THOMAS GRIFFITHS

See also:

• THOMAS GRIFFITHS WAINEWRIGHT (1794–1852)

WAINEWRIGHT (1794–1852)  , English journalist and subject-painter, was born at 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 Lamb—who thought well of his Iiterary productions, and in a letter to 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 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) .