Читать книгу The Fatal Cup: Thomas Griffiths Wainewright and the strange deaths of his relations - John Price Williams - Страница 10

paddock, according to an auctioneer’s catalogue in 1832. It was a ‘capital house’, commented one observer admiringly.

To the imposing portico and the great door set in the encompassing walls came the cream of London’s literary society, for this was the home of Dr. Ralph Griffiths, bookseller, publisher and editor of the Monthly Review, which he had founded in 1749, the most influential literary journal of its kind in Georgian London,

Its only rival, the Critical Review, run by Tobias Smollett, denounced it as being conducted “by a parcel of obscure hirelings under the restraint of a bookseller and his wife, who presume to revise, alter and amend the articles occasionally.”

Dr. Griffiths was the grandfather of Thomas Griffiths Wainewright – to whom he gave his middle name – and a formative influence on his infant life. Griffiths himself was a Shropshire village lad, who had started life as a watchmaker’s apprentice at Stone in Staffordshire, then pulled himself up by ambition and hard dealing to become a bookseller in the capital.

He was a hard master to those “obscure hirelings” who ran his magazine for him. The splendours of Linden House were paid for partly by the toil of his contributors. One of the poorly-paid hacks who managed to break free was a schoolmaster named Oliver Goldsmith, later to become famous as the author of The Vicar of Wakefield and She Stoops to Conquer. After five months as a sub-editor and 12 contributions he left disillusioned. Mrs Griffiths, who took a hand in running the magazine with her husband, accused him of unpunctuality and

THE FATAL CUP

10