Читать книгу The Fatal Cup: Thomas Griffiths Wainewright and the strange deaths of his relations - John Price Williams - Страница 43

Roman god, and one who could be blown in any direction. The other name he used, purporting to be a Dutchman, was Cornelius Van Vinkbooms, a surname probably appropriated from David Vinckbooms (sic), one of the painters of the Dutch Golden Age, who was greatly influenced by Breughel the Elder.

In the three years from February 1820 Wainewright contributed some 15 attributable essays to the London.1 Several of them are devoted to his expensive possessions and extravagant lifestyle; de Quincey, his fellow contributor, was not convinced by this showiness:

(He) could not conceal the ostentatious pleasure which he took in the luxurious fittings-up of his rooms, in the fancied splendour of his bijouterie, &c. Yet it was easy for a man of any experience to read two facts in all this idle etalage (display); one being, that his finery was but of a second-rate order; the other, that he was a parvenu, not at home even amongst his second-rate splendour.

Wainwright’s striving for effect in his essays makes some of them quite difficult to read today, though his

1. Carew Hazlitt also attributes to Wainewright two articles in the London signed “Egomet Bonmot Esq.” which Hazlitt added to the known works as he detected a similarity of style. This attribution has recently been disputed by Marc Vaulbert de Chantilly, who says they are probably the work of another contributor, Edward Gandy. “Some passages” in the Life &c of Egonmet Bonmot, Esq. The Vanity Press of Bethnal Green. 2000.

JOHN PRICE WILLIAMS

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