re who was not a real father programmatically and perhaps from his point of view sensibly distanced himself physically and emotionally from the boy, even as he generously acknowledged him as his own. Nor did Mrs. Freeman, who might have been his natural mother, for reasons of social (superego?) respectability, acknowledge him (Grebanier 289). An imperfectly formed conscience would not necessarily have prevented young Ireland from engaging oedipal issues with the elder, connected to the problems of projecting a coherent, superego-socialized persona into the world. This was complicated by the fact that Samuel Ireland had scant regard for William Henry's intellectual gifts. Until the end of his life, Samuel Ireland insisted that William had not the wit to forge the documents (Grebanier 55; 281ff, et passim), though William repeatedly assured Samuel that he had indeed crafted them, that there had been no such person as the myster
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