Читать книгу The Fatal Cup: Thomas Griffiths Wainewright and the strange deaths of his relations - John Price Williams - Страница 7

CHAPTER 1

THE MAKING OF THE DANDY

Thomas Griffiths Wainewright has been damned as a murderer from that day to this. After his transportation those who had been his friends and acquaintances were quick to pass judgement. They queued up to castigate him. John Forster, the critic and biographer of Dickens called him an “unscrupulous and unsparing murderer”.

His sister-in-law, Helen, had died of poisoning after she had swallowed from what the Attorney-general was to call a “fatal cup” and Wainewright was accused of saying that he had killed her “because her ankles were too thick”. He was said to wear among his many rings one with a secret compartment that contained the deadly poison strychnine. Victorian authors fell on the case with relish to produce spine-chillers.

Oscar Wilde was fascinated by him, describing him as “not merely a poet and a painter, an art critic, an antiquarian, and a writer of prose, an amateur of beautiful things and a dilettante of things delightful, but also a forger... and a subtle and secret poisoner almost without rival in this or any other age”.1

As recently as the year 2000, the UK poet laureate, Andrew Motion produced what he called

1. Wilde. O. Pen Pencil and Poison. Fortnightly Review. 1889

JOHN PRICE WILLIAMS

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