William Beckford inherited a fortune in 1771 at about age ten, with an income estimated at 100,000 pounds a year from sugar plantations in Jamaica, and newspapers called him the richest commoner in England. In 1784 the first Baron Loughborough publicly accused him of an improper relationship with a boy named William Courtenay. The allegations were never proven in court, but society shut him out. He left for Europe with his wife, Lady Margaret Gordon, who died in childbirth in Switzerland, and wandered through France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Portugal before returning to his family’s Fonthill estate in Wiltshire. There he built a six mile wall high enough to stop local hunters from chasing foxes and hares across his land.

In 1796 he hired architect James Wyatt, known for drinking and disappearing, to build a Gothic abbey aimed at Edmund Burke’s idea of the sublime. Beckford took charge himself, ran 500 laborers in day and night shifts, and lured 450 more from royal works at Windsor Castle with extra ale. The 300 foot central tower collapsed, was rebuilt over six years, collapsed again, and was ordered rebuilt a third time. Finished around 1813, the abbey had 35 foot doors, yet Beckford used a single bedroom and dined alone on meals cooked for twelve. After losing two Jamaican plantations in a legal dispute in 1822, he sold Fonthill to arms dealer John Farquhar for 330,000 pounds. The tower fell for good in 1825.

• Why his wealth could not buy back a place among the peers who had shunned him
• The 1800 Christmas dinner for Horatio Nelson, cooked in a rushed kitchen that collapsed soon after
• William Hazlitt’s verdict that Fonthill was an oversized toy shop and a worthless museum
• Compo cement, timber coated in stucco to look like stone, as the reason the tower kept failing
• Demolition by 1845 and the abbey’s stones reused in houses in the village of Tisbury