Читать книгу The Fatal Cup: Thomas Griffiths Wainewright and the strange deaths of his relations - John Price Williams - Страница 59

of the Monthly Review, the editors’ set; Sir Thomas Lawrence’s portrait of Dr Ralph Griffiths, pictures by Fuseli and Richard Westall and Wainewright’s Scene from Walton’s Angler. A huge amount was sold over the course of the next year or so, but Wainewright was not to benefit. Whatever was raised was already spoken for in paying off his debts.

The auctioneer was Benjamin Wheatley, who had substantial premises in Piccadilly. He was a widower with children, who was to become Wainewright’s brother-in-law, for while cataloguing the contents of Linden House before the auctions, he had met Madalina Abercromby, then 19 years old, and in May 1832 he was to marry her.

Madalina, her sister Helen and their mother had moved to Linden House to be with Wainewright and Eliza from Sheen, where they had been teetering on edge of genteel poverty. Eliza’s mother, Frances, despite her small property holdings in Mortlake, where they had recently lived, was so short of money that she had borrowed £200 from John Stuart, the auctioneer who collected her rents. When her properties finally had to be sold in 1829, she still owed him £40, which he was never to receive.

But she must have been delighted to move to such a fashionable address, to which the cream of artistic London, such as Charles Lamb and the famous actor-manager Charles Macready still came to dine; Wainewright’s artistic talents might have forsaken him through idleness, but he was a witty host who entertained lavishly and kept at his dinner table a vicarious hold of his former life.

Now even this was threatened. The local tradesmen were owed hundreds of pounds - credit

JOHN PRICE WILLIAMS

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