My Double And How He Undid Me by Edward Everett Hale, 1859
The magic trick:
A comical story very much of its time
So I’ve been reading this very old collection of stories compiled and edited by William Dean Howells. And in the introduction, he specifically calls out this story as one that he remembers very fondly reading as a child. It made him cackle with laughter.
I flagged the story and prepared to also cackle with laughter. And well…
I guess I would say that this story reads like the kind of thing that would make a kid cackle with laughter back in the 1870s – said with as much a double-edged sword as I can possibly manage.
And that’s quite a trick on Hale’s part.
The selection:
I “set him again” at the exhibition of the New Coventry Academy; and here he undertook a “speaking part”—as, in my boyish, worldly days, I remember the bills used to say of Mlle. Celeste. We are all trustees of the New Coventry Academy; and there has lately been “a good deal of feeling” because the Sandemanian trustees did not regularly attend the exhibitions. It has been intimated, indeed, that the Sandemanians are leaning towards Free-Will, and that we have, therefore, neglected these semi-annual exhibitions, while there is no doubt that Auchmuty last year went to Commencement at Waterville. Now the head master at New Coventry is a real good fellow, who knows a Sanskrit root when he sees it, and often cracks etymologies with me—so that, in strictness, I ought to go to their exhibitions. But think, reader, of sitting through three long July days in that Academy chapel, following the program from Tuesday Morning.
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