David Poindexter's Disappearance, and Other Tales

A Sussex parson deep in gambling debts meets his exact double, a highwayman, in a wood; one of them is found dead, the other rides back into the parson's life, and no court can prove which man he is — and around that, a set of tales about ghosts, obsession and the thinness of a personality. Julian Hawthorne grew up among Emerson, Thoreau and Melville, produced some fifty books, and later went to prison for mail fraud over a mining stock. He wrote identity as something that comes loose. Fifty-eight plates, among them Munch and Eastman Johnson, run from 1783 to 1912 and dwell on interiors, kinsmen and uncertain selves, the very ground these tales of doubled identity occupy.