A LITERARY COINCIDENCE
SIR,—In browsing among the books of some writers who at one time interested me, I have been reading again the short stories of Edgar Allen Poe and Oscar Wilde, as a war-time occupation, and have chanced on a coincidence that I have never seen referred to before. In Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray it will be remembered that he relates how an artist who had painted a portrait of himself gradually saw revealed in the painting his changed character as he himself grossly changed. As a result he destroyed the portrait with his palette knife and thus brought about his own self-destruction. The story is significant when the author's own life is recalled.
Edgar Allen Poe, in his Narrative of William Willson tells of a man who was followed through life by a personality the double of himself who whispered to him his warnings as his character deteriorated, and whom he eventually killed, only to be finally driven to his own self- murder, but the theme in each case is the same. Did Oscar Wilde find the inspiration for his book in Poe's much earlier story, or was the character of the two men so alike that their minds created a back- ground for the same subject? In any event, it is curious that in both cases they discovered a story that was a very unusual one. Does any reader know whether this coincidence has been commented upon before by students of their several works?—Yours sincerely,
ANGUS WATSON.
Whitewell, Adderstone Crescent, Newcastle-on-Tyne 2.
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