William Beckford of Somerley (13/24 September 1744 – 5 February 1799) was a Jamaican-born planter and writer who wrote on the topography and conditions of slavery in the British colony of Jamaica and the history of France.[1]
Born into a very prominent and wealthy slave-holding family, he was educated in England, lost his father at the age of 10, and rounded off his gentleman's upbringing through Westminster School and Oxford University with a Grand Tour. He inherited his estates around Hertford in western Jamaica around 1765 at the age of 21. In a different mould from his colonial ancestors, he was considered a cultivated and personally sensitive man who, after he married and went to live in Jamaica in 1774 to supervise his affairs personally, became preoccupied with the welfare and conditions of the African and Creole workers in his estates, deplored their mistreatment and hardships and sought to deal with them more humanely.
However, he had too open and naive a nature to survive as a businessman, and, facing losses through natural catastrophes, and subjected to predatory actions by his creditors, found that his estates had become heavily involved in debt. Returning to England in 1787 to mend his affairs, he was thrown into debtors' prison, from where he wrote and published two books descriptive of Jamaica, of the industry of the estates and of the circumstances of the enslaved labourers. He advocated reform at every level, in transportation, domestic welfare, working conditions and management, and rights before the law, but not, finally, the dismantling of the system itself, arguing that this would lead to greater deprivations.
By the adjustment of his debts he lost his estates but retained £400 a year, and remaining in England he devoted his last years to writing both in prose and poetry. As a member of a highly privileged class, despite his personal misfortunes, his contribution to the History of France has to be understood in the light of the French Revolution and the fall of Robespierre, which occurred in the year of its publication.
- ^ Sheridan, R.B. (2004). "Beckford, William (1744–1799)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/1904. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.) The first edition of this text is available at Wikisource: . Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 4. 1885. p. 82. . For background, see R.B. Sheridan, 'The formation of Caribbean plantation society, 1689–1748,’ in P.J. Marshall (Ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, Vol. II: The Eighteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 394–414.