Wainewright the Poisoner: The Confession of Thomas Griffiths Wainewright - Hardcover

Andrew Motion is the author of three biographies and a number of books of poetry. In 1999 he was appointed Poet Laureate of Great Britain, and he is currently Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. Motion serves as head of the Literature Panel of the Arts Council and frequently broadcasts on the BBC.

ch in unlikely characters, Thomas Griffiths Wainewright (1794-1847) was one of the strangest of all. A painter, writer, well-known London dandy and friend of most of the major figures of the Romantic era (from Blake to Byron, from John Clare to John Keats, Lamb, De Quincey and Hazlitt), he was also almost certainly a murderer, possibly several times over. Arrested and convicted of forgery--evidence was lacking to prove the murders--he was transported for life to the barbarous penal colony of Tasmania, where, years later, he died in obscurity. Behind him he left only rumors and fragments of documents, and a legend of evil that fascinated such writers as Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde.

With a brilliant blend of creative imagination and scholarly sleuthing, Andrew Motion evokes Wainewright's double life in a tour de force of the biographer's art. Cast in the form of a partly fictional "confession" written by the subject himself, buttressed (and sometimes contradicted) by the note