Thomas Griffiths Wainewright (1794-1847) is known in a peripheral way to students of 19th-century literature, and perhaps better known to historians of crime. (Oscar Wilde took up his case wittily and eloquently in the 1890s, as proof of his thesis that art and morals inhabit entirely separate spheres). A criminal he certainly was, though the allegation of poisoning was never proved, and as such he spent the latter part of his life as a convict in Van Dieman's Land (now Tasmania). He was also a painter of some talent, a gifted writer and journalist, and a man-about-town in the cultural London circles of his day, moving in much the same milieu as Hazlitt, Keats, de Quincey and other literary lions of the Regency period.
Wainewright came from a respected family, but his mother died at his birth and his father followed when he was only nine. Brought up by his grandfather, the founder of the respected Monthly Review, he got a good classical education and studied art under John Linnell, though later he found the macabre style of Fuseli more to his taste. Some of his paintings were good enough to hang in the Royal Academy, and he painted a competent portrait of Byron, as well as writing lively and literate art criticism. Wainewright had, apparently, considerable social charm, was a good talker and - importantly for his future - a big spender. He financed his high life style by forging deeds on a trust fund which his grandfather had left him, but worse was to follow.
In 1828 he came into a handsome property after his uncle had died in suspicious circumstances, and two years later his mother-in-law also died rather suddenly. The third of his probable victims was an apparently healthy young woman, Helen Abercrombie, who was his wife's half-sister and around whom Wainewright had set up a complex web of life-insurance policies. Shortly after this he fled to France, either to escape suspicion and the law, or his creditors - perhaps both.
In 1837 he ventured back to London, where he was arrested and charged with forgery - it was too late then to charge him with murder, though public opinion adjudged him the poisoner of three people. Sentenced to transportation for life, he lived the rest of his life in Tasmania, at first as a common convict and finally as a ticket-of-leave man - which seems to have meant that he could live a relatively normal life inside a small area, but was liable to re-arrest at any time. His wife and only son (in whom he seems to have shown little interest) emigrated to America and were not heard of again.
Wainewright had narrowly escaped death in an epidemic which ravaged the penal colony, and while helping out in the convict hospital he seems to have stolen drugs and become an addict. Yet he resumed his painting professionally and exhibited his work along with other transported artists; according to Andrew Motion, these late pictures were mainly portraits, which show genuine talent. He was rumoured also to have kept a diary, but if he did it has disappeared, and so have other writings and many of his pictures.
Andrew Motion - the British Poet Laureat - has chosen an unusual format for this "experimental biography": he alternates semi-fictional chapters, told in the first person by Waineright himself, with pages of detailed notes on the historical, cultural and social background to each chapter. As literary pastiche this is clever and even brilliant, but the treatment is anomalous and the alternate contrasting sections remain apart like oil and water. It also makes for a certain stop-go, stop-go effect which may irritate some readers.
The period language is always convincing, however, and the utter selfishness and solipsism of Wainewright's mentality are set grimly and ironically against the fine sentiments and superior outlook he professes so eloquently. In terms of literary style and egocentricity, I suspect Motion may have taken a few hints from Benjamin Haydon's Journals, a fringe masterpiece of the period written by a kind of failed Michelangelo who finally shot himself. Not a book geared to all tastes, then, but a genuine tour-de-force and, on a non-fictional level, a telling portrait of a strange, intriguing and repellent man.
Brian Fallon is an author and critic