Who was Thomas Griffiths Wainewright? He often asked the same question himself, and in the end decided "Nobody". In a sense he was right: today he's not much more than a shadow flickering through the footnotes to Romantic studies. In his own time, though, he was a remarkable Somebody: a renowned painter and author, and a flamboyant man-about-town, who was also a forger and a murderer. His story sheds an eerie light on the famous names around him: Keats and Hazlitt, Lamb and Clare, Fuseli and Blake. Its combination of high culture and low crime dramatises their fascination with the Self, and with the link between vice and virtue. As a victim and as a villain, let alone as an artist and critic, Wainewright caught the spirit of his age.
He was born the year before Keats (1794) in Chiswick. His mother died in childbirth, and when his father disappeared shortly afterwards, he was taken in by his maternal grandfather, Ralph Griffiths. Griffiths was an impressive fellow: the founder, and then for 50 years the editor, of England's first modern literary magazine, the Monthly Review. This made him a reasonable living, but most of his money came from another source. He was the original publisher of Fanny Hill and the proceeds bought a grand mansion on Chiswick High Road: Linden House.
Wainewright was raised in Linden House and educated in Greenwich by the famous Classicist Charles Burney (brother of Fanny, and son of the well-known musician), where he discovered a flair for drawing. When the time came for him to enter the wide world, he was apprenticed to established painters: John Linnell (Blake's friend) first, then Thomas Phillips, the society portraitist who is probably best remembered today for his portrait of Byron wearing Albanian national costume.
Wainewright didn't get on brilliantly well with Phillips. He thought he was too flattering to his sitters. Which is why, when he painted Byron himself (the picture now hangs in Newstead Abbey) he went out of his way to make him look frankly voluptuous. Indeed, the whole business of painting soon lost its appeal for Waine-wright, so he chucked it in and joined the army. By this time, he had shaken off the stern influence of his grandfather and become the most ostentatious kind of dandy: fancy moustaches, frock coat, spurs.
This was largely why the 16th Foot appealed to him: they had a uniform which put Beau Brummell in the shade. But not even this was enough to keep him in the military for long. After a year he gave up the army as well , came back to London, had a nervous breakdown, cured himself by reading Wordsworth's poems, got married and went back to painting, exhibiting at the Royal Academy and elsewhere. This was when he met Blake and others in his circle, and also became close friends with Fuseli, to whose dungeon-apartments under Somerset House he often took his wife's two half-sisters to pose for the "god of his worship".
His life was glamorous, but expensive. He collected prints; he rented smart rooms in Great Marlborough Street; he gave lavish dinners for the London Magazine set: all things which couldn't easily be financed by the little money he earned as a painter and journalist, or by the interest he received from the small trust fund which had been set up for him by his grandfather. By the early 1820s he was reduced to forging the deeds governing this trust (which he knew was a capital offence), in order to continue on his merry way.
When that money was spent, he devised a more desperate remedy. In the late 1820s and early '30s at least three of his nearest and dearest died in highly suspicious circumstances, and as a result of each death Wainewright made large financial gains. He never admitted to murder, but the circumstantial evidence against him is overwhelming, and he is known to have had several books on poison in his library. He was especially interested in strychnine, which had been developed only recently, and could not be reliably detected at autopsy.
What seems to have happened is this: first he killed his uncle and inherited the big house out at Chiswick; then he bumped off his mother-in-law to sever his links with her money-grubbing relations; and then he set up a complicated insurance scam with Helen Abercrombie, a half-sister of his wife. The original idea was to fake her death and run away to France with the loot, but things got too complicated. In the end, he poisoned Helen as well.
When Wainewright unwisely returned to London in the mid-1830s after five wretched years in France, he was immediately arrested, put in Newgate, where he was visited by Dickens, among others, and tried for forgery. (Not for murder, which was mentioned during his trial but could not be proved.) He was transported to Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania), the most brutal of all the penal colonies.
After a gruelling year on the chain gang, Wainewright got back his freedom by degrees: as a hospital orderly, then as someone who was allowed to practice painting again. Many of the local worthies sat for him (about 50 of these elegant portraits survive), but Wainewright never became part of respectable society, even after gaining his ticket-of-leave and, eventually, a conditional pardon. When he died in Hobart in 1847, his body was seized by the hospital and used to demonstrate methods of dissection. He has no grave.
It took two years of library-hopping, as well as a visit to Tasmania, to sort out the basic chronology of Wainewright's story. (Though a biography of him had been published in the 1930s, and another in Australia in the '50s). But when I was ready to start writing, it was obvious that certain vital elements had vanished for ever. As his friends learned of his disgrace, they destroyed all evidence of their connection with him: only a handful of his letters survive, and his petition for a ticket of leave. When he disappeared from public records he vanished from the face of the earth.
This meant that I was simply not in a position to write a complete orthodox biography, but by now I didn't want to, anyway. Initially, I'd supposed that whatever was experimental about my book would have to do with Wainewright's obscurity. During my research, I realised that I had good reasons for going on a formal adventure as well. I'd been pre- occupied for years by the problems which dog all biographers: how to combine objective views with subjective judg-ments; how to breathe life back into people who don't leave a mass of papers behind them. Maybe, I thought, by allowing Wainewright to tell his own story - by writing his Confessions (19th-century sense) - I could frame these questions in dramatic rather than just theoretical ways. And at the same time I could reveal things about his personality. I could make a virtue of unavoidable ignorance by presenting it as his own plausible evasion. I could suggest things about his devious nature by mingling extracts from his own writing, with others from contemporaries like Lamb and Hazlitt, and embed them all in my own ventriloquising invention.
This, I reckoned, would make Wainewright at once elusive and plausible - as he was. But I was still anxious to preserve a reliable kind of control over the material. In order that readers should know what they were dealing with, and to let hard facts emerge clearly, I decided to augment his text with notes which would supply background information, include mini-essays on relevant topics (from print collecting to poisoning), and wherever necessary correct the lies or misinformation in Wainewright's own account.
And this is how the book ended up: 21 chapters in which Wainewright tells his story from cradle to (almost) grave, and which purport to have been written in Van Diemen's Land the year before he died. They combine elements we normally associate with novels, prose poems, rants, ravings, self-justifications, the whole caboodle. And at the end of each chapter, there's a parcel of notes which contain the "orthodox biography".
The book is an experiment. But its mixture of different forms all share a common purpose. They are dedicated to rescuing Waine-wright from obscurity, to enjoying his achievements as an artist and critic, to exploring his career as a criminal, and to investigating his self. The voice that I have given him is a confection, but it is nothing more or less than the one I would have tried to characterise by more conventional means, had I decided to write a more familiar sort of biography. Exactly the same applies to my treatment of his personality.
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