ABSTRACT
With this in mind he rushed below and dashed off hasty, excited letters to former friends, including Charles Dickens, confidently expecting them to share his own exhilaration. Disembarking at Gravesend, however, brought home to him the inevitable legacy of bewilderment of seventeen years' absence, leaving him with doubts, he confessed, as to his 'own identity'. He was 'Rip Van Winkle'.
