Sentimental Murder: Love and Madness in the Eighteenth Century

The Rope, the penalty of broken Laws,

Is not more shocking than the pen of D-ws.

Both to deserve no Crime can be so great;

Yet both to suffer was poor Hackman’s fate

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What made Dawes’s account so controversial? First and foremost he categorically asserted that Hackman and Ray had been not only friends but lovers. From the outset he described the two as ‘revelling in all its [loves] rites by stealth’, and enjoying ‘stolen bliss

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What, then, had gone wrong? In his dedication to Lord Sandwich and in the main body of his narrative Dawes placed the blame on Galli and Sandwich. Galli, according to him, had taken money from Hackman so that the couple could continue to meet without Sandwich’s knowledge. But, after a while, Galli ‘(whether under the management and direction of his Lordship, who wished to break off the connexion at all events, or otherwise, we do not know) informed Mr Hackman that all future visits from Miss Reay would be dispensed with, for that Lord S––– was too well acquainted with their amour to bear with it longer

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In the early editions of The Case and Memoirs Dawes says nothing about Ray’s own view of the matter. The reader is left to assume that she still loved Hackman, even when temporarily unable to see him. Perfidy perhaps lay with Sandwich and certainly blackened the character of Galli. But no matter where responsibility was placed, the act of warning off Hackman was the turning point in the plot. It triggered ‘his despair and grief’, transforming his character: ‘he was an altered man … he was agreeable, sprightly and affable; but on a sudden he changed himself to a pensive and grave deportment’. He grew increasingly subject to a melancholy ‘originated on that occasion, which, by continually brooding over, encreased and inflamed his wretched mind

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Dawes included in his account a letter from Hackman to Ray which, ‘with one other, (a copy whereof is in the hands of his brother-in-law) is the only one he did not cancel

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(#litres_trial_promo) you are not fond of the follies and vanities of the town. How tranquil and agreeably, and with what uninterrupted felicity, unlike to anything we have yet enjoyed, shall we then wear our time away together on my living.’ Full of despair, he threatens Ray with the prospect that if she does not marry him he will die: ‘For God’s sake let me hear from you; and as you love me, keep me no longer in suspense, since nothing can relieve me but death or you

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The deception of others, continued Dawes, plunged Hackman into this melancholia, but only when he saw Martha Ray with another man in the playhouse on the night of the murder did he decide on suicide. ‘Gloomy, melancholy, and outrageous, at the injuries he had conceived, which exceeded all human knowledge to explain’, he determined to shoot himself ‘in the presence of a woman, whose supposed infidelity had brought him to a misery and despair not to be described by words

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The lawyer in Dawes wanted to acquit Hackman of murder, though he could not, of course, deny the killing. In his long ‘Commentary on his Conviction’, Dawes absolved Hackman of any felonious intent to kill Martha Ray. Murder, he reminded the reader, is distinguished as a crime by proof of prior intention and malice: ‘It is the wickedness and malignity of the heart which raises the crime of murder, and not simply the act that kills

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