William Hatchett (fl. 1730–1741)

Allison Muri, University of Saskatchewan
June 2023

Of William Hatchett next to nothing is known other than his few publications and collaborations with his long-time friend the author, publisher, and translator Eliza Haywood. Hatchett himself authored and translated a few works, starting with the translations The Adventures of Abdalla, Son of Hanif, sent by the Sultan of the Indies, to make a discovery of the island of Borico and Advice From a Mother to her Son and Daughter in 1729. The play The Rival Father: or, The Death of Achilles followed in 1730, and ending with The Chinese Orphan (1741), the anonymous A Remarkable Cause, on a Note of Hand (1742), and a work co-translated with Haywood, The Sopha: A Moral Tale (1742).

Hatchett's first biographer David Erskine Baker wrote of him in The Companion to the Play-House (1764):

Of this Gentleman I know nothing more than his having been concerned, in Conjunction with Mrs. Eliza Heywood, in the converting Mr Fielding's Tragedy of Tom Thumb, into a Ballad Opera, which was set to Musick, and performed under the Title of 

The Opera of Operas,

and having brought one Play on the Stage, entitled,

The Rival Father. Trag.

(vol. 2, n.p.)

Haywood's entry describes Hatchett as "a Gentleman with whom she appears to have had a close literary Intimacy." The revised edition, Biographia Dramatica, or, a Companion to the Playhouse (1782), adds that he lived with Haywood "upon terms of friendship" (vol. 1, 208).

More recent reports of Hatchett's personal history are derived from A Remarkable Cause, and should be read with some caution since there is no certainty as to the extent to which details concerning Hatchett's personal life are fictionalized in the narrative. The conceit of the work is that it is the transcription of a trial at the Court of Conscience, "Faithfully taken down by an Ingenious Gentleman of the Law present at the trial" and "Made Publick by Order of the Court for General Instruction." Hatchett is the "Author and Defendant" and Bryan Dawson, a former friend, is the Plaintiff. Council for the Plaintiff is Quirk Seem-right, Esq; of Grays-Inn and Flint Savage, Esq; Serjeant at Law. Council for the Defendant is Impartial Tenderman, Esq; of Lincoln's-Inn and Sir Justin Reason, Knt. Primier Serjt. at Law. The trial concerns Dawson's demand of payment for a promisory note given to him by Hatchett several years previously, for money he had borrowed while the two were on an "extensive" "Summer Tour" together (13). Hatchett's rather damnable defence is that "there is nothing more Resonable than that a Debt, incurr'd for An Affair of Pleasure, should be paid at Pleasure" (17). The fanciful jury, composed of Sir George Love-Truth, Sir Seymour Justice, Sir Clement Honour, and Sir Peter Christian, Knights, along with several other facetiously named men, finds in favour of the defendant. Patrick Spedding has assembled historical details concerning Bryan Dawson and his family in A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood that suggest at least some of the events related in A Remarkable Cause are factual (785–9).