It is somehow appropriate that this book should close with a discussion of the vampire, for its shadowy, vaporous and shifting presence draws together and metaphorises many of the issues which have been significant throughout it. If my initial premise has been to explore the nature of identity for the individual within nineteenth-century modernity through its representation in a variety of different cultural texts and intertexts, what then can be said about the state of identity in the nineteenth century? As should be clear by now, identity, certainly in terms of its representation in the works scrutinized here, can be seen to be in a state of flux, crisis and transition in all sorts of different configurations. Marx and Engels's claim that modernity for the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie consists of constant and destabilizing revolution and reinvention – encapsulated in the all too familiar phrase ‘[a]ll that is solid melts into air’ so usefully interrogated by Marshall Berman – goes some way to explain why identity should have such unstable qualities during the period. The reasons for this dislocation, subsumed within the broad spectrum of analysis offered in the Communist Manifesto, are manifold.