William Wilson

"William Wilson" is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe with a setting inspired by Poe's formative years outside of London. The tale follows the theme of the doppelgänger and is written in a style based on rationality. It was first published in 1839, later appeared in the 1840 collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, and has been adapted several times. The story begins with the narrator, a man of "a noble descent" who calls himself William Wilson, denouncing his profligate past, although he does not accept blame for his actions, saying that "man was never thus [...] tempted before." After several paragraphs of, the narration then segues into a description of Wilson's boyhood, which was spent in a "large, rambling Elizabethan" schoolhouse, "in a misty-looking village of England." The house was huge, with many jumbled paths and rooms, and situated on extensive grounds; the students were kept on site perpetually, however, hemmed in by a fence surmounted by broken glass, only being...