the first of many people close to him who were to die suddenly.
The Gentleman’s Magazine noted her death in its Obituary of Notable Persons:
She is greatly regretted on account of her amiable disposition and uncommon accomplishments. She is supposed to have understood the writings of Mr.Locke as well as, perhaps, any person of either sex now living.
Uncommon indeed in Georgian England for a woman of 21 to be a recognised authority on the works of a philosopher, but being brought up at table with the cream of literary London she would have had a rare and unusual grasp of such matters and had her father’s huge library at her disposal.
The baby was left to be brought up by his grandparents and his father – a lawyer, one of the 12 children of a prosperous solicitor of Hatton Garden. Like his wife, he too, died young, a few years later, leaving the young Thomas an orphan, but in the care of his wealthy but aged grandparents.
It was before he was nine, for in Dr. Griffiths’ will, dated June 1803, the boy’s father is referred to as “the late”. It was a very strange will that Dr. Griffiths made in June that year, four months before his own death at the age of 83.
IN THE PREROGATIVE COURT OF CANTERBURY
This is the last Will and Testament of me, Ralph Griffiths, of Turnham Green, in the
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County of Middlesex, Doctor of Laws. Whereas on the marriage of my late daughter, Ann Griffiths, with the late Thomas Wainewright Esquire, I advanced a certain sum of money and covenanted that after my death a further sum should be paid by my personal representatives as a marriage portion for my said daughter and whereas my grandson Thomas Wainewright is become entitled to such property so advanced by me to his mother my Will that neither he the said Thomas Wainewright nor his trustees for him shall demand any further sum out of my estate as I hereby declare that the sum already paid with that which is covenanted to be paid is all that I intend for my said grandson. And with regard to the rest and residue of my estate and effects of what kind of nature soever it is my Will and intention that the same should be divided according to the statute for the distributions between my wife and my son George Edward Griffiths, and that I should die intestate save and except as to what I have declared regarding my said grandson Thomas Wainewright.
In witness whereof I have hereunto set my hand and seal this seventh day of June in the year of Our Lord one thousand eight hundred and three.”
This is unlikely, at his great age, to have been his first will. Why did he go to such lengths to ensure that his young grandson would get not a penny more than he had settled on his dead daughter and husband?
There is some evidence that the bluff doctor - described by John Forster, the biographer of
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Dickens as “a mean-spirited tyrant” - had developed a dislike of the young orphan who roamed the corridors of Linden House. He is named in the will twice as Thomas Wainewright; his second Christian name – Griffiths – which came from his grandfather himself, is omitted. It seems almost as though the old man were trying to disown him. It would have irked him mightily if he had known that one day the lad would inherit the lot.
It has been suggested that the young Wainewright might already have been showing a childish cunning which turned his grandfather against him. But of this, of course, there is no proof.
The bequest that did come to the boy was £5,000 invested at the Bank of England in Navy five per cent annuities – his greed and reckless spending when he plundered the inheritance years later was to cause his downfall. The settlement was in the name of three trustees: his uncle, Robert Wainewright; Edward Smith Foss a relative on his mother's side, and Foss's, son, also Edward, whom Wainewright regarded as a cousin. Under the terms of the will, Wainewright could not touch the capital at any time; all he could draw on was the dividends of £250 a year (£23,500). What is more, the capital would never come to him. The trusteeship would continue for his descendants. But that annual income, guaranteed by the Bank of England was enough to keep him in some style - the wage of a labourer in England, with no guarantee of employment was not much more than £20 a year.
The restriction in the will was to set Wainewright on the road to crime. For what could be more galling for the debt-ridden profligate he was to become, than to have a considerable sum of money just out
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of reach – money which he regarded morally as being his own? The frustration and the temptation were to become so unbearable that he was willing to risk a death sentence by swindling the Bank of England and then to gain from mysterious deaths of his relatives.
With old Dr. Griffiths gone, Wainewright was brought up by his grandmother the shrewish, hard-headed business woman, who died in 1812, and her son George, an amiable easy-going bachelor and dabbler in the arts who took up the editorship of the Monthly Review.
George’s delights were planting tropical trees and building new conservatories in the grounds of Linden House. By 1822 money seems to have become tight, as part of the land was sold off to the Duke of Devonshire for £800.
The young Wainewright had a lonely if privileged upbringing, with a firm grounding in the arts; his grandfather’s dinner table and library had seen to that. Though he was to dismiss this in one of his essays years later:
As a boy I was placed frequently in literary society; a giddy, flighty disposition prevented me from receiving thence any advantage.
This was not true, the advantages were considerable; he was brought up in a bookish hothouse and knew the famous authors of the day who came to dine. He acquired a considerable body of knowledge which was to prove most important as it later gave him an entrée into artistic society.
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His formal education was completed at Dr. Charles Burney’s newly-opened academy at Hammersmith, and probably at his other, more famous Academy at Greenwich. Dr. Burney was a distant relative, a contributor to the Monthly Review, an antiquarian and one of the great classical scholars of his time. It was here that Wainewright added to his Latin, Greek and the considerable body of knowledge which he delighted to display with such panache in his later essays.
Here, too, another talent burgeoned. He became proficient as a draughtsman. W. Carew Hazlitt, his first proper biographer, who collected and edited his essays in 1880, was able to see the book in which he drew at Dr. Burney’s. “It displays great talent and natural feeling” he recorded. The book is now lost. Wainewright himself declared: “The little attention I gave to anything was directed to painting, or rather to an admiration of it.” It was more than admiration; he decided to become an artist himself.
He was 19, articulate, well-schooled, well-connected and, most importantly, had a comfortable independent income.
But – and this was one of the roots of his tragedy – not enough to keep up the wardrobe and the inclinations of a dandy, for such he had become. His dandyism was to become more than a passing phase of youthful extravagance; it was the start of the profligacy which led to his downfall.
He had already studied painting under John Linnell, friend of Blake and an accomplished landscape and portrait artist, but to become anything of an artist himself it was necessary to
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become apprenticed to one of the successful, fashionable Royal Academicians. He chose Thomas Phillips, whose portraiture was already famous. The National Portrait Gallery in London calls him prolific, since he completed more than 700 portraits, many of them of the great men of the day in the arts and sciences... At Phillips’ studios in George Street, off Hanover Square, the young dandy mixed the paints and met the famous. At that time Phillips was painting literary figures, a series commissioned by the publisher, John Murray.
To