Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 58.djvu/446

Wainewright taste for luxury was displayed in his majolica, his proof engravings, his exotic plants, and similar foibles. The financial pressure must already have been very great when in 1826, in the names of his trustees, he forged an order upon the Bank of England to pay him a moiety of the capital sum to the interest of which alone he was entitled.

Next year Wainewright made a final venture as an author by the publication of a curious and rare little volume, entitled 'Some Passages in the Life of Egomet Bonmot, Esq. Edited by Mr. Mwaughaim, and now first published by M E' (London, 1827, 12mo, British Museum); it consists of some forty-seven pages, of which at least forty are devoted to sneers at rival authors.

In 1828 Wainewright and his wife were invited to go and reside under the roof of their bachelor uncle, George Edward Gritfiths, at Linden House. Within a year of their going there Griffiths died 'suddenly,' and the house and property, now considerably reduced in value, passed to Wainewright, who was by this time head over ears in debt. He now arranged for his wife's mother and two half-sisters, Helen and Madeleine, to make their home at Linden House. In 1830 he insured Helen's life for sums of 3,000l. and 2,000l. respectively in the Palladium and Eagle offices; the insurance in both cases covered only a short period of from two to three years. Other negotiations of a similar kind were obstructed by the 'obstinacy' of Helen's mother. Conveniently for Wainewrights' purpose, she died very suddenly in August 1830. He proceeded to quadruple the amount insured, and then removed temporarily from Linden House to lodgings at 12 Conduit Street. There, on 21 Dec. (the day to which a bill of sale on Wainewright's effects had been allowed to stand over), Helen Abercromby died in great agony, the symptoms of her brief illness being described by her nurse as identical with those of her mother and George Griffiths; her age when she died was twenty-one years and nine months. Wainewright's remarkable foresight failed him in but one point; owing to the many suspicious circumstances attending the proposals made in the name of Miss Abercromby, the insurance offices refused to pay, and it was with the utmost difficulty that he managed to raise a loan of 1,000l. on the security of his claims. With what remained of this, after paying the most pressing of his creditors, he crossed over in the spring of 1831 to Boulogne. His career during the next six years is almost a blank, but he is known to have spent a considerable term in prison at Paris. The police there found some strychnine upon his person. In June and again in December 1835 Wainewright's case against the insurance companies for non-payment was tried before Lord Abinger and the court of exchequer, and at the conclusion of the second and fuller trial the jury (who had previously disagreed) found promptly for the defendants on the ground of misrepresentation and of Miss Abercromby having no real interest in the insurance (3 Dec. 1835; see Times, 4 Dec.)

In June 1837 Wainewright returned to England, and shortly after his arrival in 'London was arrested at a Covent Garden hotel by Forrester, the Bow Street runner, upon a warrant obtained against him by the Bank of England for the forgery of 1826. He was tried at the Old Bailey on 6 July. Having pleaded guilty to uttering the forged cheque, the bank consented to waive the capital charge, and he was sentenced by the recorder to transportation to Van Diemen's Land for life. While in Newgate he was recognised by Macready, who was being shown over the gaol in company with Forster and Charles Dickens. He is stated to have tacitly admitted that he poisoned Helen Abercromby, and to have urged in extenuation that she had very thick ankles. To a Lombard Street visitor he is said to have retorted, 'Sir, you city men enter upon your speculations and take your chances of them. Some of your speculations succeed, and some fail. Mine happen to have failed.' More plaintive in tone is the Pinchbeck petition (full of maudlin 'art sentiment' and insolent twaddle about 'the ideal') addressed in 1844 to Sir John Eardley Wilmot, the lieutenant-governor of Van Diemen's Land. The ticket-of-leave which he petitioned for was refused. He is said to have executed a number of pastel and watercolour portraits while a convict at Hobart Town, and he died in the hospital there in 1852.

In his supersensual propensities, his fondness for cats, and in other respects, Wainewright presents some notable points of similarity to the notorious French criminal Lacenaire. His literary talent has been exaggerated, and he has no claim whatever to rank with erratic men of genius such as Villon or Cellini, or Casanova or Verlaine. His personality has, however, attracted a good deal of attention from the modern school of criminologists as presenting a perfect example of 'the intuitive criminal' in his most highly developed state—fortunately a very rare phenomenon. His life, too, has inspired some well-known fiction. In Bulwer Lytton's 'Lucretia' he appears as Varney, and Lucretia Clavering is supposed to be