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CHAPTER 3
“THE BRINK OF MERE INSANITY”
He was free; the restraints of communal life has been lifted, he was his own master again. He wrote:
I was idle on the town, my blessed art touched her renegade; by her pure and high influences the noisome mists were purged; my feelings, parched hot and tarnished were renovated with a cool fresh bloom, childly, simple, beautiful to the simple-hearted.
He found solace in Wordsworth, weeping, as he said, tears of happiness and gratitude over his poems. But this elevated state did not last, for he fell ill. His serene state was broken, he was to say in one of his essays…
…like a vessel of clay by “acute disease, succeeded by a relaxation of the muscles and nerves which depressed me. Hypochondriasis! Ever shuddering on the brink of mere insanity!
Oscar Wilde surmised that Wainewright had “wandered through that terrible valley of melancholia from which so many great, perhaps greater, spirits have never emerged”.
The illness seems to have had a critical effect on his life and theories have been propounded to suggest that what could be recognised now as
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severe depression had turned him into a reckless spender and a criminal.
Havelock Ellis, the psychologist, who was also a literary critic and essayist, described Wainewright “the perfect picture of the instinctive criminal in his most highly-developed shape” and concluded in his book The Criminal in 1901 that he was probably insane at the time.
“It is extremely probable that he never recovered from the effects of that illness……if we possessed a full knowledge of every instinctive criminal we should always be able to put our hands on some organically-morbid spot”.
Jonathan Curling, who published a biography of Wainewright in 1938, hazarded a guess at sleeping sickness, Encephalitis lethargica, which could lead to cerebral derangement and turn a man into a criminal.
In January 2017, I showed one of London’s leading consultant psychiatrists, Dr Edward Burns, the above eight paragraphs to seek his medical opinion. He was told Wainewright was possibly a murderer, according to previous reports, but given no information about his past.
He dismissed Curling’s hypothesis saying it was unlikely that a physical illness would turn him into a murderer. People often searched for reasons, such as an illness, which turned for someone into a serial killer, but often there was no physical cause for these behaviours. Wainewright seemed rather to be suffering from a lack of empathy, suggestive of a dissocial or antisocial personality, probably brought on by something that happened in his childhood.
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As a psychiatrist, he would look in such a patient for anger brought on by a feeling of deprivation of love, or someone dying when he was young.
How closely Wainewright fits this diagnosis! His birth killed his mother, his father died while he was an infant leaving him to be brought up by a curmudgeonly grandfather in his seventies and his sharp-tongued grandmother, and provided for only grudgingly in the old man’s will.
It was about this time in the early 19th century, said Dr Burns that attempts were made to separate out different mental disorders and consider treating them in different ways. In 1801 Phillipe Pinel published Traité Médico-philosophique sur l’Aleniation Mentale; ou la Manie in which he described “manie sans delire” - insanity without delusions.
This was defined in the 1830s as “moral insanity” by James Pritchard of Bristol Royal Infirmary in his Treatise on Insanity and Other Disorders of the Mind. The condition is neatly defined by Duhaime’s Law Dictionary as a disease of the mind in which the individual is bereft of ethical judgment or feelings but still fully functioning intellectually. Later, it became relabelled as psychopathic personality. Here we have the template for a cold-blooded killer, possibly a poisoner, a crime regarded with particular horror because it is premeditated and usually achieved over a period by stealth, as the victim is gradually dosed to death. The Times, reflecting on the use of poisons for murder in 1865, wrote:
The poisoner may be a smooth-faced plausible person, without any external symptoms of
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depravity, liable to no wild and furious outbursts of passion, imagining mischief secretly in the deep of his (sic) heart.
Could this be Wainewright, never fully recovered from his great torments? He may well have stepped over that “brink of insanity” of which he wrote. Nevertheless, he went on to tell positively of his recovery from illness.
Two excellent secondary agents, a kind and skilful Physician and a most delicately-affectionate (though young and fragile) Nurse brought me at length out of those dead black waters, nearly exhausted with so sore a struggle.
The nurse may have been his wife-to-be, Eliza, whose step-father, in one of the coincidences in the Wainewright story, was to die in the very barracks in Fermoy in which Wainewright had idled away his very brief military career.
He had not returned to Linden House after resigning his commission; perhaps the ignominy of doing so would have been too great and he would not have had so much of his highly-prized independence.
Instead he had taken lodgings in a boarding house run by a Mrs Frances Abercromby and her three young daughters at Mortlake, not far from Chiswick. It was a fateful day when Wainewright entered their lives. Two were to die suddenly and painfully.
Mrs Abercromby had married twice. Born Frances Weller, in Claygate, Surrey, she wedded in 1794 a widower named Cooper Ward. She was only 20, so had to have the consent of her father,
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a builder, which is noted in the Mortlake parish records. A son, John Cooper Ward, was born a year later, a daughter, Eliza Frances Ward, the future Mrs Wainewright, appeared in the summer of August 1796.
Cooper Ward was not long for this life, dying a few years later, leaving Frances in her twenties with two tiny children, but she soon married again, this time to an army officer, Lieut. John Bateman Abercromby. By him she had two further daughters, the first, Helen Frances Phoebe Abercromby, born in 1809, was to meet her untimely end in the Wainewright household under very strange circumstances. In 1810 she had a sister, burdened with the name Madalina Rosa Hibernia Burdett Abercromby, the Hibernia no doubt being imposed by her father who spent long periods in Ireland.
Lieut. Abercromby held his commission in the Royal Artillery Drivers, a small corps of the Royal Artillery which deployed gun carriages on the field of battle, for the army needed hundreds of horses to drag around the batteries of six-pound and three-pound guns.
It was not a sought-after section of the army in which to serve, for the Drivers had a dire reputation. Their antecedents were the scoundrel private contractors who had supplied horses to the artillery on the field of battle before the corps was founded in 1806, and who were known as being more likely to drive their charges away from the sound of gunfire as towards it.
Even after the Drivers became part of the army, military authorities of the time talked of them as being more interested in plunder than in their
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duty and of being the “scourge of the army”. The officers, it was said, were seldom if ever with their men. Abercromby was commissioned as a second lieutenant in 1806 and bought his way to become a first lieutenant two years later, according to the Army Lists of the period.
Lieut. Abercromby served with a unit of the 6th Battalion Royal Artillery under the command of Captain Richard Dyas which had a strength of some 500 men - drivers, shoeing smiths, collar makers and veterinary