The murdering dandy

WAINEWRIGHT THE POISONER

by Andrew Motion

IT is a ghastly coincidence that the Poet Laureate's fictionalised biography of one of the 19th century's most intriguing killers should be published in the keening wake of the Shipman case. Like Shipman, it seems, Wainewright poisoned his victims out of evil bravado, pathological pride and self-destructively naked greed.

And, like Shipman, Wainewright's crimes were intricately related to his profession - in the latter's case, dandy artist of the demoniacal Romantic fringe. If we consider Keats's death wish, the Romantic flirtation with drug fantasies, Byron's play with incest and violence and the Gothic novel's staging of torture and murder, it is easier to comprehend the temptation to marry art and crime.

It was Oscar Wilde's brilliant 1889 essay Pen, Pencil, Poison that immortalised Wainewright as the epitome of the criminal artist.

Wainewright was intimate with Blake, Lamb, Fuseli, Clare and the London Magazine Romantics. He was a conspicuous dandy and antiquarian collector of prints and paintings of exquisite taste, amassing an impressive array of works by the so-called Poetic school of Romantic art which crowded his expensive rooms at Great Marlborough Street. He wrote dense, flamboyant and witty articles on art and poetry under a variety of pseudonyms (most famously as Janus Weathercock), taking to Shandyesque extremes the spin on multiple identities which obsessed the darker aficionados of Romanticism. He was also an extremely talented artist, becoming a key figure in the shift towards visionary, gothic-erotic fantasy in contemporary art. If he hadn't been a criminal, he'd be hailed as a minor Eminence grise of the world of arts and letters.

But a deep-seated grievance about being cheated of his inheritance by his grandfather-guardian (who hated his deceased father) coupled with extravagant debts due to his socialising and art-collecting mania led him into depression, imminent bankruptcy and despair. He first forged signatures to get hold of his inheritance, then involved his wife's family in complex life-insurance scams. Suspicions began to circulate after the death of Helen Abercrombie, his wife's cousin, in circumstances that seemed to duplicate the death of her mother. Their symptoms, masked as food poisoning, were, according to evidence of servants and doctors after the event, identical with poisoning by antimony (to weaken the system), then strychnine (to kill the patient off).

It was the insurance companies that got together to nail Wainewright, and, as there was insufficient evidence to convict him of murder (he was suspected of at least four killings), he was transported for life to Tasmania (then Van Diemen's Land) on forgery charges.

Motion has done a fantastically skilled job in piecing Wainewright's life story together from the fragmentary clues and evidence that were left after he died, for friends and relatives destroyed many of his paintings, letters and effects once the scandal broke. Furthermore, Motion has had to edit out a tissue of grisly and melodramatic stories which began to crop up after Wainewright had been transported - invented murders and a stereotyping of the criminal painter as a shifty, effeminate, cold-hearted, dandy killer: notably in Bulwer Lytton's Lucretia and in Dickens's story Hunted Down, as well as in the form of Rigaud in Little Dorrit.

Motion makes the rather strange decision to write the life as a fictional autobiography; on the face of it in order to supplement, with imaginative material, the gaps left in the record. But the move is wonderfully tactful, because Motion's real case is that the self, for the Romantics (and even more so, perhaps, for us), is a shifting, multiple, theatrical series of fake identities. Wainewright, as Wilde argued, was a key figure in the Romantic redefinition of selfhood as the "performance of personality" and, as such, announces Wilde's own dandy murderer, Dorian Gray. Motion, by displaying his subject's special pleading, lies and self-justifications, makes a brilliant post-Wildean case about the necessary fictiveness of biography.

But what a strange thing to want to do. It is true that we cannot really understand the 19th century without taking on board Wilde's challenge that high culture is just one mask in the many-headed self's performance of dark and potentially murderous drives. The self is, Wilde writes, "a complex multiform creature that bears within itself strange legacies of thought and passion". Motion, with his careful notes to each fictionalised chapter of this pseudo- autobiography, ponders this again and again.

But perhaps, after Shipman and the other serial killers who haunt our imaginations, the book fails to account for the real question about men like Wainewright, not "How could he be a dandy artist and a killer?", but "What is the dark residue of evil in the hearts of these people?" Nevertheless, this is an extraordinary and cruelly timely book, in the centenary of Wilde's death and the year of the Dr Jekyll of Hyde.

Copyright 2000
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