Wainewright and the Foxglove Fable

By Keith Bamler Category: Poisoners Shelf 16th July 2026

Dusty London drawing rooms were his gallery and gossip was his critic. Thomas Griffiths Wainewright kept a neat hand, a neater waistcoat and an appetite for trouble. He wrote clever essays, painted genteel portraits and, according to a string of alarmed acquaintances, left a strange botanical footprint after people went sick and then died.

Contemporaries pointed at foxglove as if it were a calling card. Digitalis, grown in cottage gardens and used in small doses for the heart, had a darker reputation in the wrong hands. Wainewright's name became tangled with a couple of sudden deaths among debtors and relatives. Proof never arrived in a court of murder. What did come was a forgery charge in 1837 that sent him on a long and final voyage to Van Diemen's Land.

Silhouettes of men with top hats stand near bottles and purple flowers in watercolor shades.

He sailed away with a trunk of sketches and a personality that made strangers suspicious and admirers chuffed. Gossip did the rest. Newspapers and bawdy salons fed the tale until the painter's reputation looked acky. Some historians have trimmed the rumour, others have kept it alive like smoke under a collar. The truth sits uneasy between handwriting samples and cocktail-party cal.

There is a delicious cruelty to the story. A man clever enough to fake a signature and fake friendships proved to be jammy in slipping the most serious accusations. He never faced a murder charge. He was hauled up for paper and ink instead of for poison. That outcome left some people maungy and others relieved, which feels like the sort of human arithmetic courts have always performed.

If you want theatre, Wainewright serves it. His letters and odd sketches give the impression of someone who enjoyed life with a warm un sort of swagger and a habit of keeping his neb out of other people's business while somehow being at the centre of it. He died in Tasmania. People carried on talking. The story endures because it sounds like summat proper wicked and we are all gormless enough to prefer a neat scandal to a quiet truth.