Читать книгу The Fatal Cup: Thomas Griffiths Wainewright and the strange deaths of his relations - John Price Williams - Страница 40

leaning forward with his cream-coloured gloves and his large turned-down wristbands conspicuous over the splashboard. Go to old Lady Fitzrattle’s ball the same evening and you will see the fascinating creature with the belle of the evening, gracefully revolving in the waltz”. Hardly a contemporary description, it was written more than 20 years after his death.

Wainewright was a dandy, but not like the rather dim Regency buffs whose horizons were bounded by Grosvenor Square and St James’ and who spent vast amounts on gambling and on amusing themselves at Almanack’s Assembly Rooms, a marriage mart for the aristocracy.

His was an artistic dandyism, a posturing to draw attention to himself and his talents rather than to impress other followers of fashion. As Baudelaire, himself a dandy, wrote: “Dandyism is not an excessive delight in clothes and material elegance. For the perfect dandy, these are no more than a symbol of the aristocratic superiority of the mind.”

Wainewright had no doubt about the latter as far as he was concerned. He knew Latin and Greek, French and German, had an encyclopaedic knowledge of art and a keen eye as an artistic and literary critic.

It was the height of Romanticism in art and literature, the era of Turner, Constable and Fuseli, of Wordsworth, Blake, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats and others. Their emphasis on the beauties of nature and the importance of emotion and the self, rather than dictates of reason and order promoted by the 18th century Enlightenment, was a cause that Wainewright enthusiastically embraced, as

THE FATAL CUP

40