WAINEWRIGHT, THOMAS GRIFFITHS (17941852)

This article appears in Volume V28, Page 246 of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: VIR-WAT

WAINEWRIGHT, THOMAS GRIFFITHS (17941852) , English journalist and subject-painter, was born at

Chiswick

CHISWICK

in October 1794. He was educated by his distant relative Dr Charles Burney, and served as an orderly officer in the guards, and as cornet in a yeomanry regiment. In 1819 he entered on a literary life, and began to write for The Literary Pocket-Book, Black-

wood

's Magazine and The Foreign Quarterly Review. He is, however, most definitely identified with The London Magazine, to which, from 1820 to 1823, he contributed some smart but flippant art and other criticisms, under the signatures of " Janus Weathercock," " Egomet Bonmot " and " Herr Vinkbooms." He was a friend of Charles Lambwho thought well of his Iiterary productions, and in a

letter

LETTER (through Fr. lettre from Lat. littera or litera, letter of the alphabet; the origin of the Latin word is obscure; it has probably no connexion with the root of linere, to smear, i.e. with wax, for an inscription with a stilus)

Bernard

Barton

, styles him the " kind, light-hearted Wainewright "and of the other brilliant contributors to the journal. He also practised as an artist, designing illustrations to Chamberlayne's poems, and from 1821 to 1825 exhibiting in the Royal

Academy

ACADEMY, GREEK
ACADEMY, ROYAL

figure pictures, including a " Romance from Undine," " Paris in the Chamber of Helen " and the "Milkmaid's Song." Owing to his extravagant habits, Wainewright's affairs became deeply involved. In 1830 he insured the life of his sister-in-law in various offices for a sum of 18,000, and when she died, in the December of the same year, payment was refused by the companies on the ground of misrepresentation. Wainewright retired to France, was seized by the authorities as a suspected person, and imprisoned for six months. He had in his possession a quantity of strychnine, and it was afterwards found that he had destroyed, not only his sister-in-law, but also his uncle, his mother-in-law and a Norfolk-shire friend, by this poison. He returned to London in 1837, but was at once arrested on a charge of forging, thirteen years before, a transfer of stock, and was sentenced to transportation for life. He died of poplexy in

Hobart

Town

hospital

in 1852.
The Essays and Criticisms of Wainewright were published in 188o, with an account of his life, by W. Carew Hazlitt; and the history of his crimes suggested to Dickens his story of Hunted Down and to Bulwer Lytton his novel of Lucretia. His personality, as artist and poisoner, has interested latter-day writers, notably Oscar Wilde in " Pen, Pencil and Poison " (Fortnightly Review, Jan. 1889), and A. G. Allen, in T. Seccombe's Twelve Bad Men (1894).

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