Marrin's Bookshop

Item Description

8vo. 8.75x 6 inches. 415 + [1] pp. Bound in original maroon cloth, gilt, with gilt block on front board. A little wear to extremities, a few small stains on boards and occasional traces of foxing; otherwise a very good copy. Illustrated by 18 pages of black and white photographs, including portrait frontispiece and facsimiles. The biography of Wainewright, author, painter, forger and suspected killer, who was in 1837 transported for fraud on the Bank of England to Van Dieman's Land (later Tasmania), where as a convict he later became a society painter. The last section of the book assesses his impact on Victorian writers such as Dickens and Bulwer Lytton.