Intentions
embarrassment. Indeed, a few months after the murder of Helen
Abercrombie, he had been actually arrested for debt in the streets of
London while he was serenading the pretty daughter of one of his friends.
This difficulty was got over at the time, but shortly afterwards he
thought it better to go abroad till he could come to some practical
arrangement with his creditors. He accordingly went to Boulogne on a
visit to the father of the young lady in question, and while he was there
induced him to insure his life with the Pelican Company for £3000. As
soon as the necessary formalities had been gone through and the policy
executed, he dropped some crystals of strychnine into his coffee as they
sat together one evening after dinner. He himself did not gain any
monetary advantage by doing this. His aim was simply to revenge himself
on the first office that had refused to pay him the price of his sin.
His friend died the next day in his presence, and he left Boulogne at
once for a sketching tour through the most picturesque parts of Brittany,
and was for some time the guest of an old French gentleman, who had a
beautiful country house at St. Omer. From this he moved to Paris, where
he remained for several years, living in luxury, some say, while others
talk of his ‘skulking with poison in his pocket, and being dreaded by all
who knew him.’ In 1837 he returned to England privately. Some strange
mad fascination brought him back. He followed a woman whom he loved.
It was the month of June, and he was staying at one of the hotels in
Covent Garden. His sitting-room was on the ground floor, and he
prudently kept the blinds down for fear of being seen. Thirteen years
before, when he was making his fine collection of majolica and Marc
Antonios, he had forged the names of his trustees to a power of attorney,
which enabled him to get possession of some of the money which he had
inherited from his mother, and had brought into marriage settlement. He
knew that this forgery had been discovered, and that by returning to
England he was imperilling his life. Yet he returned. Should one
wonder? It was said that the woman was very beautiful. Besides, she did
not love him.
It was by a mere accident that he was discovered. A noise in the street
attracted his attention, and, in his artistic interest in modern life, he
pushed aside the blind for a moment. Some one outside called out,
‘That’s Wainewright, the Bank-forger.’ It was Forrester, the Bow Street
runner.
On the 5th of July he was brought up at the Old Bailey. The following
report of the proceedings appeared in the _Times_:—
Before Mr. Justice Vaughan and Mr. Baron Alderson, Thomas Griffiths
Wainewright, aged forty-two, a man of gentlemanly appearance, wearing
mustachios, was indicted for forging and uttering a certain power of
attorney for £2259, with intent to defraud the Governor and Company
of the Bank of England.
There were five indictments against the prisoner, to all of which he
pleaded not guilty, when he was arraigned before Mr. Serjeant Arabin
in the course of the morning. On being brought before the judges,
however, he begged to be allowed to withdraw the former plea, and
then pleaded guilty to two of the indictments which were not of a
capital nature.
The counsel for the Bank having explained that there were three other
indictments, but that the Bank did not desire to shed blood, the plea
of guilty on the two minor charges was recorded, and the prisoner at
the close of the session sentenced by the Recorder to transportation
for life.
He was taken back to Newgate, preparatory to his removal to the colonies.
In a fanciful passage in one of his early essays he had fancied himself
‘lying in Horsemonger Gaol under sentence of death’ for having been
unable to resist the temptation of stealing some Marc Antonios from the
British Museum in order to complete his collection. The sentence now
passed on him was to a man of his culture a form of death. He complained
bitterly of it to his friends, and pointed out, with a good deal of
reason, some people may fancy, that the money was practically his own,
having come to him from his mother, and that the forgery, such as it was,
had been committed thirteen years before, which, to use his own phrase,
was at least a _circonstance attenuante_. The permanence of personality
is a very subtle metaphysical problem, and certainly the English law
solves the question in an extremely rough-and-ready manner. There is,
however, something dramatic in the fact that this heavy punishment was
inflicted on him for what, if we remember his fatal influence on the
prose of modern journalism, was certainly not the worst of all his sins.
While he was in gaol, Dickens, Macready, and Hablot Browne came across
him by chance. They had been going over the prisons of London, searching
for artistic effects, and in Newgate they suddenly caught sight of
Wainewright. He met them with a defiant stare, Forster tells us, but
Macready was ‘horrified to recognise a man familiarly known to him in
former years, and at whose table he had dined.’
Others had more curiosity, and his cell was for some time a kind of
fashionable lounge. Many men of letters went down to visit their old
literary comrade. But he was no longer the kind light-hearted Janus whom
Charles Lamb admired. He seems to have grown quite cynical.
To the agent of an insurance company who was visiting him one afternoon,
and thought he would improve the occasion by pointing out that, after
all, crime was a bad speculation, he replied: ‘Sir, you City men enter on
your speculations, and take the chances of them. Some of your
speculations succeed, some fail. Mine happen to have failed, yours
happen to have succeeded. That is the only difference, sir, between my
visitor and me. But, sir, I will tell you one thing in which I have
succeeded to the last. I have been determined through life to hold the
position of a gentleman. I have always done so. I do so still. It is
the custom of this place that each of the inmates of a cell shall take
his morning’s turn of sweeping it out. I occupy a cell with a bricklayer
and a sweep, but they never offer me the broom!’ When a friend
reproached him with the murder of Helen Abercrombie he shrugged his
shoulders and said, ‘Yes; it was a dreadful thing to do, but she had very
thick ankles.’
From Newgate he was brought to the hulks at Portsmouth, and sent from
there in the _Susan_ to Van Diemen’s Land along with three hundred other
convicts. The voyage seems to have been most distasteful to him, and in
a letter written to a friend he spoke bitterly about the ignominy of ‘the
companion of poets and artists’ being compelled to associate with
‘country bumpkins.’ The phrase that he applies to his companions need
not surprise us. Crime in England is rarely the result of sin. It is
nearly always the result of starvation. There was probably no one on
board in whom he would have found a sympathetic listener, or even a
psychologically interesting nature.
His love of art, however, never deserted him. At Hobart Town he started
a studio, and returned to sketching and portrait-painting, and his
conversation and manners seem not to have lost their charm. Nor did he
give up his habit of poisoning, and there are two cases on record in
which he tried to make away with people who had offended him. But his
hand seems to have lost its cunning. Both of his attempts were complete
failures, and in 1844, being thoroughly dissatisfied with Tasmanian
society, he presented a memorial to the governor of the settlement, Sir
John Eardley Wilmot, praying for a ticket-of-leave. In it he speaks of
himself as being ‘tormented by ideas struggling for outward form and
realisation, barred up from increase of knowledge, and deprived of the
exercise of profitable or even of decorous speech.’ His request,
however, was refused, and the associate of Coleridge consoled himself by
making those marvellous _Paradis Artificiels_ whose secret is only known
to the eaters of opium. In 1852 he died of apoplexy, his sole living
companion being a cat, for which he had evinced at extraordinary
affection.
His crimes seem to have had an important effect upon his art. They gave
a strong personality to his style, a quality that his early work
certainly lacked. In a note to the _Life of Dickens_, Forster mentions
that in 1847 Lady Blessington received from her brother, Major Power, who
held a military appointment at Hobart Town, an oil portrait of a young
lady from his clever brush; and it is said that ‘he had contrived to put
the expression of his own wickedness into the portrait of a nice,
kind-hearted girl.’ M. Zola, in one of his novels, tells us of a young
man who, having committed a murder, takes to art, and paints greenish
impressionist portraits of perfectly respectable people, all of which
bear a curious resemblance to his victim. The development of Mr.
Wainewright’s style seems to me far more subtle and suggestive. One can
fancy an intense personality being created out of sin.
This strange and fascinating figure that for a few years dazzled literary
London, and made so brilliant a _début_ in life and letters, is
undoubtedly a most interesting study. Mr. W. Carew Hazlitt, his latest
biographer, to whom I am indebted for many of the facts contained in this
memoir, and whose little book is, indeed, quite invaluable in its way, is
of opinion that his love of art and nature was a mere pretence and
assumption, and others have denied to him all literary power. This seems
to me a shallow, or at least a mistaken, view. The fact of a man being a
poisoner is nothing against his prose. The domestic virtues are not the
true basis of art, though they may serve as an excellent advertisement
for second-rate artists. It is possible that De Quincey exaggerated his
critical powers, and I cannot help saying again that there is much in his
published works that is too familiar, too common, too journalistic, in
the bad sense of that bad word. Here and there he is distinctly vulgar
in expression, and he is always lacking in the self-restraint of the true
artist. But for some of his faults we must blame the time in which he
lived, and, after all, prose that Charles Lamb thought ‘capital’ has no
small historic interest. That he had a sincere love of art and nature
seems to me quite certain. There is no essential incongruity between
crime and culture. We cannot re-write the whole of history for the
purpose of gratifying our moral sense of what should be.
Of course, he is far too close to our own time for us to be able to form
any purely artistic judgment about him. It is impossible not to feel a
strong prejudice against a man who might have poisoned Lord Tennyson, or
Mr. Gladstone, or the Master of Balliol. But had the man worn a costume
and spoken a language different from our own, had he lived in imperial
Rome, or at the time of the Italian Renaissance, or in Spain in the
seventeenth century, or in any land or any century but this century and
this land, we would be quite able to arrive at a perfectly unprejudiced
estimate of his position and value. I know that there are many
historians, or at least writers on historical subjects, who still think
it necessary to apply moral judgments to history, and who distribute
their praise or blame with the solemn complacency of a successful
schoolmaster. This, however, is a foolish habit, and merely shows that
the moral instinct can be brought to such a pitch of perfection that it
will make its appearance wherever it is not required. Nobody with the
true historical sense ever dreams of blaming Nero, or scolding Tiberius,