Two Temple Place Letter" is represented by Hester Prynne and the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale. The two remaining characters are Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle and his daughter. At the feet of Rip Van Winkle is his dog and at those of his daughter is the gnomes’ keg of liquor, the drinking of which had sent Van Winkle into his long slumber and freedom from his bothersome wife for 20 years! The staircase hall is overlooked by a gallery that features statues made by Nicholls, having American literary associations, and a frieze in relief which features 82 characters from Shakespeare’s "Othello", "Henry VIII", "Antony
Time travel en fût jamais" (1770) by Louis-Sébastien Mercier, "Rip Van Winkle" (1819) by Washington Irving, "Looking Backward" (1888) by Edward Bellamy, and "When the Sleeper Awakes" (1899) by H.G. Wells. Prolonged sleep, like the more familiar time machine, is used as a means of time travel in these stories. The earliest work about backwards time travel is uncertain. Samuel Madden's "Memoirs of the Twentieth Century" (1733) is a series of letters from British ambassadors in 1997 and 1998 to diplomats in the past, conveying the political and religious conditions of the future. Because the narrator receives these letters from his guardian