The Wrong Box

A tontine has come down to two elderly brothers who between them can barely manage a staircase, and then a railway accident leaves a nephew with a body, a barrel and every reason not to report either. Stevenson wrote it with his stepson Lloyd Osbourne, who produced a draft that Stevenson then rewrote entirely. The preface admits the whole thing is judicious levity and that one of the authors is old enough to be ashamed of himself. Fifty-seven comic plates from Rowlandson to Cruikshank, spanning 1821 to 1900, catch the farce of mistaken corpses and tontine greed in every tavern scene and street corner.