Wainewright, THOMAS GRIFFITHS, essayist, forger, and poisoner, was born at Chiswick in October 1794. Left an orphan, he was brought up at Turnham Green by his grandfather, Dr Ralph Griffiths (1720-1803), the founder of the Monthly Review, and was educated under Charles Burney. He had held a commission in the Guards when, about 1820 or earlier, he took to writing tawdry art criticisms and miscellaneous articles for the periodicals, especially the London Magazine. He married on £200 a year, and, soon outrunning his means, first committed a forgery (1824), and then poisoned with strychnine his uncle (1829), his mother-in-law (1830), a sister-in-law (1830), and a Norfolk acquaintance at Boulogne (1831). The sister-in-law (Wainewright's wife was an accomplice in her murder) had been fraudulently insured for £18,000, but two actions to enforce payment failed; and Wainewright, venturing back from France to London in 1837, was arrested for his old forgery, and sentenced to life transportation. Even in Newgate he bragged of still holding 'the position of a gentleman,' and in Van Diemen's Land canted about 'Art and the Ideal.' There he painted portraits, ate opium, and at last died of apoplexy in Hobart Town hospital about 1852. The 'kind, light-hearted Wainewright' of Charles Lamb (1823) is depicted by 'Barry Cornwall' as short and fattish, 'with mincing steps and tremulous words, his hair curled and full of unguents,' and his cheeks painted like those of a demirep, a collector of richly-bound works on oenctism and poisoning. He is the 'Varney' of Lytton's Lucretia (1846), and the 'Slinkton' of Dickens's Hunted Down (1860).
See his Essays and Criticisms, edited, with a memoir, by W. C. Hazlitt (1880), B. W. Procter's Autobiography (1877), and Oscar Wilde's Intentions (1891).