Perry Gauci's work is the first full biographical treatment of the great West Indian William Beckford, whose exotic career traversed the far-flung spaces of the eighteenth-century British Empire and the intricate social geography of Georgian England. Gauci's meticulous and wide-ranging research has pulled together the life of a man who throughout his lifetime showed an unusual cultural adaptability, enabling him to negotiate his way through a multiplicity of British and imperial eighteenth-century subcultures.

Born a younger son of one of Jamaica's wealthiest and most influential families in 1709, William could also claim roots in the metropolis, where the London branch of the Beckfords of Mincing Lane maintained a continuous presence in the business and political life of the City. Like many children of American planters, he was sent home to England for his education; like many younger sons, he sought a career, distinguishing himself by his scholarship at Westminster and Oxford, and studying medicine at Leiden and Paris. Gauci speculates that Beckford might have remained in Britain for the rest of his life, but his father's death brought him back to Jamaica in 1736, drawing him first into family conflict over the settlement of Speaker Beckford's sprawling estate and then, when the death of older brother Peter left him the family patriarch, into island affairs. He became a member of the Jamaica house of assembly, a conspicuous leader in the defense of the island during a tumultuous period of internal and external threats from the rebel Maroons and from Spain, and a spokesman for Caribbean interests during a brief sojourn in London in 1738–39. Here he took credit for bringing to the attention of Parliament the sufferings of Thomas Jenkins, whose famous ear helped spur Walpole's government into war. Beckford probably never lost sight of his ultimate goal of returning to England; the settled state of his domestic affairs by the end of 1744 made that possible, and Gauci notes that “the social success of his English-based relatives” may have been another pull factor, as the Beckford family successfully pursued the upward trajectory of the English nouveau riche, seeking to join the aristocracy (47). That year saw the marriage of Beckford's brother Francis to a sister of the Duke of Ancaster and the engagement of his sister to the Earl of Effingham.

With such advantages of money and connections, William Beckford nevertheless must be given credit for the vision to see where all this could lead him. His return to England marked the rise of the planter community there as Jamaica's burgeoning prosperity made metropolitan life affordable. But the resourceful Beckford's career was hardly typical of an absentee. Within three years he was member of Parliament for Shaftsbury. With his City roots, he was accepted as a mercantile figure in London, where he became an alderman, and, in 1754, member of Parliament for London. Concurrent with his entry into politics and his rise as a City patriot, Beckford was demonstrating his unusual “amphibian” quality by cultivating aristocratic society in the West End and at his country estate of Fonthill. Gauci asserts that Beckford's simultaneous quest for advancement “at either end of town” “broke existing social and political molds” (54).

Beckford's long-standing political association with William Pitt is particularly well treated here. At the height of his political career in London, he supported Pitt in the City, where he was the leading spokesman for both the West Indian interest and the cause of radical reform, championing the notion that Britain and its colonies faced a common threat to their liberties. His second election as Lord Mayor in 1769 boosted the radical cause in London, bringing together the parliamentary opposition in legendary entertainments at Mansion House. The closing act in his flamboyant career, when he spontaneously reprimanded the king while presenting a City Remonstrance in May 1770, ensured him a posthumous reputation as a forthright champion of English liberty that endured into the next century. Beckford died the following month, not living to see the Somerset Decision and the onset of the American war, both of which would have shaken his increasingly tenuous position as a City patriot who was also a slave owner and as an influential West Indian who was an outspoken supporter of American resistance.

If Beckford's assimilation into Georgian society was sometimes less than perfect—if he could seem underbred in the highest society, a “wild, incoherent” speaker in Parliament, hypocritical “Alderman Sugarcane” to his City enemies—that is less surprising than his persistence and success (90, 96). Nor is it surprising that a man who poured his energies into assuming so many personas ultimately left few glimpses into his personal feelings. But Gauci's verdict—that much of Beckford's life remains “stubbornly elusive” (ix)—does not take us far enough. The biography highlights the glaring contradictions: his bitter legal battle with his mother over the family estate, his multiple mistresses and illegitimate children, and his reputed violent temper contrast sharply with the ostentatious genteel domesticity of his married years at Fonthill. His fantastic hospitality and instances of philanthropy in London sit uneasily with his ruthless behavior toward his debtors in Jamaica. Most striking, to his contemporaries as much as to posterity, is the silence regarding the single most obvious contradiction in his life, slavery. His almost wordless return of abolitionist Granville Sharp's pamphlet attacking slavery in England makes a conspicuous contrast with his impulsive speech to the king a year later. But Gauci, despite his stated objective of getting beyond the limits of a conventional biography, never tries to dig beneath any of this. The book is a closely written narrative that adheres to a chronological format. An imaginative use of comparative material, and a sensitive exploration of his environments in Jamaica and England, might have thrown more light on the personality and motives of this unusual man, and in so doing would have enriched the study as an exploration of the diverse cultural provinces of eighteenth-century Britain. This is nevertheless an impressively researched book, written with enthusiasm, and one that will be welcomed as a long overdue biography of a leading figure in Britain's Atlantic world.