Though the ability to sympathize with others was a sign of modern refinement and virtue, it was also, as many verses and essays on sensibility commented, a source of distress, a sign of moral superiority but also of weakness. As a contributor to the Lady’s Magazine in 1775 exclaimed: ‘Sensibility120 – thou source of human woes – thou aggrandiser of evils! – Had I not been possessed of thee – how calmly might my days have passed! – Yet would I not part with thee for worlds. We will abide together – both pleased and pained with each other. Thou shalt ever have a place in my heart – be the sovereign of my affections, and the friend of my virtue.’
Women, young people of both sexes, and those connected to the fine arts and literature were all believed to be especially susceptible to sensibility, prone to virtuous feeling and to excessive sentiment that made them melancholic (in the case of men) or hysteric (in the case of women). Expressions of sympathy, though praised as the great virtue of modern life, indeed as its defining social characteristic, could also be pathological and crippling.
Critics quickly recognized that sentimentalism supposed a different sort of writing and storytelling, one that in the words of the cleric and scholar Hugh Blair ‘derives its efficacy not so much from what men are taught to know, as from what they are brought to feel121’. The sympathetic moral response that sentimental literature evoked in the reader depended on particularity, a sense of intimacy that engaged the reader rather than on moral lessons or grand abstractions that appealed only to their intellect. The interior feeling of characters had to be explored and not just their external actions. Memoirs, biographies, collections of letters and verses, histories and, above all, novels portrayed the quotidian, ordinary, private and mundane because it was more likely to excite the reader’s sympathy, being close to their own experience. In Blair’s words, ‘It is from private life, from familiar, domestic, and seemingly trivial occurrences, that we most often receive light into the real character122.’
Sentimentalism was best staged in the intimate theatre of the home and family, and its most characteristic plots concerned the joys and misfortunes of everyday life – romantic and conjugal love, amatory disappointment, misfortunes brought on by intemperance and improvidence, the pleasures of familial companionship in a circle of virtue. A sentimental story was, in the words of the novelist William Guthrie, ‘an Epic in lower Life123’, a story, in other words, exactly like that of Sandwich, Ray and Hackman.
Sentimental writing spread with astonishing swiftness in the second half of the eighteenth century. Newspaper reporting, pamphlets advocating reform and improvement such as Jonas Hanway’s A Sentimental History of Chimney-sweepers (1785); biographies and memoirs like Oliver Goldsmith’s Life of Richard {Beau} Nash (1762) or Joseph Boruwlaski’s Memoirs of the Celebrated Dwarf (1788) – ‘I not only mean to describe my size and its proportions, I would likewise follow the unfolding of my sentiments, the affections of my soul124’; travel literature such as John Hawksworth’s account of Captain James Cook’s voyage; histories such as those of David Hume; and sermons, of which the most popular were those of Hugh Blair; literary forgeries, advice literature, plays, periodical essays, as well as a raft of sentimental novels and verses – all these used the techniques of literary sentimentalism to capture the hearts of their readers.
The cult of sensibility reached a peak in the 1770s, around the time of Ray’s murder. It was not therefore very difficult to present the tragedy of Hackman and Ray as a sentimental story and to expect that the terrible tale would provoke the sympathy of those who read about it. Sentimental literature, especially the sentimental novel, was filled with stories of virtue in distress, a description that was easily applied to all three figures in this love triangle. Hackman after all was a victim of his amatory passion, Ray was a fallen woman who had achieved some respectability only to be murdered, and Sandwich was a former rake whose domestic felicity had been shattered by Hackman’s bullet. The lovelorn youth, the fallen woman who nevertheless retained some virtue, and the reformed rake were all familiar figures in the many sentimental novels that were commissioned, published, sold and loaned by publishers like the Noble brothers, who ran ‘novel manufacturies’ and circulating libraries to distribute this extremely popular form of fiction.
A sentimental account of the affair suited Sandwich and Hackman’s followers because it depicted all three as blameless. But it fell on fertile soil because the case seemed such an obvious one of life imitating art. Readers were likely to respond as if the story was a sentimental fiction, because to do so was an obvious way to make sense of the events surrounding the crime. It gave Sandwich, Hackman’s friends and the public what they all wanted – closure, a way of making the case understandable by placing it in a familiar light. We all know the pleasures of recognizing the familiar – ‘ah! It’s one of that sort of story’. We can wrap it up and put it away and, in doing so, perhaps hide the parts of the story that are troubling or disturbing, or suppress other ways of telling it. In the spring of 1779 the protagonists’ desire to end speculation and the public’s desire for assurance were at one, but it proved rather more difficult than might at first have been supposed to keep the story under wraps.
CHAPTER 3 The Killer as Victim: James Hackman
IN THE SPRING OF 1779 Dr Johnson and his close friend Hester Thrale, whose own intimacy has long been a source of speculation, discussed relations between the sexes. Mrs Thrale was all for woman-power: ‘It seems to me that no Man can live his Life thro’, without being at some period of it under the Dominion of some Woman – Wife Mistress or Friend125.’ Nevertheless she found it hard to fathom Hackman’s passion for Ray. It was, she said, ‘the strangest thing that has appeared these hundred years’. Boswell had told her that his last words on the scaffold were ‘Dear Dear Miss Ray’. ‘Here was Passion for a Woman neither young nor handsome; whose eldest son was eighteen [sic] years old & a sea officer when she was shot by her Lover, & a woman not eminent as I can find for Allurements in the Eyes of any Man breathing but himself, & Lord Sandwich, who ’tis said had long been weary of her, though he knew not how to get free.’ But Dr Johnson took a very different view. ‘A woman’, he said, ‘has such power between the Ages of twenty five and forty five, that She may tye a Man to a post and whip him if she will.’
While Mrs Thrale pondered the powers of middle-aged women and Johnson surrendered to his masochistic fantasy, all over London people of fashion gossiped about the murder and its motive. In the twelve days between the killing of Martha Ray and the execution of James Hackman, the crime was on everyone’s lips. Sandwich’s colleagues from the Admiralty chatted at court with Lord Hertford about the tragedy. Ladies and gentlemen exchanged notes and items of news. ‘For the last week’, Horace Walpole wrote to his friend