirza says he will keep the job. Cosrou the Iman's account of a vision he had in the desert has changed his mind.

"The Folly of Human Wishes and Schemes to Correct the Moral Government of the Worid --- The History of Nouraddin and Amana" (Issues 72-73):

Nouraddin the merchant falls in love with Amana the shepherdess. He carries her off to Egypt. The wedding is delayed. Meanwhile, Osmin, caliph of Egypt, has grown tired of his harem and proclaims that he who produces the most beautiful virgin within two days will be made third in the kingdom (after the caliph and his chief eunuch, Nardic). Caled, a disaffected servant of Nouraddin, tells Nardic about Amana. On the day of the wedding, the wicked Caled shows up with a royal order and makes off with the bride. She is presented to the caliph. She begs to be allowed to return to her lover but the enraged tyrant gives her three hours to submit to him, or else he will throw Nouraddin's head at her feet. A sympathetic eunuch advises her to agree, but ask for three days to prepare.

Meanwhile, Nouraddin in his despair wishes aloud that he could change places with Osmin, since the caliph has his beloved. A spirit, a Genius, appears and gives him a magic talisman, by which he can change into the semblance of the caliph and back again at will.

Meanwhile, further, the wicked caliph, spurned by Amana, wishes that he could take on the appearance of Nouraddin, so she would accept him. He is changed. Unfortunately, Caled the traitor, who now commands the guard, takes him for the real Nouraddin; they fight and both are slain. The real Nouraddin, disguised as the caliph, is poisoned by Amana. He changes back into his real form briefly, but dies as the caliph. His body is taken for that of Osmin. Amana is executed.

A holy hermit explains that virtue should suffer adversity, not presume to change it. Nouraddin and Amana were punished for presumption.

"Natural and Adventitious Excellence, Less Desirable Than Virtue --- Almerine and Shelimah: a Fairy Tale" (Issues 103-104):

In "remote times" when fairies still intervened in the lives of men, a noble of the East, Omaraddin, has two daughters, Almerine and Shelimah. Almerine is blessed by a good fairy, Elfarina. She is beautiful and is destined to marry a prince. However, the evil fairy Farimina does her worst for Shelimah, making her ugly, and further cursing her so that every wish she makes shall have an opposite effect. However, the good fairy decrees that Shelimah shall be content with humble things and perceive them as greater than riches.

Shelimah is raised in obscurity. Almerine is the toast of society, but all this adulation makes her proud and discontented. She sees everyone and everything as inferior. Also, she falls in love with her teacher, the physician Nourassin. Now the prophecy about marrying a prince is a curse. When the caliph proposes, she is in despair. Nourassin gives her a poison so she can do away with him. It is fed to her by mistake. He mixes an antidote, but this makes her hideously deformed and leprous. Actually these are temporary symptoms, and she will recover, but she doesn't know this and confesses everything. The physician is exiled and she is cast out of the palace. The caliph now decides that beauty will get him nowhere, so he will marry the ugliest woman in the land --- Shelimah. At the news Shelimah wishes that she might indeed be the ugliest woman in the kingdom. Her wish backfires, and she becomes the most beautiful. The caliph marries her anyway, and since her wishes never work out, she remains humble and content.

"The Value of Life Fixed on Hope and Fear, and Therefore Dependent Upon the Will" (Issue 114):

A stranger comes to Almet the "dervise" seeking advice. He (the stranger) owns everything, has every wish fulfilled, but lives an empty life and is sure to be forgotten as soon as he dies. Almet tells of a vision he saw, of a man discontented amidst an apparent paradise and another, naked and seemingly wretched, happy in a wilderness. The first has everything, but suffers because he is afraid of losing it. The second has nothing, but hopes for a better future.

"Benevolence Urged From the Misery of Solitude" (Issue 132):

Carazan the miserly merchant is given a vision of the here after. Because he has valued money above mankind, he is to be cast into the outer darkness, beyond all stars and inhabited worlds. He is not even allowed the comfort of inhabiting a comet, which would bring him near mankind every few thousand years. An eternity of cosmic solitude awaits. Sure enough, he reforms.

The titles of these stories, by the way, come from the contents pages of the Collected Adventurer. Quite possibly they were not titled as they originally appeared.

There is a little more fantasy in the magazine, one minor Eastern Story by Joseph Warton and two sketches by Hawksworth, depicting the experiences of a flea and a louse respectively. Both are dictated to the Adventurer (i. e. , Hawksworth) in dreams. The flea episode is considerably the better, carrying the unfortunate narrator through many incarnations as various beasts, all of them ill-treated by mankind. It is rather like a shortened version of Dunsany's The Strange Journeys of Colonel Polders.

Hawksworth's Eastern fictions aren't very good by today's standards, although "Amurath" has enough interesting episodes and striking images to be worth reading. The modern reader's main objection is that, like much eighteenth century fiction, the stories are told almost entirely in synopsis, rather than in dramatic scenes. This prevents the reader from vicariously experiencing the action. We only hear about it. Most of the fiction of the day is like that. When more dramatic narrative techniques were developed, however, there was no looking back. The synoptic mode is no longer used, except in some fables, where the outline of events, rather than the texture of them is what matters.

The importance of Hawksworth's fantasy fiction is that they are part of what I am sure was a flourishing tradition. Somewhere around his time the moral fable was giving way to the romance. The Arabian Nights had been discovered by Europeans, mostly through a French translation in the early part of the century. Imitations abounded, again mostly in French, but quickly translated into English. I've found a few of these in used bookshops, in centuries-old editions. One particularly prized one is a volume entitled Chinese Tales, published by Walker and Edwards, 1817. This actually contains Chinese Tales, or The Wonderful Adventures of the Mandarin Fum-Hoam by Thomas Simon Gueulette (1683-1766) and Oriental Tales by The Comte de Caylus (1692-1765). Gueulette's China is about as authentic as Hawksworth's Arabian "East". Further, a look in Reginald's Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature, A Checklist reveals Fum-Hoam published in London as early as 1725. Gueulette is also the author of Mogul Tales, or, The Dreams of Man Awake (1736) and A Thousand and One Quarters of an Hour (1716). This latter is sometimes reprinted in sets of The Arabian Nights as the most able pastiche.

Reginald does not list de Gaylus. I don't know when he was first published in English, but this is hardly important, since any educated Englishman of the day could read French.

Hawksworth was taking elements that were already standard in the literature of his day and using them for his own purposes. So far there has not been much research into the pseudo-Oriental fantasies of his era. I suspect I have uncovered the tip of an iceberg.

Suddenly Vathek can be seen in a different perspective. There was a tradition of Oriental fiction, most of it fantastic, for at least two generations before Beckford. He is at the end of a long line of development. Further, since these stories tended to be heavy-handedly moralistic and quite contrived ("Nouraddin and Amana" being the most extreme example) it is easy to see how Beckford, who was more akin in spirit to Oscar Wilde than Johnson or Swift or Hawksworth, could find himself very tired of this sort of thing. It would look ridiculous to him. Therefore, in Vathek, he would try to create something far more extravagant than any thing before him. Indeed he does. There is also an episode in which a holy man right out of Hawksworth (in essence, a Christian monk/hermit transmogrified into a Muslim) comes to rebuke Vathek for his wickedness. But Vathek and his cronies kick him along the streets like a soccer ball, to the edge of town. It's a grotesque, comic scene. Beckford is giving the pompous fellow what he (as Vathek would say, anyway) deserves.

Vathek has obvious elements of parody in it. But because Beckford was a far more capable writer than most who went before, because he had absorbed the influences of the richer, more romantic Gothics, and because (I suspect) he got caught up in the richness and grandeur of his story, it is far more than a parody. He transcended what was by his time an already long-established and moribund genre.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Adventurer. 2 vols. Included in British Essayists. London: J. F. Dove, 1827.

The Spectator. 12 vols. James Crissy. Philadelphia, 1832.

John Hawksworth (trans.). Telemachus by Fenelon (Del La Mothe Fenelon, Archbishop of Cambray). W. Sutaby & B. Crosby & Co., 1807.

Thomas Simon Gueulette and The Comte de Gaylus. Chinese Tales and Oriental Tales. Walker & Edwards, London, 1817.

William Beckford. Vathek, trans. by Herbert B. Grimsditch. Bodley Head, 1953.  This is the preferred text.

Vathek has a strange history. Beckford, though English, wrote it in French, trusting a clergyman, Samuel Henley, to translate it into English. Henley published it in 1786, without putting Beckford's name on it. To protect his claim to authorship, Beckford had to rush a French version into print (1787). In the rush, he had to leave three episodes out. A revised text appeared later that year. In 1815 he published a second revision of the French version, still not including the episodes, which finally appeared as The Episodes of Vathek (1912). Lin Carter edited a version of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series with the episodes in place. Unfortunately he followed Henley's text. Grimsditch's translation is based on the 1815 revision and is considerably superior stylistically. It was originally published by the Nonesuch Press in 1929.