Читать книгу The Fatal Cup: Thomas Griffiths Wainewright and the strange deaths of his relations - John Price Williams - Страница 5

300 men, another cargo of criminality exported from England to be dumped out of sight and mind in “this dust-hole of Empire”, as Colonial Secretary, Lord Stanley called it. An island penal colony the British did not even want, but had occupied only to prevent the French acquiring it.

Among those below, crippled by the fever of rheumatism, lay Convict 2325 Thomas Griffiths Wainewright. Age: 43. Occupation: there were many; dandy, painter, essayist. Swindler. Murderer?

How had it come to this? The perfumed and jewelled exquisite who affected a quizzing glass and lemon yellow gloves in the literary and artistic salons of fashionable London reduced to wretchedness and a sentence of Transportation to Parts beyond the Seas.

The essayists Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt and the poet John Clare had been his friends and he had contributed to London’s leading literary magazine. The lions of literary and artistic London came to dine with the elegant Wainewright at his lavish London apartment and the fine country house at Turnham Green in Chiswick.

Had he not been praised as an artist by William Blake, exhibited at the Royal Academy in London, had claimed the academy’s President, the famous portraitist Sir Thomas Lawrence, as a childhood friend, and the academy’s Keeper, Henry Fuseli, the Gothic fantasist as “the god of his worship”?

Had he not followed Fuseli’s lead-lined coffin to St Paul’s in the funeral procession? Did the crowds not marvel as they saw the dandy as he rode in an open coach behind a hearse which was drawn by six black horses, accompanied by pages bearing

JOHN PRICE WILLIAMS

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