Alfred Egmont Hake

Hake was born in Bury St Edmunds, the fourth son of Lucy Bush and Thomas Gordon Hake, a physician. An early friend was William Michael Rossetti, his father being involved professionally with the Rossetti family. He joined the Savile Club in 1878.[1][2]

Charles George Gordon was a first cousin of Hake's father, his paternal grandmother Augusta Maria Hake (née Gordon) being Gordon's aunt.[3] In 1884 Hake published The Story of Chinese Gordon.[4] It concentrated on Gordon's role opposing the Taiping Rebellion. It became topical with the Siege of Khartoum launched that year by Mahdist forces. A companion volume Gordon in China and Soudan was published in 1885, and sold well.[5]

While Gordon remained in the besieged city of Khartoum, journals were taken out through the lines; J. Donald Hamill-Stewart, who left in September 1884, had been keeping a journal, a task taken over by Gordon himself from 10 September. What he wrote to 14 December was brought out, and sent to London.[6] Sir Henry William Gordon, Gordon's brother, was entitled to the papers, after Gordon's death on 26 January 1885; and decided that Hake should edit them. On the other hand, the War Office wanted them suppressed. Gordon himself had thought some very personal comments should not be published; while the content included extended attacks on the current Liberal administration of W. E. Gladstone. Sir Henry was apparently unaware of Hake's political sympathies (he was a strong Conservative supporter).[7]

In the end a popular, two-volume edition of Gordon's journal appeared, with Hake as editor, on 25 June 1885. He added an introduction strongly critical of the government's inactivity in supporting Gordon.[8] Sir Henry Gordon required, contractually, that substantial redaction of the text removed a large number of personal references. Heavy criticism of Evelyn Baring remained.[9] Hake took advice from Wilfrid Meynell, and consulted Wilfred Scawen Blunt the Arabist on background.[10]

Hake then lectured on Gordon and the failure of the Liberal government to rescue him in Khartoum, before the 1885 United Kingdom general election.[11] He undertook a tour in England and Scotland, from the late summer to November: the election campaign started on 24 November.[12] The Conservatives supported the tour covertly through Richard Middleton; and finance was provided by Lord Cranborne and his sister, with whom Hake was in contact in October and December.[13]

Hake edited in 1866 The State, a Conservative weekly; it had a short lifespan.[2][14] He became interested in the economics of free trade, was a critic of the Bank Charter Act 1844, and invented a system of banking; which Oscar Wilde found amusing. He wrote works for the Free Trade in Capital League.[2][15]

Hake died on 8 December 1916 of peripheral neuritis, in the City of London Lunatic Asylum, Stone, Kent.[2]

Hake wrote:

• Paris Originals: With Twenty Etchings (1878)[16]
• The Unemployed Problem solved (1884), pamphlet
• The New Dance of Death (1884) with J. G. Lefebre[17]
• The Story of Chinese Gordon (1884). The updated New York edition was expanded by Hugh Craig.[18]
• Gordon in China and the Soudan (1885), companion volume to the above.
• The Journals of Major-gen. C.G. Gordon, C.B., at Kartoum (1885, 2 vols.), editor
• Remington's Annual (1889), editor[19]
• Free Trade in Capital: Or, Free Competition in the Supply of Capital to Labour, and Its Bearings on the Political and Social Questions of the Day (1890), with O. E. Wesslau.[20] For the views of the Free Trade in Capital League, an anti-socialist organisation.[2][21]
• Events in the Taeping Rebellion (1891), editor[22]
• Suffering London - Or, the Hygiene, Moral, Social, and Political Relations of Our Voluntary Hospitals to Society (1892)[23]
• Regeneration: A Reply to Max Nordau (1896). This book was published anonymously.[2][24] Hake linked Max Nordau's ideas in Degeneration with the possibility of imperial decline.[25] Members of Nordau's family called the book anti-Semitic.[26] It has also been called a "hatchet job".[27] On the other hand, Camporesi in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes it as "a fundamental and seminal work, proposing not only a cultural and anthropological interpretation of the sociological problems, but even a philosophy of history and a theodicy."
• The Coming Individualism (1895) with O. E. Wesslau[28]

Hake also collaborated with David Christie Murray on novels.[29] He contributed to the Open Review of Arthur Kitson.[30]

In 1879 Hake married Philippa Mary Handley, daughter of Alexander Charles Handley[2]

• Fergus Nicoll, "Truest History, Struck Off at White Heat": The Politics of Editing Gordon's Khartoum Journals, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Volume 38, Number 1, March 2010, pp. 21–46(26)

• Works by Alfred Egmont Hake at Project Gutenberg
• The Death of General Gordon at Khartoum, 1885, Alfred Egmont Hake in Eva March Tappan (ed.) The World's Story: A History of the World in Story, Song and Art (Boston, 1914) vol. III, pp. 240–249