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"P.'s Correspondence" is an 1845 short story by the 19th century American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, constituting a pioneering work of alternate history. Some consider it the very first such work in the English language (depending on whether or not Benjamin Disraeli's "Alroy" of 1833 is defined as being alternate history). In any case, it is certainly among the earliest works of this genre in any language and apparently the first to introduce some features which were to become an essential part of it. It was first published in ''The United States Magazine and Democratic Review'' in April 1845 and collected with other Hawthorne stories (not of this genre) in "Mosses from an Old Manse" (1846). ==The setting== The story uses the technique of the false document, common in literature of the period. It purports to transcribe a letter written by a mentally-deranged friend of the writer, identified only by the initial "P." (supposedly to protect his privacy). As presented in the preface, the writer seems to share with the rest of the world the belief that his friend is indeed mad, and publishes the text as an act of kindness rather than out of believing in its veracity. However, the text attributed to P. seems far from the ravings of a madman. Rather, it appears the product of a rational and sensitive mind placed in the impossible situation of simultaneously perceiving two realities which contradict each other in numerous important details. With no explanation for this phenomenon, the narrator is increasingly unable to decide which is true and which is imaginary: "More and more I recognize that we dwell in a world of shadows; and, for my part, I hold it hardly worth the trouble to attempt a distinction between shadows in the mind and shadows out of it. If there be any difference, the former are rather the more substantial." In terms of the later fully developed alternate history genre, the basic premise can be described as two analogues of P. in two alternate timelines being able to communicate mentally and often share each other's consciousness. The one in our history's 1845 is considered a madman, kept at the insistence of his relatives in a "little whitewashed, iron-grated room" somewhere in New England, where he had been effectively incarcerated and cared for by a keeper for several years. His analogue in an alternate 1845 timeline is visiting London and meeting with various VIPs, and although many prominent people mentioned in the narrative had substantially different lives (and deaths), the general political and social situation is the same (for example, both timelines have essentially the same Queen Victoria). Hawthorne, however, did not yet possess any of the above terms - though he seems to have intuitively grasped many of the concepts involved. While some alternate history was written before the present story, this seems the first work in which two parallel realities are presented as co-existing and interacting with each other (though not physically). The writer states in the preface: "Many of his () letters are in my possession, some based upon the same vagary as the present one, and others upon hypotheses not a whit short of it in absurdity. The whole form a series of correspondence, which, should fate seasonably remove my poor friend from what is to him a world of moonshine, I promise myself a pious pleasure in editing for the public eye." This seems to indicate that Hawthorne considered writing further such stories, set in the same alternate reality and/or in a different one. Such additional stories were, however, never published. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「P.'s Correspondence」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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