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.
Boswell
Hackman