James Hackman - Aftermath

Aftermath

Hackman's case became famous, and The Newgate Calendar later noted that:

Horace Walpole remarked that the murder fascinated much of London during April 1779. At first, given Sandwich's position as First Lord of the Admiralty, a political motive was suspected. Not long before, Sandwich and Martha Ray had found themselves fleeing from Admiralty House, where a mob was rioting against the government and in particular against what it saw as the mistreatment of Admiral Keppel.

The affair inspired Sir Herbert Croft's epistolary novel Love and Madness (1780), an imagined correspondence between Hackman and Martha Ray. In this, Hackman is dealt with sympathetically. He is represented as a man of sensibility suffering from an extreme case of unrequited love who descends into suicidal and homicidal despair, even to the point that the reader is invited to identify with Hackman rather than with his victim.

Samuel Johnson and Topham Beauclerk debated whether Hackman had meant to kill only himself. Johnson believed that the two pistols Hackman took with him to Covent Garden meant that he intended there to be two deaths. Boswell himself (who had visited Hackman in prison) wrote that the case showed "the dreadful effects that the passion of Love may produce".

In his Mind-Forg'd Manacles (1987), the social historian Roy Porter argues that Hackman was well aware of the madness of his passion.

In The Luck of Barry Lyndon Thackeray has his protagonist describe having met Hackman 'at one of Mrs Cornely's balls, at Carlisle House, Soho'.