The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid_ A Memoir - Bill Bryson [126]
Wyatt continued to attend intermittently and to drive Beckford to fury with his absences. In early September 1813, just after his sixty-seventh birthday, Wyatt was riding back to London from Gloucestershire with a client when his carriage overturned and he was dashed against the wall, striking his head a fatal blow. He died more or less instantly, leaving his widow penniless.
Just at this time, sugar prices went into a depression and Beckford ended up uncomfortably exposed to the downside of capitalism. By 1823, he was so strapped for funds that he was forced to sell Fonthill. It was bought for £300,000 by an eccentric character, John Farquhar, who had been born in rural Scotland but went to India as a young man and made a fortune manufacturing gunpowder. Returning to England in 1814, Farquhar settled in London in a fine house on Portman Square, which he conspicuously neglected. He conspicuously neglected himself, too—to such an extent that on his walks through the neighborhood he was sometimes stopped and questioned as a suspicious vagrant. After buying Fonthill, he hardly ever visited it. He was, however, in residence on the most spectacular day in Fonthill’s brief existence, just before Christmas 1825,when the tower emitted a sustained groan, then collapsed for a third and final time. A servant was blown thirty feet down a corridor by the rush of air, but miraculously neither he nor anyone else was injured. About a third of the house lay under the heaped wreckage of the tower, and would never be habitable again. Farquhar was remarkably equable about his misfortune and merely remarked that this greatly simplified the care of the place. He died the following year, immensely rich but intestate, and none of his bickering relatives would take on the house. What remained of it was torn down and cleared away not long after.
Beckford, meanwhile, took his £300,000 and retired to Bath, where he built a 154-foot tower in a restrained classical style. Called the Lansdown Tower, it was erected with good materials and prudent care, and still stands.
II
Fonthill marked the summit not only of ambition and folly in the domestic realm but also of discomfort. A curious inverse relationship had arisen, it seems, between the amount of effort and expense that went into a house and the extent to which it was actually habitable. The great age of housebuilding brought new levels of elegance and grandeur to private life in Britain, but almost nothing in the way of softness, warmth, and convenience.
Those homely attributes would be the creation of a new type of person who had scarcely existed a generation or so before: the middle class professional. There had always been people of middling rank, of course, but as a distinct entity and force to be reckoned with, the middle class was an eighteenth-century phenomenon. The term middle class wasn’t coined until 1745 (in a book on the Irish wool trade, of all things), but from that point onward the streets and coffeehouses of Britain abounded with confident, voluble, well-to-do people who answered to that description: bankers, lawyers, artists, publishers, designers, merchants, property developers, and others of generally creative spirit and high ambition. This new and swelling middle class served not only the very wealthy but also, even more lucratively, one another. This was the change that made the modern world.
The invention of the middle class injected new levels of demand into society. Suddenly there were swarms of people with splendid town houses that all needed furnishing, and just as suddenly the world was full of desirable objects with which to fill them. Carpets, mirrors, curtains, upholstered