The Demon Of Van Diemen's Land. - Review - book review

Wainewright the Poisoner. Andrew Motion. Faber and Faber. [pound]20.00. 305 pages. ISBN 0-571-19401-X.

Guards officer, artist, art critic and essayist, wit, poet, poseur and Disraelian dandy-about-town; good friend of Charles Lamb, Fuseli and William Blake, acquainted with De Quincey, Hazlitt, John Clare, Keats, and Wordsworth. That was one side of the coin of Thomas Griffiths Wainewright's life. The obverse was Wainewright the poisoner, the forger and murderer whose very name became a Victorian byword for evil.

A curious subject you might think for the Poet Laureate to select as suitable for treatment and a very curious treatment at that. An experiment in biography, rather less successful than Symons' Corvine, on a par perhaps with Ackroyd's Dickensian direct address strategems. A factitious journal or confession, supplemented by a confusion of authorial stand-aside notes, leaving one, for all their recondite accuracy and patent erudition, high and dry above reality, confounded between fact, faction and fiction.

Notwithstanding its to be expected verbal skills, this biographical excursus seems to me to disappoint.

Assuredly, Wainewright is a seductive proposition. Wilde made vastly entertaining play with him in his Fortnightly Review (January 1889) essay, 'Pen, Pencil and Poison' -- republished in Intentions (1891) with the subtitle, 'A Study in Green' -- and, characteristically, eschewing all reprobations. Wilde must have sensed the similarities between Wainewright and certain aspects of himself, if only their mutual belief that life itself is an art. With true Wildean flippancy, Wainewright claimed to see absolution for his murder of his young sister-in-law in the fact that she had very thick ankles!

Despite his venenatious reputation, Wainewright was never convicted of any crime other than forgery, for which he stood trial at the Old Bailey in July 1837; but that was enough to get him to the hulks at Portsmouth, and shipped off thence to Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania), where he died, a ticket-of-leave man, aged fifty-three, in 1847. Latterly he had done a good deal of painting, including a portrait of Henriette Heathorn, who married Thomas Henry Huxley.

Although I admit to not being over-enamoured of the form in which it is cast, this does seem to me to be the most painstakingly researched and creatively articulated book among the several which we have seen on this, in every sense, challenging subject. Not perhaps the last word, but much the deepest and best that we have had to date.

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