He was taken back to Newgate, preparatory to his removal to the colonies.
In a fanciful passage in one of his early essays he had fancied himself
'lying in Horsemonger Gaol under sentence of death' for having been
unable to resist the temptation of stealing some Marc Antonios from the
British Museum in order to complete his collection. The sentence now
passed on him was to a man of his culture a form of death. He complained
bitterly of it to his friends, and pointed out, with a good deal of
reason, some people may fancy, that the money was practically his own,
having come to him from his mother, and that the forgery, such as it was,
had been committed thirteen years before, which, to use his own phrase,
was at least a _circonstance attenuante_. The permanence of personality
is a very subtle metaphysical problem, and certainly the English law
solves the question in an extremely rough-and-ready manner. There is,
however, something dramatic in the fact that this heavy punishment was
inflicted on him for what, if we remember his fatal influence on the
prose of modern journalism, was certainly not the worst of all his sins.
While he was in gaol, Dickens, Macready, and Hablot Browne came across
him by chance. They had been going over the prisons of London, searching
for artistic effects, and in Newgate they suddenly caught sight of
Wainewright. He met them with a defiant stare, Forster tells us, but
Macready was 'horrified to recognise a man familiarly known to him in
former years, and at whose table he had dined.'
Others had more curiosity, and his cell was for some time a kind of
fashionable lounge. Many men of letters went down to visit their old
literary comrade. But he was no longer the kind light-hearted Janus whom
Charles Lamb admired. He seems to have grown quite cynical.
To the agent of an insurance company who was visiting him one afternoon,
and thought he would improve the occasion by pointing out that, after
all, crime was a bad speculation, he replied: 'Sir, you City men enter on
your speculations, and take the chances of them. Some of your
speculations succeed, some fail. Mine happen to have failed, yours
happen to have succeeded. That is the only difference, sir, between my
visitor and me. But, sir, I will tell you one thing in which I have
succeeded to the last. I have been determined through life to hold the
position of a gentleman. I have always done so. I do so still. It is
the custom of this place that each of the inmates of a cell shall take
his morning's turn of sweeping it out. I occupy a cell with a bricklayer
and a sweep, but they never offer me the broom!' When a friend
reproached him with the murder of Helen Abercrombie he shrugged his
shoulders and said, 'Yes; it was a dreadful thing to do, but she had very
thick ankles.'--_Pen, Pencil and Poison_.