The Double Life of a Dandy – T.G. Wainewright’s Criminal and Aesthetic Myth

This article explores the life of Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, a Regency dandy, painter and art critic who resorted to crimes ranging from forgery to murder in order to finance his expensive lifestyle, until he was finally deported to Tasmania. While Wainewright’s double life inspired a variety of Victorian literary villains, he was rediscovered as a flamboyantly transgressive figure in the second half of the nineteenth century within the framework of burgeoning aestheticism. After Beau Brummell and dandyism had been celebrated by the likes of Jules-Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly and Charles Baudelaire, Wainewright himself attracted the attention of A. C. Swinburne, W. C. Hazlitt and Oscar Wilde as a forerunner of the aesthetic movement. When Wilde was sentenced to prison as a criminal, however, his association with Wainewright acquired darker tones and the two came to be regarded as overreachers whose defiance of social norms had inevitably led to punishment.