Wainewright the Poisoner: The confession of Thomas Griffiths Wainewright--Regency author, painter, swindler, and probable murderer--brilliantly woven from historical fragments - Hardcover

Motion, Andrew

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375402098 ISBN 13: 9780375402098

Publisher: Knopf, 2000

Synopsis

In a time rich in unlikely characters, Thomas Griffiths Wainewright (1794-1847) was one of the strangest of all. A painter, writer, well-known London dandy and friend of most of the major figures of the Romantic era (from Blake to Byron, from John Clare to John Keats, Lamb, De Quincey and Hazlitt), he was also almost certainly a murderer, possibly several times over. Arrested and convicted of forgery--evidence was lacking to prove the murders--he was transported for life to the barbarous penal colony of Tasmania, where, years later, he died in obscurity. Behind him he left only rumors and fragments of documents, and a legend of evil that fascinated such writers as Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde.

With a brilliant blend of creative imagination and scholarly sleuthing, Andrew Motion evokes Wainewright's double life in a tour de force of the biographer's art. Cast in the form of a partly fictional "confession" written by the subject himself, buttressed (and sometimes contradicted) by the notes, background essays and other commentary setting out the known facts, it reveals the man as no straightforward history could do--his distinctive voice, his wit and charm, his callousness and unreliability, his pathos and, perhaps, his capacity for
murder.

As a distinguished biographer (of Philip Larkin and John Keats, among others), Andrew Motion has been notably successful in pinning down the often-elusive details of Wainewright's life. As a first-rate poet (he succeeded Ted Hughes as Britain's Poet Laureate), he shows himself equally skilled in the imaginative investigation of Wainewright's bizarre psyche. The result is a richly memorable exploration of the darker side of human nature, of the roots of crime, of the nature of biography itself.

About this title

Review:

British poet laureate Andrew Motion knows how to write a conventional biography--witness his much-praised books on John Keats and Philip Larkin--but this time out he's chosen not to. In a fascinating act of literary ventriloquism, Motion has created a fictional "confession" supposedly written by Thomas Griffiths Wainewright (1794-1847), an English painter and essayist friendly with many artists in the Romantic movement before he was convicted of forgery in 1837 and transported to Van Diemen's Land (modern-day Tasmania). Demonized in several lurid pieces of Victorian fiction that assumed with some justification that he was a murderer as well as a forger, Wainewright has fallen into obscurity since. Motion thinks he deserves a modern reassessment: "His career dramatizes ideas that deeply concerned [the Romantics]. By combining a life in culture with a life in crime he embodies an extreme version of [their belief] that good and evil grow on the same stem." The brilliantly slippery monologue fabricated by Motion vivifies that belief, capturing Wainewright's glittering, dandified charm and subtly suggesting the darker currents underneath as it narrates his unhappy childhood, London heyday, and ordeal as a convict. Readers are strongly urged not to skip the footnotes, which lay out the book's factual underpinnings and gracefully provide a historical context as interesting as Wainewright's convulsive life story. --Wendy Smith

From the Publisher:

"Innovative and compelling. . . . Part of Mr. Motion's achievement in this remarkable biography is to leave the matter [of murder] so tantalisingly, and altogether appropriately, unreseloved."
-- The Economist

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0375402098
• ISBN 13: 9780375402098
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 304