A Georgian Pageant

by Frank Frankfort Moore

While he was in the condemned cell at Newgate he received a message from Lord Sandwich to the effect that if he wished for his life, he (Lord Sandwich) had influence with the King, and might succeed in obtaining a commutation of his sentence. Hackman replied that he had no wish to live, but he implored his lordship to give him such assurance that those whom Miss Reay had left behind her would be carefully looked after, as would, on meeting her in another world, enable him to make this pleasing communication to her.

He spent the few days that remained to him in writing fervid letters to his friends and in penning moralisings, in a style which was just the smallest degree more pronounced than that which was fashionable at his period—the style of the sentimental hero of Richardson and his inferior followers.

His execution at Tyburn attracted the most enormous crowds ever seen upon such an occasion. The carriage in which the wretched man was conveyed to the gibbet could only proceed at a walking pace; but still, the vehicle which followed it, containing the Earl of Carlisle and James Boswell, arrived in good time for the final scene of this singular tragedy, which for weeks, as the Countess of Ossory wrote to George Selwyn, was the sole topic of conversation.

And, as a matter of course, Horace Walpole had something to communicate to one of his carefully-selected correspondents. Oddly enough it was to a parson he wrote to express the opinion that he was still uncertain “whether our clergy are growing Mahometans or not”; adding sagely, “they certainly are not what they profess themselves; but as you and I should not agree, perhaps, in assigning the same defects to them, I will not enter on a subject which I have promised you to drop, all I allude to now is the shocking murder of Miss Reay by a divine. In my own opinion we are growing more fit for Bedlam than for Mahomet's paradise. The poor criminal, I am persuaded, is mad, and the misfortune is the law does not know how to define the shades of madness; and thus there are twenty out-pensioners of Bedlam for one that is confined.”

Most persons will come to the conclusion that the judge who tried Hackman made a most successful attempt to expound to the jury exactly where the law drew a line in differentiating between the man who should be sent to Bedlam and the man who should be sent to Tyburn, and will agree with the justice of the law that condemned to the gallows this divine of three weeks' standing for committing an atrocious crime, even though the chances are that Hackman spoke the truth when he affirmed that he had brought his pistols down to the theatre with no more felonious intent than to blow out his own brains in the presence of the lady and to fall dead at her feet. At the same time one is not precluded from agreeing with Walpole's opinion that the people of his period were growing more fit for Bedlam than for Eblis.

The truth is that an extraordinary wave of what was called “sensibility” was passing over England at that time. It was a wave of sentimentality—that maudlin sentimentality which was the exquisite characteristic of the hero and heroine of almost every novel that attained to any degree of success. To people who have formed their ideas of the latter half of the eighteenth century from studying Boswell's Life of Johnson, every page of which shows a healthy common sense; or from the plates of Hogarth—robust even to a point of vulgarity—it would seem incredible that there should exist in England at practically the same time a cult of the maudlin and the lachrymose. Such a cult had, however, obtained so great a hold on a large section of society that all the satire of Smollett, Sterne, and Goldsmith, was unable to ridicule it out of existence.

And the worst of the matter was that the types of these weeping sentimentalists were not unreal. They began by being unreal, but in the course of a short time they became real, the fact being that people in all directions began to frame their conduct and their conversation upon these flaccid creatures of the unhealthy fancy of third-rate novelists and fourth-rate poetasters. More than once, it may be remarked, even in our own time “movements” have had their origin in the fancy of a painter—in one case of a subtle caricaturist. An artist possessed of a distorted sense of what is beautiful in woman has been able to set a certain fashion in the unreal, until people were well-nigh persuaded that it was the painter who had taken the figures in his pictures from the persons who had simply sought a cheap notoriety by adopting the pose and the dress of the scraggy posturantes for whose anatomy he was responsible.

So it was that, when certain novel-writers in the eighteenth century, having no experience of the life which they attempted to depict, brought forth creatures out of their own unhealthy imaginations, and placed them before their readers as types of heroes and heroines, the public never failed to include quite a number of readers who were ready to live up to all those essentials that constituted the personages of the fiction.

And not alone over England had the sighs of a perpetually sighing hero and heroine sent a lachrymose flood; France and Germany, if not actually inundated, were at least rendered humid by its influence. The Sorrows of Werther was only one of the many books which helped on the cult of the sentimental, and it was as widely read in England as in Germany. Gessner's Death of Abel had an enormous vogue in its English translation. The boarding-school version of the tale of Abelard and Heloise was also much wept over both in France and Germany; and the true story of James Hackman and Martha Reay, as recorded by the correspondence of the pair, published shortly after the last scene in the tragedy had been enacted, and reissued with connecting notes some twelve years ago, might pass only as a somewhat crude attempt to surpass these masterpieces of fancy-woven woes. James and Martha might have been as happy as thousands of other Jameses and Marthas have been, but they chose to believe that the Fates were bothering themselves with this particular case of James and Martha—they chose to feel that they were doomed to a life of sorrowful love—at any rate, this was Martha's notion—and they kept on exchanging emotional sentiments until James's poor head gave way, and he sought to end up their romance in accordance with the mode of the best models, stretching himself a pallid corpse at the feet of his Martha; but then it was that Fate put out a meddlesome finger, and so caused the scene of the last chapter to take place at Tyburn.

The romance of Mr. Hackman and Miss Reay would never have taken place, if Lord Sandwich had been as exemplary a husband as George III or Dr. Johnson or Edmund Burke—the only exemplary husbands of the eighteenth century that one can recall at a moment's notice. Unhappily his lordship was one of the many examples of the unexemplary husband of that period. If the Earl of Chesterfield advanced the ill-treatment of a wife to one of the fine arts, it may be said that the Earl of Sandwich made it one of the coarse. He was brutal in his treatment of the Countess, and never more so than when he purchased the pretty child that Miss Reay must have been at the age of thirteen, and had her educated to suit his tastes. He went about the transaction with the same deliberation as a gourmand might display in ordering his dinner. He was extremely fond of music, so he had the child's education in this direction carefully attended to. His place at Hinchinbrook had been the scene of the performance of several oratorios, his lordship taking his place in the orchestra at the kettledrums; and he hoped that by the time he should have his purchase sent home, her voice would be equal to the demands put upon it by the most exacting of the sacred soprano music of Handel or Gluck.