Читать книгу The Fatal Cup: Thomas Griffiths Wainewright and the strange deaths of his relations - John Price Williams - Страница 39

according to his own description. He was said to stoop slightly and have a habit of lisping.

In the same description he talked of his “one large white hand decorated with regal rings”. They are mentioned again in one of his essays:

diamond rings on our fingers, the antique cameos in our breast-pins, our cambric pocket-handkerchief breathing forth attargul, our pale lemon-coloured kid gloves.

John Clare, known as the Peasant Poet, whom Wainewright admired, was invited to dinner in February 1822 and wrote of him as “a very comical sort of chap. He is about 27 and wears a quizzing glass and makes an excuse for the ornament by complaining of bad eyes”. Thomas Hood, another poet who was present, referred to Wainewright being “exquisitely scented and lisping”. In the 1896 life of de Quincy by David Masson, Wainewright is referred to as “a shabby-genteel and bejewelled effeminate, whose department was the Fine Arts.”

After his transportation to Van Diemen’s Land, many of those who had enjoyed his hospitality were unsparing about his dandyism. He was, wrote the poet Barry Cornwall, “absolutely a fop, finikin in dress, with mincing steps and tremulous words, with his hair curled and full of unguents and his cheeks painted like those of a frivolous demi-rep”, defined at that time as ‘a woman of uncertain virtue’. Talfourd said his conversation was that of “smart, lively, clever, heartless, voluptuous coxcomb”.

“He is ubiquitous” wrote Walter Thornbury. “Go to the Park and you observe him in his phaeton,

JOHN PRICE WILLIAMS

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