A clash of wills!
Partly a Robinsonade, Mr Meeson's Will was based on a well-known anecdote of the time. The London Globe in fact seemed to hit that Haggard had based his book on a previous book by Aubert, when the Clarence and Richmond Examiner provided an eyewitness account of a gathering attended by Haggard where some legal pupils after having had a fair bit of wine intended to hoax their "eminent Chancery lawyer" and "these newly made advocates" had proposed this curious question in a rather ribald context – whether a will written on skin would be considered legal. The examiner cited this as the source of the plot which concerns a marooned man's will tattooed on the back of a woman in a desperate attempt to remedy his earlier will.