A Sentimental Murder Love and Madness in the Eighteenth Century

by Brewer, John

• ISBN13: 9780374529772
• ISBN10: 0374529779
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-06-08
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Summary

So a London paper reported on April 8, 1779, of the moment when James Hackman, a young clergyman, killed Martha Ray and then tried to take his own life. In this fascinating book, John Brewer examines this shocking little scene as it was described and redescribed over the centuries. Fiction and history, it turns out, were intertwined from the beginning in reports of this "sentimental murder." Book jacket.

Author Biography

John Brewer is the author of many books, including The Pleasures of the Imagination (FSG, 1997), which won the Wolfson History Prize. He teaches at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	vii
Prologue	ix
Preface	1	(279)
1 Spring 1779	9	(28)
2 The Press: A Case of Sentimental Murder	37	(26)
3 The Killer as Victim: James Hackman	63	(24)
4 Missing Stories: Lord Sandwich and the Making of a Libertine	87	(32)
5 Missing Stories: Martha Ray and the Life of the Mistress	119	(32)
6 Love and Madness, A Story too True	151	(33)
7 Wordsworth and the Doctors	184	(20)
8 The Nineteenth Century	204	(36)
9 The Twentieth Century	240	(40)
10 History and Telling Stories	280	(15)
Notes	295	(37)
Index	332