Pen, Pencil and Poison is an essay by Oscar Wilde, a witty and provocative summary of the life and career of the notorious Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, who was a painter, essayist, aesthete, literary critic and famous serial killer from the first part of the nineteenth century.

A first version of the essay was published by Frank Harris in the January 1889 edition of The Fortnightly Review. Wilde then revised it for inclusion in the volume of four essays titled Intentions which he intended to use to position himself as a major critic of late Victorian art, literature and theatre, and which was published in May 1891.

(The same year saw the publication of his collection of short stories, Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and the expanded, book-length version of The Picture of Dorian Gray. The following year the first of his social comedies was produced. Critic. Short story writer. Novelist. Playwright. Within two years Wilde very impressively proved himself the master of all these genres and manoeuvred himself into the centre of London’s literary and intellectual life.)

Thomas Griffiths Wainewright

The story of Thomas Griffiths Wainewright (1794 to 1847) was well known by Wilde’s time and had been written about by a number of authors. The Essays and Criticisms of Wainewright had been published in 1880 and the history of his crimes was used by Charles Dickens as the basis for his story ‘Hunted Down’ and by Edward Bulwer-Lytton for his novel Lucretia. Indeed Wilde’s essay features quotes and memoirs of people who knew or met or read Wainewright, such as Hazlitt, de Quincey, Charles Lamb, with anecdotes about William Blake et al. Even the title isn’t original having been borrowed from Swinburne.

What obviously attracted Wilde was the close connection between art and crime. Wainewright’s letters, writings and memoirs reveal a man of high artistic sensibility and great psychological sensitivity. Yet the same man set about poisoning to death a number of those nearest and dearest to him.

His delicately strung organisation, however indifferent it might have been to inflicting pain on others, was itself most keenly sensitive to pain.

Biography

According to Wilde, Wainewright was born in 1794 in Chiswick. His mother died in childbirth. She was just 21 and followed soon after by the death of his father, so the baby was raised by its grandfather and then uncle.

Right from the start the essay displays the deliberately, comically casual juxtaposition of conventional biography with Wainwright’s activities as a poisoner i.e. the bland phrases of standard biography are interspersed with very casual mention of his murders.

His father did not long survive his young wife, and the little child seems to have been brought up by his grandfather, and, on the death of the latter in 1803, by his uncle George Edward Griffiths, whom he subsequently poisoned.

A similar flippancy underlies Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and The Canterville Ghost, whose achievements in scaring various Canterville relatives to death or terrifying visitors out of their minds are listed as subjects of great amusement. It is the bluntness of the juxtaposition which achieves the effect.

Wainewright joined the army, buying a commission in 1814, but was too sensitive for the rough vulgarity of barrack life, had a nervous breakdown, was cashiered out, went back to stay with his uncle in a fine house in Turnham Green, and became ever more interested in literature. His maternal grandfather was editor of the Monthly Review and Wainewright had been raised in a bookish intellectual milieu. In 1819 he embarked on a literary career. He wrote essays. He had them published, most often in the London Magazine. Literary figures of the day began to take notice.

Wilde is particularly pleased that Wainewright wrote essays for literary journals under a number of pseudonyms. This plays right into Wilde’s fondness for masks and artificiality.

Janus Weathercock, Egomet Bonmot, and Van Vinkvooms, were some of the grotesque masks under which he choose to hide his seriousness or to reveal his levity. A mask tells us more than a face. These disguises intensified his personality.

Dandy

And Wainewright was a dandy:

Like Disraeli, he determined to startle the town as a dandy, and his beautiful rings, his antique cameo breast-pin, and his pale lemon-coloured kid gloves, were well known, and indeed were regarded by Hazlitt as being the signs of a new manner in literature: while his rich curly hair, fine eyes, and exquisite white hands gave him the dangerous and delightful distinction of being different from others.

Wilde obviously sees him as a precursor to himself:

It is only the Philistine who seeks to estimate a personality by the vulgar test of production. This young dandy sought to be somebody, rather than to do something. He recognised that Life itself is in art, and has its modes of style no less than the arts that seek to express it.

Wilde likes Wainewright because in his writings he cultivated a cult of his own personality, liberally telling his readers not only his views on art, but where he dined and who he met and what they talked about and what he was wearing, very much a precursor to Oscar himself.

Wainewright’s collection

Wilde goes on at length about Wainewright’s collections of beautiful objects from a wide variety of sources, and his writings not only about art in the narrow sense, but about all beautiful things from the past, statues and jewels, rare books and cameos and engravings, he delighted in letting his soul wander among masterpieces in a way Wilde thoroughly approves. The truly beautiful fly free from a particular age and congregate in a timeless imaginarium.

The critic seeks the thing in itself

He approves Wainewright’s aesthetic writings and above all the idea that the critic shouldn’t apply standardised rules to a work, but instead be flexible and respond to the thing as it is.

‘I hold that no work of art can be tried otherwise than by laws deduced from itself: whether or not it be consistent with itself is the question.’

Wainewright’s prose poem responses to art

That said, Wilde admires the way Wainewright responds to art with long prose poems which seek to mimic or replicate their effect in words.

The conception of making a prose poem out of paint is excellent. Much of the best modern literature springs from the same aim. In a very ugly and sensible age, the arts borrow, not from life, but from each other.

Wilde’s approval of Wainewright’s technique of ‘criticising’ a work of art by writing a long florid prose poem based on it explains why so much Victorian writing about art is unpleasantly vague and gaseous. In my opinion it also explains why English taste in art remained so conservative and retarded until well into the twentieth century.

Van Gogh and Gauguin while Wilde was still alive, and then the Fauves, the German Expressionists and the Cubists within a few years of his death, completely tore up the nineteenth century rulebook of art to create all kinds of marvellous new images and sensations which Wilde’s style of limp-wristed prose vaporings were completely inadequate to understanding or explaining.

Wilde sits at the end of a fagged-out tradition. His aestheticism was new in the 1870s but tired by the 1890s. His love of the classical world was merely the exquisite climax of a tradition which had dominated the British education system for a century. Wilde comes at the end of both these traditions, before the turn of the twentieth century ushered in entirely new ways of seeing and thinking. For all his brave talk about The New, praising new sensations in art and life, Wilde revered the past and hadn’t a clue about the revolutionary turn all the arts were about to take. His approach, his whole aesthetic, was a glorious dead end and that’s why he was a back number even before he died.

Wainewright the poisoner

Half-way through the essay which had, up to this point, been a charming stroll through Wainewright’s art criticism, aesthetic stance, prose poetry and delightful collection of rare and precious objects – Wilde turns with a flourish and an ironic smile to the fact that this gorgeous proto-aesthete was also a murderer. In doing so he uses a very characteristic phrase which is worth dwelling on:

However, we must not forget that the cultivated young man who penned these lines, and who was so susceptible to Wordsworthian influences, was also, as I said at the beginning of this memoir, one of the most subtle and secret poisoners of this or any age. How he first became fascinated by this strange sin he does not tell us, and the diary in which he carefully noted the results of his terrible experiments and the methods that he adopted, has unfortunately been lost to us.

The words ‘strange’ and ‘sin’ are very characteristically Wildean. He uses ‘strange’ a lot throughout the essays in Intentions as a buzzword, a key word, a key adjective which indicates the mood of weird, fin-de-siecle mystery Wilde likes to shed around his own personality, the great works of art he reverences and so on. When Wainewright returns to England in 1837, it is very characteristic of Wilde to say he did so because of ‘some strange mad fascination’.

However, on closer examination, there’s often nothing at all ‘strange’ in what he’s describing. Thus there is nothing ‘strange’ about being a murderer.

Something similar with ‘sin’, Wilde enjoys saying that this or that personality or work of art hints at ‘sin’. If you stop and think about it he is stealing a Catholic Christian term and dressing it in the vague, heavy velvet of the Decadence and then attributing it – like his other favourite words ‘strange’, ‘curious’, ‘dangerous’ – to people or actions which, on closer examination, do not merit it. He uses it in a spirit of high symbolist melodrama to conjure an overripe atmosphere but empty of precise meaning.

It is tempting to go along with Wilde’s prose and be carried away into the purple and gold world of luxury objects illuminated by flickering candlelight which phrases like ‘strange sin’ suggest. Except Wainewright was a murderer, pure and simple. Nobody would write about the ‘strange sin’ of Harold Shipman or Fred West. There was nothing either strange or sin-nish about either multiple murderer.

Wainewright’s victims

(This section borrows freely from the Wikipedia article as Wilde’s account is factually incorrect. To give the most obvious example Wilde has Wainewright dying in 1852, whereas it was 1847.)

The key fact to grasp is that, although Wainewright had inherited £5,250 from his grandfather, it was invested at the Bank of England, he was unable to touch the capital and receiving only the dividends of £200 a year. This combined with the income from his journalism was nowhere near enough to maintain the extravagant lifestyle, with the collection of fancy art works Wilde delights in describing, not to mention a wife he’d married in 1817 (when he was 23).

On two occasions he forged the signatures of powers of attorney in order to withdraw the capital from the Bank, the second time leaving his account empty. Now he was in desperate financial straits and it is this which explains the series of murders he now embarked on.

By 1828 the Wainewrights were in severe financial trouble again and forced to move in with the elderly George Griffiths, still living at the Wainewright estate in Chiswick. He died in agony shortly afterwards. and it is suspected Wainewright poisoned him to inherit the property.

Eliza’s mother married again, becoming a Mrs Abercromby, and had two further daughters, Helen and Madalina, before being widowed again. They too moved into the estate, and Mrs Abercromby settled her will in favour of Eliza. She died shortly afterwards. It is strongly suspected he murdered her.

In 1830, he and Eliza insured the life of his sister-in-law Helen with various companies for a sum of £16,000. She died in December of the same year after showing signs of strychnine poisoning. The insurance companies refused to pay and Wainewright fled to Calais in order to escape legal action and his increasingly clamorous debtors. Victorian authors speculate that he also killed his mother-in-law and a Norfolk friend.

In 1837 Wainewright returned to England, was arrested for bank fraud, convicted and deported to Hobart, Van Diemen’s Land, where he spent the last ten years of his life, dying in 1847.

Wilde’s account contains detailed descriptions of further murders, such as the father of a lady friend with whom he was staying in Boulogne and who he is said to have murdered purely to spite the insurance companies.

Wilde’s calculated heartlessness

The tone Wilde describes all this in is deliberately flippant and superficial. He doesn’t take the murders seriously and instead is tempted into characteristic raptures about art and beauty. Thus Helen, his wife’s sister:

was about twenty years of age, a tall graceful girl with fair hair. A very charming red-chalk drawing of her by her brother-in-law is still in existence, and shows how much his style as an artist was influenced by Sir Thomas Lawrence, a painter for whose work he had always entertained a great admiration. De Quincey says that Mrs. Wainewright was not really privy to the murder. Let us hope that she was not. Sin should be solitary, and have no accomplices.

A lot is going on in this passage but the obvious points to me are the way Wilde goes out of his way to be more interested in the painting of Helen done by the murderer than the fact that he murdered her. Making fine art critical comments about the painting are more important than the fact of murder. Wilde’s position is not immoral, as such, but it is a very calculated promotion of Wilde’s ideas that art comes first, art is paramount, that art triumphs over the sordor and messiness of life, that art soars above facts, that art isn’t limited by bourgeois morality and petty notions of right or wrong.

The second obvious point is his use of ‘sin’. As stated above, Wainewright’s acts weren’t really ‘sins’, were they? They were crimes. Accepting the word ‘sin’ is to enter Wilde’s fin-de-siecle world of decadence and ‘strange’ practices. He intends the word ‘sin’ to shimmer with scarlet associations and strange cries in velvet-lined rooms, and yet it comes over as naughty schoolboy. Poisoning someone for the insurance money isn’t a ‘sin’. It’s a crime.

Wilde thought of his encounters with quite a few rent boys as ‘strange’ ‘sins’ and yet they weren’t. He was paying for sex. He was using sex workers. Some of them were under age so nowadays he would be convicted of paedophilia and put on a Sex Offenders Register.

Wilde set himself up to try and redefine how people talked about these things. It was a battle of discourses or lexicons. He tried to persuade his time of the value of ‘strange sin’. The law courts of his time saw a man who practiced and promoted sex crimes.

The provocative heartlessness of Wilde’s stance is crystallised when he quotes Wainewright. When he was in Newgate prison awaiting transportation, his cell became ‘for some time a kind of fashionable lounge’ (doesn’t sound very likely, does it?), one gentleman visitor asked him why he murdered his innocent young sister-in-law:

He shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘Yes; it was a dreadful thing to do, but she had very thick ankles.’

It is very funny in its deliberately heartless way. Wilde moves briskly on, to get back to ‘sin’. He tells us that Wainewright loathed the sea journey to Australia, and tells us why.

Crime in England is rarely the result of sin. It is nearly always the result of starvation. There was probably no one on board in whom he would have found a sympathetic listener, or even a psychologically interesting nature.

This suggests that Wilde is interested not in the sordid ‘crime’ committed by the wretched poor all the time. What interests him about Wainewright is the combination of fantastically refined sensibility with murder. It is Wainewright’s refined sensibility which converts what would be mere ‘crime’ in you and me into ‘sin’. ‘Sin’ is what the refined do; the rest of us merely break the law.

Crime and art

Wilde concludes his essay by speculating about the effect of his crimes on his art. Wainewright was allowed to sketch and paint in the prison colony, completing more than 100 portraits on paper using coloured wash, pencil and ink, and many survive to this day. Wilde says the effect of his crimes (er, ‘sins’) on his art is ‘subtle and suggestive’.

One can fancy an intense personality being created out of sin.

This is obviously the central theme of The Picture of Dorian Gray, the notion that ‘sin’ adds depth and interest to one’s style. Obviously one has to have a refined sensibility and be an artist and critic and writer in order to have a style in the first place and to benefit from these ‘sins’.

He ends with a barrage of opinions against conventional morality, variations on the theme of the superiority of the artist to social norms and standards:

The fact of a man being a poisoner is nothing against his prose. The domestic virtues are not the true basis of art, though they may serve as an excellent advertisement for second-rate artists.

There is no essential incongruity between crime and culture. We cannot rewrite the whole of history for the purpose of gratifying our moral sense of what should be.

This latter is an implicit rebuke to the trend of modern progressive ideology in the humanities which is to pull down statues, ban books and films and plays and art by anyone judged to have transgressed the strict morality of our times. Wilde believes the contrary:

I know that there are many historians, or at least writers on historical subjects, who still think it necessary to apply moral judgments to history, and who distribute their praise or blame with the solemn complacency of a successful schoolmaster. This, however, is a foolish habit, and merely shows that the moral instinct can be brought to such a pitch of perfection that it will make its appearance wherever it is not required. Nobody with the true historical sense ever dreams of blaming Nero, or scolding Tiberius, or censuring Caesar Borgia. These personages have become like the puppets of a play. They may fill us with terror, or horror, or wonder, but they do not harm us. They are not in immediate relation to us. We have nothing to fear from them. They have passed into the sphere of art and science, and neither art nor science knows anything of moral approval or disapproval.

Not in our modern world, in 2024, where moral disapproval is the central occupation of so many critics and commentators, poring over the art and writing of the past in an endless quest for transgressions to call out and cancel, to scold, chastise, disapprove of and, ideally, ban. Wilde would have been horrified.

Related links

• Pen, Pencil, And Poison online

Related reviews

• Oscar Wilde reviews
• Fiction of the 1890s