ABSTRACT
The double is a familiar trope in nineteenth-century literature; but whereas it is a literary strategy customarily employed to expand, deepen and disturb realist narrative and characterisation, in Thomas Hardy and Florence Henniker's collaborative story 'The Spectre of the Real' it is the figure of the authorial double which generates a fascinatingly unstable text. Linda Dowling has suggested that 'though many Victorians cherished for England and the English language hopes of territorial, commercial and linguistic hegemony as far-reaching as Rome's, they could never forget that Rome had ultimately failed'. The sexual desire is thus eclipsed by social ambition, but in a move which is symptomatic of the authorial double and the contested nature of both literary and erotic relations between the two, Henniker struck this phrase out. As Webber suggests, if the double 'enters into rivalry with the self, it is because it too suffers from lack, even as it imitates the self's bravado gestures of potency'.
