The Invention of Murder (36 page)

Before the poison panic, a certain sort of poisoning case could be considered exciting: if it was not likely to happen to you, it was fun to read about. One such case was that of Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, whose trial took place in 1837, but whose aura, promoted and enhanced in theatre and literature, remained a potent force throughout the next wave of poison fears.

Wainewright had inherited a small annual income from his grandfather, the founder of the
Monthly Review,
a prestigious literary journal. He studied first under a portrait painter, then, ‘ever to be whiled away by new and flashy gauds’, as he later wrote, he ‘postponed the pencil to the sword’, buying a commission in the army. He saw no active service and, like many young men, regarded his military career largely as an opportunity to swagger about in quasi-fancy-dress. By 1815 he had sold his commission, and was once more a would-be artist and writer (he never quite made up his mind). He contributed essays to the
London Magazine
under the pseudonym ‘Janus Weathercock’, but was more interested in ‘the diamond rings on our fingers, the antique cameos in our breast-pins. our pale lemon-coloured kid gloves’: dandyism as art. Although his affected, facetious style is almost unreadable today, it was admired by a circle that included the critics Thomas de Quincey and William Hazlitt, essayist Charles Lamb and Thomas Hood.

In 1822 he married, and the couple moved into rather grand lodgings in Great Marlborough Street, which had once belonged to the tragedian Sarah Siddons. This alone, without any other expensivehabits, was far beyond his modest income. Even before his marriage Wainewright had been in financial difficulties, which he had temporarily resolved by forging the signatures of his trustees to gain access to the capital sum on which his income depended. He obtained half of the capital immediately, and a second forgery the following year procured the rest. This carried him through until an uncle died in 1828, but despite great expectations he inherited only a few thousand pounds and a large house that he could not afford to run.

The household now consisted of Wainewright and his wife; Mrs Abercromby, his mother-in-law; and his wife’s two young sisters, one of whom, Helen, at Wainewright’s urging, insured her life. She told the insurers that there was a chancery suit in her name, which was likely to end in her favour; the insurance was to give temporary cover in case she died before it was settled, so her heirs would benefit. With Wainewright accompanying her, she insured herself with two different companies. In 1830, Mrs Abercromby died suddenly and unexpectedly. Later that year Helen applied to another seven insurance companies for cover. She was, by the end of the year, the possessor of policies that would pay out £12,000 on her death, and on 12 December she signed a will in favour of her sister. On 14 December she was taken ill; ‘a chill on the stomach’, thought the doctor. On 20 December she was dead.

The insurance companies refused to pay out, claiming that the policies had been obtained by fraud. In some cases Helen and Wainewright had said no other cover had been obtained; there was also, contrary to her statement when buying the policies, no chancery suit; and Wainewright was the beneficiary, despite Helen having told the companies that the policies were to benefit her sister. Wainewright brought a suit against the Imperial Insurance Company for nonpayment, but his own tangled finances meant that he could not await the outcome. He fled to France to avoid arrest and bankruptcy proceedings, and for the next few years, everything we know of him is based on rumour. At some point, however, one of the trustees of his inheritance applied to the Bank of England for Wainewright’s French address, assuming the bank would be forwarding payments to him.Only now was it discovered that the entire sum had been embezzled in 1824; in 1835 a warrant for forgery was sworn out.

Meanwhile, the civil case against the insurance company was proceeding, despite Wainewright’s continued absence. The prosecution’s case was that Helen Abercromby had been murdered. As Wainewright could not have afforded to continue paying the premiums, he must have planned all along to kill her. The judge ruled that this was irrelevant: Helen Abercromby did not insure herself with the intention of being murdered, and therefore she had perpetrated no fraud. The jury failed to agree a verdict, and a retrial was necessary. This time the insurance company stressed fraud rather than murder, and won; in his absence, Wainewright’s house was sold and his goods auctioned off.

For reasons that were never clear, Wainewright returned to England in 1837. Legend has it that he was arrested by one of the most famous detectives of the day, Daniel Forrester, and it may be so. Forrester was said to have recognized him despite his new ‘large tuft of mustachios and beard’. He ‘ran up, and tapping him smartly on the arm, said, “Ah, Mr. Wainright [sic], how do you do? Who would have thought of seeing you here?”’ Rather dramatically,
The Times
claimed that Wainewright was carrying ‘a small dirk in a sheath’, but the next phrase was probably more realistic: he was entirely ‘without money or friends’, and was taken to a debtors’ prison. The next day he was charged with fraud on the Bank of England, and transferred to Newgate, bank fraud and forgery being capital crimes. Very sensibly therefore Wainewright agreed to plead guilty to passing a forged cheque, which was not a capital crime, in exchange for the Bank of England dropping its prosecution. He was sentenced to transportation to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), and in 1847 he died there. At no time was he tried for, much less convicted of, murder.

That was no reason to rein in the imagination. Wainewright, according to popular views, had definitely murdered Helen Abercromby; and her mother; and his uncle. As one end-of-century author shrugged, ‘The evidence. is not conclusive, nor, indeed, very strong, but in the face of his subsequent actions there can be little doubt of his guilt.’ This author then repeated two murder stories he said straightforwardly that he didn’t believe. One was that, after fleeing to France, Wainewright supposedly murdered a man in Calais, and another in Boulogne, the latter merely because the man had secured a loan on an insurance policy from the company that had refused to pay Wainewright. Other versions suggested there was no motive for this murder at all – Wainewright just liked killing. One source said he had used a ‘poison ring’, which had a hinged compartment in which he ‘always’ carried strychnine, ‘a poison almost tasteless’ (strychnine is not tasteless: it is harshly bitter). After Wainewright’s death in Tasmania, more murders in Hobart were added to the list. There were also reports that he kept a diary in which he gloated over his crimes ‘with a voluptuous cruelty and a loathsome exultation’. This diary was frequently cited, although no one ever saw it, nor is there any reason to believe in its existence. The only part of the legend that would probably have pleased Wainewright was that in most of these stories he was no longer, as in reality, short, fat, bald and with a speech defect, but had elegant raven locks, and a sinister, glamorous presence resembling that of a stage vampire: John Camden Hotten reported ‘snakish eyes’ which glowed with ‘unearthly fire’.

Hotten was the publisher in 1870 of Dickens’ ‘Hunted Down’, based on Wainewright’s supposed murders. Dickens had long been interested in Wainewright. In 1837 he had even briefly seen him in gaol before his transportation. He, John Forster, the illustrator ‘Phiz’, the barrister and writer Thomas Noon Talfourd and the actor William Macready were visiting Newgate – Dickens was researching a piece – when suddenly Macready stopped and said, ‘My God! there’s Wainewright.’ Talfourd later elaborated this glimpse: ‘On some of the convicts coming down into the yard with brooms to perform the compulsory labour of sweeping it, he raised himself up, puffed down his soiled wristbands, and exclaimed … “You see those people; they are convicts like me; – but no one dares offer me the broom!” ‘

Six years later, in
Martin Chuzzlewit,
Dickens produced his first portrait of Wainewright. Jonas Chuzzlewit attempts to murder his father; when he marries he tries to insure his wife’s life, even though he ‘didn’t consider myself very well used by one or two of the old companies in some negotiations I have had with ‘em’. He wants, he tells Tigg Montague, his crooked companion, to insure her without her knowledge, ‘for it’s just in a woman’s way to take it into her head, if you talk to her about such things, that she’s going to die directly’.Jonas, like his close namesake Janus, was an ambiguous murderer: he fails to kill his father (although he thinks he has succeeded), while he ultimately kills Tigg Montague, under the impression Tigg knows of this murder-that-wasn’t. Wainewright may have killed; he may not have. Dickens was at this stage content to see uncertainty in his roguery. The play adaptations of the novel were more straightforward in their accusations of murder. In 1844, two versions, for the Queen’s Theatre and the New Standard Theatre, both concentrated on the insurance-murder theme. When Jonas Chuzzlewit insures his wife’s life, Tigg taunts him: ‘Surely she can’t be
poison
to you yet. You don’t want to get rid of her do you? bless my soul – what’s the matter. How white your lips are.’

Bulwer had no time for moral ambiguities in
Lucretia, or, The Children of the Night,
which appeared in 1846. Six years earlier he had rewritten
Eugene Aram
to remove any indication of criminality on the part of the murderer. Now, in the preface to
Lucretia,
he stated that his two murderous protagonists were based on real people, in whom ‘there appear to have been as few redeemable points as can be found in Human Nature. Yet. their sanguinary wickedness was not the dull ferocity of brutes; – it was accompanied with instruction and culture’ – thus giving himself licence to glamorize. But Bulwer insisted, ‘There has been no exaggeration. even that which seems most far-fetched’, like the poison ring, was founded on ‘literal facts’ (sic). Nor, he added, had he ‘much altered the social position of the criminals’. Thus he countered criticism in advance by claiming that he had merely drawn from life.

Bulwer had access to the facts of Wainewright’s case, having been given all the documents held by the Eagle Insurance Company, which had sent its agent, Henry Smith, to recover them from France after Wainewright’s arrest. The second murderer in the novel, the Lucretia of the title, was seen by many people to be a portrait of a Frenchwoman, Marie-Fortunée Lafarge, who had been convicted in 1840 of poisoning her husband with arsenic. It was one of the first cases to use the Marsh test, and there were as many conflicting views on the result as in the case of Eliza Fenning. Madame Lafarge’s memoirs had been translated into English in 1841, and she was a popular figure of dread.

Merging these stories, together with a quick gallop around the French Revolution (Varney, the Wainewright character, is forced as a child by his father to watch the guillotining of his mother), Bulwer produced a glamorous story of upper-class poisoning, money, royalist plots and betrayal. The two villains are Varney and his stepmother, Lucretia Clavering. Varney perpetrates a forgery on the Bank of England, arranges for a character named Helen to insure her life and then, with Lucretia’s help, slowly poisons her. As in the best melodramas, Lucretia murders a beggar, discovering only as he is in his death throes that he is her long-lost son. She goes mad, Varney tries to claim the insurance money, is arrested for an earlier forgery and is transported, leaving Lucretia abandoned in an asylum.

Soon melodrama would be overtaken by sensation-fiction, and in
Lucretia
we can already see the first shoots. No longer set in dens of low-class vice, sensation-novels kept all the excitement of gothic horror, but situated the stories squarely in the middle-class home, which was now seen to be a den of infamy, filled with madness, forgery, bigamy and murder. Bulwer still clung to the older genre’s focus on the aristocracy, but his depiction of outward respectability masking inward evil in realistic settings sometimes led his readers astray, and his highly coloured picture of wholesale death was taken seriously by many who should have known a great deal better. Alfred Swaine Taylor’s
London Medical Journal
cited the novel as a ‘handbook on poisoning’ which instructed ‘wretches who employed this mode of assassination’ how to avoid detection, while encouraging the ‘weak and the criminal’.

Lucretia
was a precursor: as well as the vicious female poisoner that sensation-fiction was to revel in from the 1860s, the novel also drew an early portrait of the sophisticated, suave, upper-class murderer, and created the type of elaborate insurance-scam murder thought to be perpetrated by the prosperous. Four years later,
Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal
published a series of stories narrated by an attorney who took the role that would later be given in fiction to the amateur detective. One case revolved around insurance fraud: a child dies shortly after being heavily insured; the insurance company queries the death but, after a satisfactory post-mortem, pays out. Some time later, the boy’s godfather in India dies, leaving him a fortune. The child’s father now confesses to the attorney that his son is not actually dead: when his lodger’s son died of cholera he allowed the substitution in order to claim the insurance money. It is not the rather banal story itself that is of interest, but the use of insurance fraud as a quotidian middle-class crime – as well, of course, as the use of the attorney as detective.

In Caroline Clive’s
Paul Ferroll
(1855), the long-undiscovered murder has links to Eugene Aram, but the character of the murderer – the upper-class man whose ‘name and fame as an author were some of the best parts of his existence’ – was much closer to Varney/Wainewright. Soon after the appearance of that novel, Dickens returned to Wainewright, this time as the blackmailer and all-round villain Blandois (or Rigaud – he uses both names) in
Little Dorrit.
Dickens drew on a French murderer, Pierre-François Lacenaire,
*
for most of the details of Blandois, but the similarity to Talfourd’s description of Wainewright in Newgate is unmistakable. In prison, Blandois asks rhetorically, ‘Have I ever. touched the broom, or spread the mats, or rolled them up. or put my hand to any kind of work?’ Dickens was not the only one to be fascinated by the ‘gent’ element in Wainewright’s story. In Surtees’
Ask Mamma
of the same year, he too reiterated Talfourd’s phrase: ‘They don’t set me to make my bed, or sweep the yard … they treat me like a gentleman,’ although he added, practically if fictionally, ‘They think I’m in for ten thousand pounds.’