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This piece by Rayner Heppenstall originally appeared in the February / March 1973 edition of The London Magazine.
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In mid-February 1821, John Scott, then editor of The London Magazine, was fatally wounded on Primrose Hill in a duel with a Scottish lawyer, substituting for the editor of Blackwood’s. A week later, the young poet on whose behalf the duel would increasingly seem to have been fought died in Rome. Scott lingered four more days, then succumbed to his intestinal wound.

The shadow of these two deaths must have persisted, but so did the magazine, with Tom Hood in the editorial chair. Monthly dinners were started by new proprietors in Waterloo Place. To the November one, in black silk stockings and descending order of age, came Lamb, Hazlitt, Cunningham, De Quincey, Procter, Wainewright, Talfourd and Reynolds.

Youngest of them all, Hood had at that time published nothing or, so far as anyone knew, written anything of his own. This clever and reliable boy had yet achieved a discreet literary merit by revising Helen Maria William’s translation, still excellent but already a quarter of a century old and now seemingly here and there quaintly expressed, of the durable French romance, Paul and Virginia.

At twenty-five, with his volume, The Garden of Florence, that year John Hamilton Reynolds (who in the magazine was ‘John Corcoran’) had already published the handful of poems by which, if at all, he would be remembered, and notably a parody of Peter Bell, a tedious ballad which the Distributor of Stamps had composed before the end of the previous ceremony but wisely left unpublished until recently. Called that year to the Oxford circuit, Tom Noon Talfourd, Reynold’s senior by a year. A brewer’s son, had a judgeship, a seat in the Commons and a knighthood or baronetcy to look forward to, but would not disgrace letters. The shade of Shelley, Lamb’s own, and all subsequent creators of literary copyright would have reason to be grateful to him.

A year older again, yet another Tom, Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, had, after a year in the Army with a commission, commenced painter, like Hazlitt, but, under one or another of his pseudonyms, of which ‘Jansu Weathercock’ seemed likeliest to stick, had become one of the magazine’s most assiduous and useful contributors as a writer upon painting and himself. He was a grandson of the Dr Griffiths who had founded the Monthly Review and conducted it for over fifty years. This link with the age of Johnson had been Wainewright’s sufficient entrée to the London.

Those were the men in their twenties. Of those in their thirties, the youngest was Bryan Waller Procter, who, a Yorkshireman, wrote as ‘Barry Cornwall’ for anagrammatical reasons. His tragedy, Mirandola, had that year been mounted at Covent Garden, with a cast containing not only Macready but also Charles Kemble. The future Metropolitan Commissioner for Lunacy had also two volumes to his published credit, Dramatic Scenes and Other Poems and A Sicilian Tale. Two years older was the English opium eater (not the first among literary men, for there was Coleridge in Highgate), whose Confessions had startled the magazine’s readers. A year older again, to represent the nicer Scotland, was Allan Cunningham, tangy with wet sheet and flowing sea, a wind that followed him fast.

In his forty-fourth year, Hazlitt, a further intended victim of Blackwood had also survived a campaign against him in the Quarterly and as a critic stood at the height of his powers and reputation. He had known Lamb these twenty years, had copied portraits in the Louvre, had been petted by the Wordsworth but quarrelled with them over politics, lived separated from his wife and was known to be in love with the landlord’s daughter at his lodgings in Southampton Buildings. When, three years before, his own Works had appeared in two volumes, it had seemed that Lamb’s literary career was closed, but he had come emphatically to life again as ‘Elia’ in the London.

De Quincey, who had been out of sorts all day, studied Wainewright’s, the one face new to him. It was to be their only meeting. De Quincey found his junior’s appearance dandified and did not care for his elaborate, self-delighted way of writing, yet admitted that in Wainewright’s judgements upon the great Italian masters of painting there seemed a tone of sincerity and of native sensibility, as in one who spoke for himself and was not merely a copier from books.

Most readers of the present-day London Magazine are, I dare say, literary historians in their way and like to contemplate recorded occasions on which the great and the worthy of letters in the past jostled each other, whether the London itself was concerned or not. The very notion of literary co-existence often seems to me more interesting than most of what can be said about any writer taken by himself. Having in recent years become saturated with criminal history, what strikes me most about that particular occasion is that all the principal guests were in one way or another involved with murderers and that at least the future murderer in their midst was involved with another of whose crime we have all heard in another connection.

That Thomas Griffiths Wainewright was to be at least a triple poisoner is known to most literate persons, if only from their reading of Oscar Wilde’s Intentions, though we should bear in mind that he was never tried for murder but only forgery, so that to the judicious a doubt may persist. It is generally known, too, that, a quarter of a century before that London Magazine dinner, Charles Lamb’s sister had stabbed their mother to the heart, being ‘worn down to a state of extreme nervous misery by attention to needlework by day and to her mother at night’. An age which, at least in England and Wales, did not much concern itself with the notion of diminished responsibility treated Mary Lamb indulgently, and the thing is never called murder, but some kind of judicial proceedings must have been started and may be on record in a book I haven’t read. De Quincey was to write, five years later, for Blackwood, an essay On Murder, considered as One of the Fine Arts, to which he added instalments twelve and twenty-seven years later again, and Hood would one day write a poem called The Dream of Eugene Aram.

Eugene Aram was executed in 1759, forty years before the birth of Thomas Hood. Hood, however, had not simply read about the case in the Newgate Calendar, but had heard a first-hand account of Aram from a brother of Fanny Burney, Admiral Burney, who had had the learned murderer as a teacher at King’s Lynn. De Quincey assures us that nothing memorable passed upon the occasion of the London Magazine dinner at which he met Wainewright, but it seems likely that Admiral Burney’s death that year would be mentioned, for it was with Lamb that Hood had met him, and a vain man like Wainewright would hardly fail to point out that the Burney’s were kinsfolk of his and that he himself had been to school at Charles Burney’s academy in Hammersmith.

The case about which De Quincey was to write most and magnificently was also quite an old one, that of the Ratcliffe Highway murders, committed while he, at Talfourd’s age, ten years before the dinner, was living in Wordsworth country. But he would also mention Thurtell, who by that time had further roused the interest of Sir Walter Scott. The month after the dinner, Hazlitt met Thurtell, whose fell deed then still lay almost two years in the future.

A contemporary by age of Wainewright’s within two months, John Thurtell resigned a commission in the Marines almost exactly a year after the former his in a regiment of the Line. He was born in Norwich, and it is probable that George Borrow, who went to the same school nine years later, at least knew him by sight there. Certainly, later, they knew each other well enough to have exchanged schoolday reminiscences, in the world of the sporting Fancy. Though it needs scholarly notes or at least a good Index to make this clear, Thurtell figures conspicuously in Lavengro and his execution in Romany Rye. That, for some years, Borrow with whom we are not here directly concerned, quite belonged to the Fancy is well-known. To what extent Hazlitt was similarly addicted, it would need a closer scholar than myself to say. On 11 December 1821, however, he travelled all the way from London to Hungerford Downs, which by coach is no small day trip, to see a prize fight, and Thurtell was his travelling companion.

Hazlitt describes Thurtell simply as a trainer, who fell asleep if anything were discussed but fighting men and dogs, bears and badgers. The contest was between ‘Gas’ Hickman and a local hero, Bill Neat, who won, so that the Londoners returned to town with ‘pockets to let’. But Thurtell in fact had not been long in the fight game and quitted it shortly thereafter, to become licensee of the Cock tavern in Haymarket and, though an undischarged bankrupt, to practise long firm frauds, his brother Tom being sued for arson and he himself for assaulting his landlady with a candlestick.

It was a little under two years after Hazlitt’s sporting journey with him that, on an evening jaunt into Hertfordshire, where one of the three had an illicit still (a ‘jigger’), Thurtell with two accomplices murdered another sporting character called Weare, who had returned flush from Doncaster races. Everybody at some point comes across the stanza, attributed to Theodore Hook, which inaccurately commemorates part of that nights work.

They cut his throat from ear to ear;
His brains they battered in:
His name was Mr William Weare;
He dwelt in Lyon’s Inn.

At the trial on 6 January 1824, at Hertfordshire assizes, one of the trio, Probert, turned King’s evidence. A witness was asked what sort of a person Weare had been.

A. He was always a respectable person.

Q. What do you mean by respectable?

A. He kept a gig.

This answer greatly appealed to Carlyle, to whom ‘gigmanity’ thereafter remained a much-used symbol for respectability. A big man who approached the gallows bravely, Thurtell was a popular murderer.

His other accomplice, Hunt, was deported. Probert was later hanged for horse-stealing. By that time, the London had changed hands. It was shaky already in 1823, when, in a letter, Lamb escribes himself as lingering ‘among the creaking rafters like the last rat’. Three buttresses he says have already been pulled down were Hazlitt, Procter and ‘their best stay, kind, light-hearted Waineright, their Janus’. Wainewright had returned to the art of painting. Married the previous year, he had not yet turned to murder but had perpetrated the forgeries for which he was in the end to be brought to trial. He lived prosperously in Great Marlborough Street, and among his dinner guests, beside Lamb, Cunningham and Hood, were Macready and John Clare, proof that Scotland was not alone in producing peasant poets.

The murder of whose activities de Quincey was to give his longest and most impressive account was the John Williams against whom the Ratcliffe Highway murders had never been proved, since he committed suicide while in prison awaiting trial. The long account was not to be added to his two Blackwood articles for many years yet, but the case is substantially touched on in the essay ‘On the Knocking at the Gate in “Macbeth” which appeared in the London Magazine for October 1823, the month after Lamb’s lament, twelve years after the murders. The tone is already that of the later pieces. De Quincey says that, at the time of the murders, he had for years been puzzled by the remarkable effect of that knocking.

“At length… Mr Williams made his début on the stage of Ratcliffe Highway, and executed those unparalleled murders which have procured for him such a brilliant and undying reputation… All other murders look pale by the deep crimson of his; and, as an amateur once said to me in a querulous tone, ‘There had been absolutely nothing doing since his time or nothing that’s worth speaking of.’ Now it will be remembered, that in the first of these murders (that of the Marrs), the same incident (of knocking at the door, soon after the work of extermination was complete) did actually occur, which the genius of Shakespeare has invented… The knocking at the gate… makes known audibly that… the human has made its reflux upon the fiendish; the pulses of life are beginning to beat again…”

Though it was not to be made so in Wainewright’s case, forgery was in those days a capital offence, and in late 1824, in a letter to the same correspondent, Bernard Barton, a Quaker poet, Lamb noted that a banker, Henry Fauntleroy, had just been hanged for that offence. It had been at that year’s Royal Academy exhibition that Blake pointed out to Samuel Palmer as ‘very fine’ a large picture by Wainewright, The Milkmaid’s Song. In May 1826, there was something doing in the way of murder, of which both De Quincey and the depressed Walter Scott took cognizance. This was the M’Kean murder of Elizabeth Bates within the jurisdiction of Lancaster. The first part of De Quincey’s big Murder essay appeared in Blackwood the February ensuing.

Among non-primary sources and, indeed, for pointers to primary sources, I am, in much of the above, indebted, on Thurtell, to E.R. Watson’s Introduction to the Notable British Trials volume and, on Wainewright, to a slender but excellent volume, The Genteel Murderer, by an American, Mr Charles Norman. Attempts to make the correspondence of Caroline Palmer primary are foiled by Mr Donald McCormick’s failure to recall where this, which he quotes, may be found. Perhaps it is somewhere in Australia. Mr McCormick, it may be recalled is one of the authorities on ‘Jack the Ripper’. He quotes a long letter from Wainewright to Caroline Palmer in a simulating if finally unsatisfying book, The Red Barn Mystery, published five years ago. Caroline Palmer was, it appears, an actress who played the unfortunate village heroine up and down the country in the barnstorming play, Maria Marten, or Murder in the Red Barn. An intelligent woman, it seems that she could not believe in the innocent maiden she embodied night after night, the portrayal of William Corder as not only murderer but a vile seducer or the dream by which Maria’s stepmother was supposed to have discovered the murder. Though a common acquaintance, she got in touch with a sister of Corder’s. The truly fascinating thing which transpired was that Corder had known Wainewright.

This had been discovered by Corder’s sister from diaries which her late brother had kept and which she had since destroyed. It was confirmed by correspondence with Wainewright in Tasmania. The two had met through the intermediary of a prostitute and smuggler, Hannah Fandango, a West Indian quadroon, who had a toehold in the Suffolk village of Polstead, where both the Corders and the Martens lived, and who in London was a neighbour of Wainewright’s in Great Marlborough Street, during his most prosperous period. When Wainewright left this address and went to live again at Linden House, Corder had also moved to Turnham Green. His diaries spoke of him doing a number of drama criticisms for the London Magazine, and in the long letter to Caroline Palmer Wainewright concedes that this may have been so, as well as that Corder was with him in Brittany and at Boulogne and that it might have been himself who first indicated to the young man from the country what benefits might be found in forgery. This instruction Corder put to lame use.

The murder of Maria Marten took place on 18 May 1827, three months after the appearance in Blackwood of the first part of De Quincey’s great murder essay. In November of that year, matrimonial advertisements inserted by Corder in the Morning Herald and Sunday Times led to some months of what appears to have been a very happy marriage, during which months Wainewright is believed to have murdered his uncle. This was the period also of two of the late Burke and Hare murders in Edinburgh, the last of these and their trial and Burke’s execution taking place four months after the trial and execution of William Corder at Bury St Edmunds.

Wainewright’s presumed murder of Helen Abercrombie took place in late 1830, and, taking refuge in France, Wainewright remained at liberty until the summer of 1837, when he was seen at Newgate by Macready and the young Charles Dickens, later to make him the central figure in Hunted Down. Lamb and Hazlitt were dead. Procter was Metropolitan Commissioner for Lunacy. Talfourd’s tragedy, Ion, had been played at Covent Garden. De Quincey had found good literary company in Scotland. Hood and Reynolds were brothers-in-law, and a younger Tom Hood was out of the cradle.
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John Rayner Heppenstall was a British novelist, poet, diarist, and a BBC radio producer.