tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

Prince Roman was written by Joseph Conrad in 1910 and first published in 1911 in The Oxford and Cambridge Review. It was posthumously collected in Tales of Hearsay, which was first published by T. Fisher Unwin in 1925. The tale is based on the real life story of Prince Roman Sanguszko of Poland (1800–81). The other tales in the collection are The Black Mate, The Warrior’s Soul, and The Tale

Prince Sanguszko’s coat of arms

Prince Roman – critical commentary

Content

This is an unashamedly patriotic piece of writing on Conrad’s part. Prince Roman is a Pole who gives up his comfortable position in the aristocracy to fight as a (virtually) unknown soldier resisting Russian oppression. When captured, he has every opportunity to escape punishment, but declares himself unequivocally committed to Polish liberation. As a result he suffers a quarter of a century in the nineenth century Tsarist equivalent of the GULAG – the Siberian mines – before returning to live in humble circumstances on what should have been his own estate before devoting his life to helping other people. There is none of the ambiguity and complexity that is normally found in Conrad’s other works, nor any of the light ironic touches in his commentary within the narration.

History

The story is based on the real life history of Prince Roman Stanislaw Sanguszko (1800–1881) who was a Polish aristocrat, patriot, political and social activist. Conrad’s fictional account is remarkably faithful to the historical details of Sanguszko’s life – though in some regards the truth is even more remarkable than the fiction. For instance, part of the punishment for taking part in the insurrection was that he should walk in chains to his place of exile. This was a distance of 3,300 kilometres which took ten months to complete.

Narrative

The main problem with the tale, from a technical point of view, is that it mixes narrative modes in a way that reflects adversely on the overall artistic effect. The story begins in first person narrative mode: the un-named narrator recalls having seen as a child this fabled Polish patriot, when Roman was an old man. That is, the narrative starts at the end of its chronological events.

The narrator then fills in the details of Roman’s background – information of a biographical nature which could be publicly available. But gradually, the narrative slips into third person omniscient mode. We are presented with Roman’s thoughts and feelings whilst he is in the Polish army of resistance – information which would not be available to anyone but Roman himself.

Then at the end of the tale, Conrad returns to a first person narrative mode, with the un-named narrator rounding off the sad but heroic account of Prince Roman’s life story. Conrad makes these transitions quite smoothly, and most readers are unlikely to complain, but in terms of strict narrative credibility and logic they are illegitimate.

Prince Roman – study resources

Tales of Hearsay – CreateSpace editions – Amazon UK

Tales of Hearsay – CreateSpace editions – Amazon US

The Complete Works of Joseph Conrad – Kindle eBook

Prince Roman – eBook versions at Project Gutenberg

Joseph Conrad: A Biography – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Routledge Guide to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad – Amazon UK

Notes on Life and Letters – Amazon UK

Joseph Conrad – biographical notes

Prince Roman – plot summary

An un-named narrator recalls as a child once meeting Prince Roman, who by that time was a bald and deaf old man. This reminiscence forms the springboard for a potted life history, which is the substance of the narrative. Roman comes from an aristocratic Polish family. His wife dies two years after the birth of their daughter, and Roman is badly affected by the loss. He finds solace by retreating into the countryside, and whilst there hears news of a successful patriotic uprising against the occupying Russians. Roman renounces his position as a military office in the Tsar’s army and announces his intention of joining the nationalist rebels. His father understands Roman’s patriotism, but thinks this is rather rash and impolitic.

Roman summons an old family servant and confides in him his intention of volunteering in the partisan army. He enlists under a false name (Sergeant Peter) and distinguishes himself for courage and valour. However, although unharmed, he is eventually taken prisoner by the Russians. There he is recognised by his captors. News of his arrest is sent to St Petersburg, where his family use their wealth and influence to plead for clemency.

The military commission that tries his case attempts to guide his responses to questioning to bring about an acquittal, but he states quite bluntly that he joined the rebellion from ‘political conviction’. He is condemned to the Siberian mines, which at that time was considered a living death. Because of his disgrace, his daughter inherits his estates, and lives abroad – in the South of France and Austria. Twenty-five years later, on his release, Roman goes to live in a modest house on one of the estates and dedicates himself to doing public good.

Joseph Conrad – video biography

Joseph Conrad’s writing

Manuscript page from Heart of Darkness

The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad offers a series of essays by leading Conrad scholars aimed at both students and the general reader. There’s a chronology and overview of Conrad’s life, then chapters that explore significant issues in his major writings, and deal in depth with individual works. These are followed by discussions of the special nature of Conrad’s narrative techniques, his complex relationships with late-Victorian imperialism and with literary Modernism, and his influence on other writers and artists. Each essay provides guidance to further reading, and a concluding chapter surveys the body of Conrad criticism.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Joseph Conrad’s writing table

Further reading

Amar Acheraiou Joseph Conrad and the Reader, London: Macmillan, 2009.

Jacques Berthoud, Joseph Conrad: The Major Phase, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.

Muriel Bradbrook, Joseph Conrad: Poland’s English Genius, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1941

Harold Bloom (ed), Joseph Conrad (Bloom’s Modern Critical Views, New Yoprk: Chelsea House Publishers, 2010

Hillel M. Daleski , Joseph Conrad: The Way of Dispossession, London: Faber, 1977

Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan, Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Aaron Fogel, Coercion to Speak: Conrad’s Poetics of Dialogue, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1985

John Dozier Gordon, Joseph Conrad: The Making of a Novelist, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1940

Albert J. Guerard, Conrad the Novelist, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1958

Robert Hampson, Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992

Jeremy Hawthorn, Joseph Conrad: Language and Fictional Self-Consciousness, London: Edward Arnold, 1979

Jeremy Hawthorn, Joseph Conrad: Narrative Technique and Ideological Commitment, London: Edward Arnold, 1990

Jeremy Hawthorn, Sexuality and the Erotic in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad, London: Continuum, 2007.

Owen Knowles, The Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990

Jakob Lothe, Joseph Conrad: Voice, Sequence, History, Genre, Ohio State University Press, 2008

Gustav Morf, The Polish Shades and Ghosts of Joseph Conrad, New York: Astra, 1976

Ross Murfin, Conrad Revisited: Essays for the Eighties, Tuscaloosa, Ala: University of Alabama Press, 1985

Jeffery Myers, Joseph Conrad: A Biography, Cooper Square Publishers, 2001.

Zdzislaw Najder, Joseph Conrad: A Life, Camden House, 2007.

George A. Panichas, Joseph Conrad: His Moral Vision, Mercer University Press, 2005.

John G. Peters, The Cambridge Introduction to Joseph Conrad, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

James Phelan, Joseph Conrad: Voice, Sequence, History, Genre, Ohio State University Press, 2008.

Edward Said, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 1966

Allan H. Simmons, Joseph Conrad: (Critical Issues), London: Macmillan, 2006.

J.H. Stape, The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996

John Stape, The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad, Arrow Books, 2008.

Peter Villiers, Joseph Conrad: Master Mariner, Seafarer Books, 2006.

Ian Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, London: Chatto and Windus, 1980

Cedric Watts, Joseph Conrad: (Writers and their Work), London: Northcote House, 1994.

Other writing by Joseph Conrad

Lord Jim (1900) is the earliest of Conrad’s big and serious novels, and it explores one of his favourite subjects – cowardice and moral redemption. Jim is a ship’s captain who in youthful ignorance commits the worst offence – abandoning his ship. He spends the remainder of his adult life in shameful obscurity in the South Seas, trying to re-build his confidence and his character. What makes the novel fascinating is not only the tragic but redemptive outcome, but the manner in which it is told. The narrator Marlowe recounts the events in a time scheme which shifts between past and present in an amazingly complex manner. This is one of the features which makes Conrad (born in the nineteenth century) considered one of the fathers of twentieth century modernism.
Buy the book from Amazon UK
Buy the book from Amazon US

Heart of Darkness (1902) is a tightly controlled novella which has assumed classic status as an account of the process of Imperialism. It documents the search for a mysterious Kurtz, who has ‘gone too far’ in his exploitation of Africans in the ivory trade. The reader is plunged deeper and deeper into the ‘horrors’ of what happened when Europeans invaded the continent. This might well go down in literary history as Conrad’s finest and most insightful achievement, and it is based on his own experiences as a sea captain. This volume also contains ‘An Outpost of Progress’ – the magnificent study in shabby cowardice which prefigures ‘Heart of Darkness’.
Buy the book from Amazon UK
Buy the book from Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2013

Joseph Conrad web links

Joseph Conrad at Mantex
Biography, tutorials, book reviews, study guides, videos, web links.

Joseph Conrad – his greatest novels and novellas
Brief notes introducing his major works in recommended editions.

Joseph Conrad at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of free eTexts in a variety of formats.

Joseph Conrad at Wikipedia
Biography, major works, literary career, style, politics, and further reading.

Joseph Conrad at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, production notes, box office, trivia, and quizzes.

Works by Joseph Conrad
Large online database of free HTML texts, digital scans, and eText versions of novels, stories, and occasional writings.

The Joseph Conrad Society (UK)
Conradian journal, reviews. and scholarly resources.

The Joseph Conrad Society of America
American-based – recent publications, journal, awards, conferences.

Hyper-Concordance of Conrad’s works
Locate a word or phrase – in the context of the novel or story.

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

The Black Mate was written, according to Conrad’s own reckoning, in 1886. This would make it his earliest tale or short story (though it is not so short). But it was not published until 1908, and was then republished posthumously as part of the collection Tales of Hearsay in 1925. The other stories in the collection were The Warrior’s Soul, Prince Roman, and The Tale.

The Black Mate – critical commentary

Narrative

The tale starts in first person narrative mode. The un-named narrator is a friend of the mate of the Sapphire Winston Bunter, and he is present in the restaurant conversation where the story begins. In fact Conrad rather coyly signals his presence in his own account of events.

There was also a very young shipmaster, with a little fair moustache and serious eyes, who said nothing, and only smiled faintly from time to time.

But on Bunter’s voyage aboard the Sapphire to Calcutta and back, events are presented in third person omniscient narrative mode, with the thoughts and feelings of the secondary and tertiary characters fully expressed.

Then when Bunter nears home and his wife inherits the money, the narrator suddenly reappears to present the conclusion to the story as a first person narrative again.

Conrad offers no explanation of how the information in the central part of the story reaches us, nor any persuasive logical reason why there should be two narrative modes at work in the one tale.

None of this would be terribly important were it not for the fact that Conrad has become celebrated for his inventive use of narrators and the complex structure of his tales and novels. But the fact is that he often makes mistakes in the logic and the narrative paths by which information reaches the reader – and this is an early example of that weakness, which is worth noting.

He also sometimes plays fast and lose with the conventions of tale-telling – as he does here. The narrator knows perfectly well at the outset of the tale why Bunter’s hair is so black, yet he conceals the fact from the reader with teasing hints that Bunter has a secret (without revealing what it is). In fact it is the narrator who advises Bunter to dye his hair in the first place. This device reduces the story to not much more than an elaborate and delayed joke.

The Black Mate – study resources

The Black Mate – CreateSpace editions – Amazon UK

The Black Mate – CreateSpace editions – Amazon US

The Complete Works of Joseph Conrad – Kindle eBook

The Black Mate – eBook versions at Project Gutenberg

Joseph Conrad: A Biography – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Routledge Guide to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad – Amazon UK

Notes on Life and Letters – Amazon UK

Joseph Conrad – biographical notes

The Black Mate – plot summary

A number of sea captains meet at a restaurant in the Port of London. They tease Captain Johns, who thinks that only young seamen should be on ships. Then they discuss ghosts and comment on Bunter, the mate of the Sapphire who once lost a ship in the Indian Ocean and who has strikingly black hair.

Bunter complains to the narrator that Captain Johns has been treating him suspiciously, and has been trying to persuade him to share his belief in ghosts and spiritualism. He has also been oppressed by a berthing master who recognises him from somewhere. It seems that Bunter has some sort of secret, as well as the bad luck that has dogged him ever since the loss of his ship. He has been a captain, but is now forced to accept the position of mate.

The Sapphire sets off bound for Calcutta, and encounters rough seas in the Southern Ocean, which results in breakages of some of Bunter’s personal belongings. Captain Johns continues to harass Bunter with his belief in spiritualism and he regards any signs of scepticism as a personal insult. Then one night Bunter suddenly falls down a ladder and injures his head. There is a general mystery regarding the reason for this accident. When he recovers he tells Captain Johns that he was startled by an apparition and fell backwards in terror.

Bunter continues to be ill, and he is converted to a belief in spiritualism. Then he reveals that the fright has turned his hair white.

Meanwhile, back in London Mrs Bunter inherits money from a distant relative but cannot pass the good news on to her husband because the Sapphire is en route back from Calcutta. She goes to meet the ship at Dunkirk, along with the narrator.

In Dunkirk, Bunter reveals to the narrator that he merely slipped on some brass plates at the top of the ladder, and his hair turned white because he ran out of the hair dye he had been using to make himself look younger. The ghostly apparition was an invention to placate Captain Johns. Bunter leaves the Sapphire and goes off with his wife.

Joseph Conrad – video biography

The Black Mate – principal characters

The Black Mate

first edition 1925 Fisher Unwin

The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad offers a series of essays by leading Conrad scholars aimed at both students and the general reader. There’s a chronology and overview of Conrad’s life, then chapters that explore significant issues in his major writings, and deal in depth with individual works. These are followed by discussions of the special nature of Conrad’s narrative techniques, his complex relationships with late-Victorian imperialism and with literary Modernism, and his influence on other writers and artists. Each essay provides guidance to further reading, and a concluding chapter surveys the body of Conrad criticism.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Joseph Conrad’s writing table

Further reading

Amar Acheraiou Joseph Conrad and the Reader, London: Macmillan, 2009.

Jacques Berthoud, Joseph Conrad: The Major Phase, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.

Muriel Bradbrook, Joseph Conrad: Poland’s English Genius, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1941

Harold Bloom (ed), Joseph Conrad (Bloom’s Modern Critical Views, New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 2010

Hillel M. Daleski , Joseph Conrad: The Way of Dispossession, London: Faber, 1977

Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan, Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Aaron Fogel, Coercion to Speak: Conrad’s Poetics of Dialogue, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1985

John Dozier Gordon, Joseph Conrad: The Making of a Novelist, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1940

Albert J. Guerard, Conrad the Novelist, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1958

Robert Hampson, Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992

Jeremy Hawthorn, Joseph Conrad: Language and Fictional Self-Consciousness, London: Edward Arnold, 1979

Jeremy Hawthorn, Joseph Conrad: Narrative Technique and Ideological Commitment, London: Edward Arnold, 1990

Jeremy Hawthorn, Sexuality and the Erotic in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad, London: Continuum, 2007.

Owen Knowles, The Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990

Jakob Lothe, Joseph Conrad: Voice, Sequence, History, Genre, Ohio State University Press, 2008

Gustav Morf, The Polish Shades and Ghosts of Joseph Conrad, New York: Astra, 1976

Ross Murfin, Conrad Revisited: Essays for the Eighties, Tuscaloosa, Ala: University of Alabama Press, 1985

Jeffery Myers, Joseph Conrad: A Biography, Cooper Square Publishers, 2001.

Zdzislaw Najder, Joseph Conrad: A Life, Camden House, 2007.

George A. Panichas, Joseph Conrad: His Moral Vision, Mercer University Press, 2005.

John G. Peters, The Cambridge Introduction to Joseph Conrad, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

James Phelan, Joseph Conrad: Voice, Sequence, History, Genre, Ohio State University Press, 2008.

Edward Said, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 1966

Allan H. Simmons, Joseph Conrad: (Critical Issues), London: Macmillan, 2006.

J.H. Stape, The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996

John Stape, The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad, Arrow Books, 2008.

Peter Villiers, Joseph Conrad: Master Mariner, Seafarer Books, 2006.

Ian Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, London: Chatto and Windus, 1980

Cedric Watts, Joseph Conrad: (Writers and their Work), London: Northcote House, 1994.

Other writing by Joseph Conrad

Lord Jim (1900) is the earliest of Conrad’s big and serious novels, and it explores one of his favourite subjects – cowardice and moral redemption. Jim is a ship’s captain who in youthful ignorance commits the worst offence – abandoning his ship. He spends the remainder of his adult life in shameful obscurity in the South Seas, trying to re-build his confidence and his character. What makes the novel fascinating is not only the tragic but redemptive outcome, but the manner in which it is told. The narrator Marlowe recounts the events in a time scheme which shifts between past and present in an amazingly complex manner. This is one of the features which makes Conrad (born in the nineteenth century) considered one of the fathers of twentieth century modernism.
Buy the book from Amazon UK
Buy the book from Amazon US

Heart of Darkness (1902) is a tightly controlled novella which has assumed classic status as an account of the process of Imperialism. It documents the search for a mysterious Kurtz, who has ‘gone too far’ in his exploitation of Africans in the ivory trade. The reader is plunged deeper and deeper into the ‘horrors’ of what happened when Europeans invaded the continent. This might well go down in literary history as Conrad’s finest and most insightful achievement, and it is based on his own experiences as a sea captain. This volume also contains ‘An Outpost of Progress’ – the magnificent study in shabby cowardice which prefigures ‘Heart of Darkness’.
Buy the book from Amazon UK
Buy the book from Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2013

Joseph Conrad web links

Joseph Conrad at Mantex
Biography, tutorials, book reviews, study guides, videos, web links.

Joseph Conrad – his greatest novels and novellas
Brief notes introducing his major works in recommended editions.

Joseph Conrad at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of free eTexts in a variety of formats.

Joseph Conrad at Wikipedia
Biography, major works, literary career, style, politics, and further reading.

Joseph Conrad at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, production notes, box office, trivia, and quizzes.

Works by Joseph Conrad
Large online database of free HTML texts, digital scans, and eText versions of novels, stories, and occasional writings.

The Joseph Conrad Society (UK)
Conradian journal, reviews. and scholarly resources.

The Joseph Conrad Society of America
American-based – recent publications, journal, awards, conferences.

Hyper-Concordance of Conrad’s works
Locate a word or phrase – in the context of the novel or story.

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

The Brute was written in early 1906, and published in The Daily Chronicle in December 1906. It was later collected in A Set of Six, published in 1908 (UK) and 1915 (US). The other stories in this collection of Joseph Conrad’s work were The Informer, An Anarchist, Gaspar Ruiz, The Duel, and Il Conde.

The Brute – critical commentary

Conrad’s own introduction to A Set of Six gives some idea of his methods of fictional composition and even a glimpse of what he thinks fiction ought to be. He mixes personal anecdote with what he sees as historical fact, and (quite reasonably) he also splices two separate incidents to make a single tale.

Perhaps the most interesting thing from the point of view of a modern reader is that he sees the necessity to provide some sort of verisimilitude – to claim that ‘this is really tue’ or ‘this really happened’ – as if a piece of fiction could not provide its own self-justification.

This is the tradition of realism in the novel (and tale) still in its strongest phase in the early twentieth century – for which we should be thankful. But it is worth noting, because so many other facets of Conrad’s writing contravene the rules of narrative logic and chronological coherence demanded by realism – even though he produced some stunning dramatic effects whilst doing so. See my various comments on both the Tales and the Novels for examples of these contraventions.

The Brute, which is the only sea-story in the volume, is … associated with a direct narrative and based on a suggestion gathered on warm human lips. I will not disclose the real name of the criminal ship but the first I heard of her homicidal habits was from the late Captain Blake, commanding a London ship in which I served in 1884 as Second Officer … In his young days he had had a personal experience of the brute and it is perhaps for that reason that I have put the story into the mouth of a young man and made of it what the reader will see. The existence of the brute was a fact.

The end of the brute as related in the story is also a fact, well-known at the time though it really happened to another ship, of great beauty of form and of blameless character, which certainly deserved a better fate. I have unscrupulously adapted it to the needs of my story thinking that I had there something in the nature of poetical justice. I hope that little villainy will not cast a shadow upon the general honesty of my proceedings as a writer of tales.

The Brute – study resources

A Set of Six – CreateSpace editions – Amazon UK

A Set of Six – CreateSpace editions – Amazon US

The Complete Works of Joseph Conrad – Kindle eBook

A Set of Six – eBook versions at Project Gutenberg

Joseph Conrad: A Biography – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Routledge Guide to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad – Amazon UK

Notes on Life and Letters – Amazon UK

Joseph Conrad – biographical notes

The Brute – plot summary

The narrator Ned enters a pub where two seamen, Stoner and Jermyn are in conversation with a stranger. The stranger is expostulating about a ship that has a reputation for causing problems and even deaths. The ship has been built especially big and heavy by its owners, the Apse family – which is also the ship’s name. He claims that the ship behaves erratically, damages other ships, and is responsible for the death of at least one person every year.

He recounts joining the ship at fourteen and seeing a young sailor killed in a fall from a mast on his first day on board. He serves for three years then transfers to another ship. Later he returns to the Apse Family, serving under his brother Charley, who is first mate. They sail to Australia where Charley appears to become engaged to Maggie, a relative of the captain.

The journey home is uneventful, but on reaching port in Gravesend, there is a shipping accident and Maggie is caught up in the ship’s anchor and drowned. Charley and Ned go home, where Charley succumbs to a fever. The later history of the ship is that a sailor Wilmot neglects his watch because he is dallying with a woman passenger. As a result of this the Apse Family runs aground on some rocks and breaks up in a storm.

Joseph Conrad – video biography

The Brute – principal characters

Joseph Conrad’s writing

Manuscript page from Heart of Darkness

The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad offers a series of essays by leading Conrad scholars aimed at both students and the general reader. There’s a chronology and overview of Conrad’s life, then chapters that explore significant issues in his major writings, and deal in depth with individual works. These are followed by discussions of the special nature of Conrad’s narrative techniques, his complex relationships with late-Victorian imperialism and with literary Modernism, and his influence on other writers and artists. Each essay provides guidance to further reading, and a concluding chapter surveys the body of Conrad criticism.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Joseph Conrad’s writing table

Further reading

Amar Acheraiou Joseph Conrad and the Reader, London: Macmillan, 2009.

Jacques Berthoud, Joseph Conrad: The Major Phase, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.

Muriel Bradbrook, Joseph Conrad: Poland’s English Genius, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1941

Harold Bloom (ed), Joseph Conrad (Bloom’s Modern Critical Views, New Yoprk: Chelsea House Publishers, 2010

Hillel M. Daleski , Joseph Conrad: The Way of Dispossession, London: Faber, 1977

Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan, Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Aaron Fogel, Coercion to Speak: Conrad’s Poetics of Dialogue, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1985

John Dozier Gordon, Joseph Conrad: The Making of a Novelist, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1940

Albert J. Guerard, Conrad the Novelist, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1958

Robert Hampson, Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992

Jeremy Hawthorn, Joseph Conrad: Language and Fictional Self-Consciousness, London: Edward Arnold, 1979

Jeremy Hawthorn, Joseph Conrad: Narrative Technique and Ideological Commitment, London: Edward Arnold, 1990

Jeremy Hawthorn, Sexuality and the Erotic in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad, London: Continuum, 2007.

Owen Knowles, The Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990

Jakob Lothe, Joseph Conrad: Voice, Sequence, History, Genre, Ohio State University Press, 2008

Gustav Morf, The Polish Shades and Ghosts of Joseph Conrad, New York: Astra, 1976

Ross Murfin, Conrad Revisited: Essays for the Eighties, Tuscaloosa, Ala: University of Alabama Press, 1985

Jeffery Myers, Joseph Conrad: A Biography, Cooper Square Publishers, 2001.

Zdzislaw Najder, Joseph Conrad: A Life, Camden House, 2007.

George A. Panichas, Joseph Conrad: His Moral Vision, Mercer University Press, 2005.

John G. Peters, The Cambridge Introduction to Joseph Conrad, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

James Phelan, Joseph Conrad: Voice, Sequence, History, Genre, Ohio State University Press, 2008.

Edward Said, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 1966

Allan H. Simmons, Joseph Conrad: (Critical Issues), London: Macmillan, 2006.

J.H. Stape, The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996

John Stape, The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad, Arrow Books, 2008.

Peter Villiers, Joseph Conrad: Master Mariner, Seafarer Books, 2006.

Ian Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, London: Chatto and Windus, 1980

Cedric Watts, Joseph Conrad: (Writers and their Work), London: Northcote House, 1994.

Other writing by Joseph Conrad

Lord Jim (1900) is the earliest of Conrad’s big and serious novels, and it explores one of his favourite subjects – cowardice and moral redemption. Jim is a ship’s captain who in youthful ignorance commits the worst offence – abandoning his ship. He spends the remainder of his adult life in shameful obscurity in the South Seas, trying to re-build his confidence and his character. What makes the novel fascinating is not only the tragic but redemptive outcome, but the manner in which it is told. The narrator Marlowe recounts the events in a time scheme which shifts between past and present in an amazingly complex manner. This is one of the features which makes Conrad (born in the nineteenth century) considered one of the fathers of twentieth century modernism.
Buy the book from Amazon UK
Buy the book from Amazon US

Heart of Darkness (1902) is a tightly controlled novella which has assumed classic status as an account of the process of Imperialism. It documents the search for a mysterious Kurtz, who has ‘gone too far’ in his exploitation of Africans in the ivory trade. The reader is plunged deeper and deeper into the ‘horrors’ of what happened when Europeans invaded the continent. This might well go down in literary history as Conrad’s finest and most insightful achievement, and it is based on his own experiences as a sea captain. This volume also contains ‘An Outpost of Progress’ – the magnificent study in shabby cowardice which prefigures ‘Heart of Darkness’.
Buy the book from Amazon UK
Buy the book from Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2013

Joseph Conrad links

Joseph Conrad at Mantex
Biography, tutorials, book reviews, study guides, videos, web links.

Joseph Conrad – his greatest novels and novellas
Brief notes introducing his major works in recommended editions.

Joseph Conrad at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of free eTexts in a variety of formats.

Joseph Conrad at Wikipedia
Biography, major works, literary career, style, politics, and further reading.

Joseph Conrad at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, production notes, box office, trivia, and quizzes.

Works by Joseph Conrad
Large online database of free HTML texts, digital scans, and eText versions of novels, stories, and occasional writings.

The Joseph Conrad Society (UK)
Conradian journal, reviews. and scholarly resources.

The Joseph Conrad Society of America
American-based – recent publications, journal, awards, conferences.

Hyper-Concordance of Conrad’s works
Locate a word or phrase – in the context of the novel or story.

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

The Duel – full title The Duel: A Military Story – was first serialized in The Pall Mall Magazine (UK) in early 1908, and later that year in the US as The Point of Honour in the periodical Forum. It was later collected in A Set of Six in 1908 and published by Garden City Publishing in 1924. The other stories in this collection of Joseph Conrad’s tales are are Gaspar Ruiz, An Anarchist, The Informer, The Brute, and Il Conde.

The Duel – critical commentary

Background

This is another of Conrad’s stories with the Napoleonic wars as a background (the others being The Inn of the Two Witches (1913) and The Warrior’s Soul (1915). Perhaps Conrad was looking back on a previous period in history which engulfed a whole continent in wars. The sad fact is that none of these historically-based tales are at all satisfactory from an artistic point of view when compared with his best work.

You can see the points Conrad is making easily enough in this tale. An innocent man is challenged according to a Code of Honour he feels duty bound to accept. His antagonist is vengeful, petty, and jealous. The duel to establish someone’s honour is a complete waste of time. D’Hubert does everything he can to give Ferand satisfaction: he even ends up secretly providing him with a pension – but still the blaggard Ferand continues to nurture what he sees as his legitimate but unfulfilled grievance.

Duelling

The rules of duelling varied (slightly) from one country to another, and they changed over time – from their origins in the chivalric age to their expiry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But no rules of engagement ever recorded permitted hiding behind trees. That would be completely contrary to the whole notion of gentlemanly behaviour and sporting ethics. It’s a puzzle why Conrad should make such a blunder when he is normally so accurate with the technical details of the things he describes.

But then, if ever a tale was spun out way beyond its natural length, it’s The Duel, which later became more ironically titled A Point of Honour. It suffers from all the weaknesses of Conrad’s shorter fictions – repetition, shifting locations, weak structure, and unconvincing historical context. It is just possible that because the tale was serialized in The Pall Mall Magazine that Conrad was tempted into these literary excesses.

The Duel – study resources

The Duel – CreateSpace editions – Amazon UK

The Duel – CreateSpace editions – Amazon US

The Complete Works of Joseph Conrad – Kindle eBook

The Duel – eBook versions at Project Gutenberg

Joseph Conrad: A Biography – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Routledge Guide to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad – Amazon UK

Notes on Life and Letters – Amazon UK

Joseph Conrad – biographical notes

The Duel – plot summary

Part I.   Lieutenant Armand D’Hubert calls at the house where Lieutenant Ferand is billeted in Strasbourg, in search of information on his whereabouts. Ferand has risen early, fought a duel with a civilian and injured him, then gone out to call on a woman who holds a salon. D’Hubert goes to the house and transmits to Ferand the official message that he must return to his quarters and remain under arrest. Ferand is annoyed, and cannot see that he has done anything wrong. D’Hubert explains that his opponent’s civilian friends are well connected and have made complaints. When the two men return to the house Ferand threatens D’Hubert for disturbing his afternoon. Ferand draws his sword and challenges him to a duel on the spot, in the rear garden. D’Hubert realises that Ferand seriously wishes to kill him, and that the duel will get both of them into trouble, but he manages to strike a damaging blow to Ferand, which cuts his arm. D’Hubert then visits the regimental surgeon and sends him to attend Ferand. He is annoyed with Ferand but glad he has not killed him.

D’Hubert is disgraced and reduced to the ranks. Then he is visited by the surgeon who tells him that Ferand, having now recovered, intends to continue the dispute with a further duel. The public assume that there must be a very serious difference between the two soldiers to make them risk their reputations in this way.

Part II.   Various theories are advanced in society to try to explain the conflict. The two men arrange another duel, in which D’Hubert is slightly hurt. Their seconds urge a reconciliation, but it does not take place. There is a proposal to appoint a deciding Court of Honour to resolve the dispute, but Ferand prefers to say nothing.

The colonel of D’Hubert’s regiment is concerned, takes a parental interest, and asks for an explanation. D’Hubert refuses to go into details, but assures him it is a matter of honour – both personal, and for the regiment. The colonel imposes a twelve month ban on any further duelling, during which time D’Hubert is promoted. This renders any further challenge impossible under the codes of duelling, because of the differences in rank of the disputants.

Ferand then seeks and gains promotion, which leads to another duel. This leaves them both cut to ribbons. After they recover D’Hubert is promoted again onto the personal staff of a marshall. Ferand cannot stand the idea of having to take orders from him. The next duel takes place on horseback at dawn in Lubeck. D’Hubert inflicts a single damaging blow to Ferand’s forehead and the duel is stopped. Both men stay on in the army, and gradually grow older.

Part III.   During the retreat from Moscow in Napoleon’s disastrous campaign, the two men are yoked in misery and defeat, but choose to ignore each other. However, they co-operate in military terms, and even help each other to survive. D’Hubert becomes dressed in a bizarre collection of old clothes collected from the wreckage of the retreat. He wants a peaceful life, and even begins to doubt the wisdom of Napoleon. However, his good conduct is favourably noticed by the ‘Emperor’, and when he is promoted to a general, this inflames Ferand’s rivalry.

D’Hubert is badly wounded, and recuperates at his Royalist sister’s home in the south of France. Then he is despatched to Paris and is introduced to a girl who he plans to marry. Napoleon is on St Helena, and the royalists plan to persecute Ferand. D’Hubert intervenes with the Minister of Police, and has Ferand’s name removed from the list of Bonapartist officers due to be punished (executed).

As a result, Ferand is retired from the army and banished to an obscure town in the middle of France. Instead of being grateful, he is outraged at the indignity, and plans yet another duel with D’Hubert.

Part IV.   D’Hubert is in love with Adele, the girl his sister has chosen for him, though she does not seem to reciprocate his feelings. But Ferand’s seconds catch up with him and present the renewed challenge. D’Hubert consults Chevalier de Vallmassigne, Adele’s royalist uncle, who suggests he can refuse the challenge – but D’Hubert feels unable to do so. He sees it as an inevitability he must face.

The duel takes place early next morning with pistols. D’Hubert nonchalantly eats an orange before the contest [a nod to Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin] . Ferand fires twice, but misses D’Hubert who hides behind trees, then spares his rival’s life yet again by conserving his two unspent shots for any time in the future.

He gets back home to find that the Chevalier de Vallmassigne has told Adele what has been going on, and she has. run all the way to D’Hubert’s house in anxiety about his wellbeing. This effectively reveals the true state of her feelings towards D’Hubert, who is overjoyed. They are married, after which D’Hubert writes to Ferand revoking his two-shot advantage, and even names one of his two sons after him, and (secretly) pays a pension to him for his upkeep in retirement. But Ferand remains unreconciled.

Joseph Conrad – video biography

The Duel – principal characters

Joseph Conrad’s writing

Manuscript page from Heart of Darkness

The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad offers a series of essays by leading Conrad scholars aimed at both students and the general reader. There’s a chronology and overview of Conrad’s life, then chapters that explore significant issues in his major writings, and deal in depth with individual works. These are followed by discussions of the special nature of Conrad’s narrative techniques, his complex relationships with late-Victorian imperialism and with literary Modernism, and his influence on other writers and artists. Each essay provides guidance to further reading, and a concluding chapter surveys the body of Conrad criticism.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Joseph Conrad’s writing table

Further reading

Amar Acheraiou Joseph Conrad and the Reader, London: Macmillan, 2009.

Jacques Berthoud, Joseph Conrad: The Major Phase, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.

Muriel Bradbrook, Joseph Conrad: Poland’s English Genius, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1941

Harold Bloom (ed), Joseph Conrad (Bloom’s Modern Critical Views, New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 2010

Hillel M. Daleski , Joseph Conrad: The Way of Dispossession, London: Faber, 1977

Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan, Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Aaron Fogel, Coercion to Speak: Conrad’s Poetics of Dialogue, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1985

John Dozier Gordon, Joseph Conrad: The Making of a Novelist, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1940

Albert J. Guerard, Conrad the Novelist, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1958

Robert Hampson, Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992

Jeremy Hawthorn, Joseph Conrad: Language and Fictional Self-Consciousness, London: Edward Arnold, 1979

Jeremy Hawthorn, Joseph Conrad: Narrative Technique and Ideological Commitment, London: Edward Arnold, 1990

Jeremy Hawthorn, Sexuality and the Erotic in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad, London: Continuum, 2007.

Owen Knowles, The Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990

Jakob Lothe, Joseph Conrad: Voice, Sequence, History, Genre, Ohio State University Press, 2008

Gustav Morf, The Polish Shades and Ghosts of Joseph Conrad, New York: Astra, 1976

Ross Murfin, Conrad Revisited: Essays for the Eighties, Tuscaloosa, Ala: University of Alabama Press, 1985

Jeffery Myers, Joseph Conrad: A Biography, Cooper Square Publishers, 2001.

Zdzislaw Najder, Joseph Conrad: A Life, Camden House, 2007.

George A. Panichas, Joseph Conrad: His Moral Vision, Mercer University Press, 2005.

John G. Peters, The Cambridge Introduction to Joseph Conrad, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

James Phelan, Joseph Conrad: Voice, Sequence, History, Genre, Ohio State University Press, 2008.

Edward Said, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 1966

Allan H. Simmons, Joseph Conrad: (Critical Issues), London: Macmillan, 2006.

J.H. Stape, The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996

John Stape, The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad, Arrow Books, 2008.

Peter Villiers, Joseph Conrad: Master Mariner, Seafarer Books, 2006.

Ian Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, London: Chatto and Windus, 1980

Cedric Watts, Joseph Conrad: (Writers and their Work), London: Northcote House, 1994.

Other writing by Joseph Conrad

Lord Jim (1900) is the earliest of Conrad’s big and serious novels, and it explores one of his favourite subjects – cowardice and moral redemption. Jim is a ship’s captain who in youthful ignorance commits the worst offence – abandoning his ship. He spends the remainder of his adult life in shameful obscurity in the South Seas, trying to re-build his confidence and his character. What makes the novel fascinating is not only the tragic but redemptive outcome, but the manner in which it is told. The narrator Marlowe recounts the events in a time scheme which shifts between past and present in an amazingly complex manner. This is one of the features which makes Conrad (born in the nineteenth century) considered one of the fathers of twentieth century modernism.
Buy the book from Amazon UK
Buy the book from Amazon US

Heart of Darkness (1902) is a tightly controlled novella which has assumed classic status as an account of the process of Imperialism. It documents the search for a mysterious Kurtz, who has ‘gone too far’ in his exploitation of Africans in the ivory trade. The reader is plunged deeper and deeper into the ‘horrors’ of what happened when Europeans invaded the continent. This might well go down in literary history as Conrad’s finest and most insightful achievement, and it is based on his own experiences as a sea captain. This volume also contains ‘An Outpost of Progress’ – the magnificent study in shabby cowardice which prefigures ‘Heart of Darkness’.
Buy the book from Amazon UK
Buy the book from Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2013

Joseph Conrad web links

Joseph Conrad at Mantex
Biography, tutorials, book reviews, study guides, videos, web links.

Joseph Conrad – his greatest novels and novellas
Brief notes introducing his major works in recommended editions.

Joseph Conrad at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of free eTexts in a variety of formats.

Joseph Conrad at Wikipedia
Biography, major works, literary career, style, politics, and further reading.

Joseph Conrad at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, production notes, box office, trivia, and quizzes.

Works by Joseph Conrad
Large online database of free HTML texts, digital scans, and eText versions of novels, stories, and occasional writings.

The Joseph Conrad Society (UK)
Conradian journal, reviews. and scholarly resources.

The Joseph Conrad Society of America
American-based – recent publications, journal, awards, conferences.

Hyper-Concordance of Conrad’s works
Locate a word or phrase – in the context of the novel or story.

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

The Idiots was Joseph Conrad’s first short story. It was written in 1896 during his honeymoon and published in The Savoy magazine later that year. It was later collected in Tales of Unrest, 1898. The other stories in the collection are Karain, A Memory, An Outpost of Progress, The Return, and The Lagoon.

The Idiots – critical commentary

It is difficult to see this story as anything other than a study in congenital abnormality. Susan’s father was mentally deficient; she herself bears four children who all have the same defect; and she ends up acting in a socially aberrant manner, first of all committing murder (though under strong provocation) then losing her hold on reality when she has been abandoned by her own mother. Finally she commits suicide. It is amazing to think that these gloomy, savage, and tragic subjects were chosen by Conrad for a story he wrote whilst on his honeymoon.

In 1883, Sir Francis Galton, the half-cousin of Charles Darwin, formulated the notion of what came to be called eugenics – the idea that the race could be ‘improved’ by removing unwanted elements from the genetic pool from which human beings are created. These unwanted elements tended to be anything which was unusual or abnormal – without any scientific evidence linking the abnormality to a genetic cause. (This was in a pre-DNA era). In the early twentieth century the notion of eugenics was used as a pretext for all sorts of social engineering, including forced sterilization and euthanasia – the sort of head-measuring pseudo-science that led to the Nazis and their absurd notions of a ‘super-race’.

The discovery of DNA by Crick and Watson in 1953 and subsequent developments in molecular biology have put paid to much of these notions, but it is interesting to note the congruence of the dates in Conrad’s story and the origins of these ideas, which were taken up quite vigorously at the time they were first publicised.

The Savoy magazine

It is also interesting to note that Conrad published his first story in The Savoy magazine. This was newly founded in the same year, 1896, and was established by Leonard Smithers, Arthur Symons, and Aubrey Beardsley – all rather controversial figures in what at the time was called the ‘decadent movement’, which embraced the idea of ‘art for art’s sake’. Other contributors to the magazine included W.B. Yeats, Max Beerbohm, and Oscar Wilde. None of these figures constitute the sort of artistic context we nowadays associate with Conrad.

The magazine was named after the luxurious Art Nouveau hotel on the Strand which had opened in 1889, built by Richard D’Oyly Carte with the profits from his successful Gilbert and Sullivan operas. As a publication of contemporary art, it became quite famous, with a policy that declared it was ‘a manifesto in revolt against Victorian materialism’. But like many small and influential magazines, it had a lifespan of only eight issues, running from January to December in 1896.

The Idiots – study resources

Tales of Unrest – CreateSpace editions – Amazon UK

Tales of Unrest – CreateSpace editions – Amazon US

The Complete Works of Joseph Conrad – Kindle eBook

Tales of Unrest – eBook versions at Project Gutenberg

The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Routledge Guide to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad – Amazon UK

Joseph Conrad: A Biography – Amazon UK

Notes on Life and Letters – Amazon UK

Joseph Conrad – biographical notes

The Idiots – plot summary

The story opens with a succession of mentally retarded children watching the narrator’s cart pass by. They are the offspring of a local farmer who is now dead. Jean-Piere Bacadou returned from military service to find the family farm run down. He decides to take over from his aged parents.

He gets married; his mother dies; and twin boys are born. The parents discover that the boys are retarded. Another son is born who is also retarded. As a reaction, Bacadou converts from a republican to Catholic royalist.

He feels it is a bitter injustice to have not just one but three retarded sons. When a retarded daughter is born, he regrets his religious conversion. He passionately desires a son who can take on the tradition and continuity of the farm. He takes out all his inner rage on his wife Susan.

One night Susan arrives at her mother’s house to announce that she has killed Bacadou, stabbing him with a pair of scissors. Since Susan’s father was ‘weak in the head’ her mother Mrs Levaille thinks there might be some hereditary curse, and she disowns her daughter. Susan runs off into the night, pursued by what she thinks of as the image of her husband.

One of the men from her mother’s shop pursues her, but she imagines in her panic and terror that it’s her dead husband. When he advances towards her in what she sees as a menacing manner, she throws herself off a cliff into the sea.

Joseph Conrad – video biography

The Idiots – principal characters

Joseph Conrad’s writing

Manuscript page from Heart of Darkness

The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad offers a series of essays by leading Conrad scholars aimed at both students and the general reader. There’s a chronology and overview of Conrad’s life, then chapters that explore significant issues in his major writings, and deal in depth with individual works. These are followed by discussions of the special nature of Conrad’s narrative techniques, his complex relationships with late-Victorian imperialism and with literary Modernism, and his influence on other writers and artists. Each essay provides guidance to further reading, and a concluding chapter surveys the body of Conrad criticism.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Joseph Conrad’s writing table

Further reading

Amar Acheraiou Joseph Conrad and the Reader, London: Macmillan, 2009.

Jacques Berthoud, Joseph Conrad: The Major Phase, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.

Muriel Bradbrook, Joseph Conrad: Poland’s English Genius, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1941

Harold Bloom (ed), Joseph Conrad (Bloom’s Modern Critical Views, New Yoprk: Chelsea House Publishers, 2010

Hillel M. Daleski , Joseph Conrad: The Way of Dispossession, London: Faber, 1977

Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan, Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Aaron Fogel, Coercion to Speak: Conrad’s Poetics of Dialogue, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1985

John Dozier Gordon, Joseph Conrad: The Making of a Novelist, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1940

Albert J. Guerard, Conrad the Novelist, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1958

Robert Hampson, Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992

Jeremy Hawthorn, Joseph Conrad: Language and Fictional Self-Consciousness, London: Edward Arnold, 1979

Jeremy Hawthorn, Joseph Conrad: Narrative Technique and Ideological Commitment, London: Edward Arnold, 1990

Jeremy Hawthorn, Sexuality and the Erotic in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad, London: Continuum, 2007.

Owen Knowles, The Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990

Jakob Lothe, Joseph Conrad: Voice, Sequence, History, Genre, Ohio State University Press, 2008

Gustav Morf, The Polish Shades and Ghosts of Joseph Conrad, New York: Astra, 1976

Ross Murfin, Conrad Revisited: Essays for the Eighties, Tuscaloosa, Ala: University of Alabama Press, 1985

Jeffery Myers, Joseph Conrad: A Biography, Cooper Square Publishers, 2001.

Zdzislaw Najder, Joseph Conrad: A Life, Camden House, 2007.

George A. Panichas, Joseph Conrad: His Moral Vision, Mercer University Press, 2005.

John G. Peters, The Cambridge Introduction to Joseph Conrad, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

James Phelan, Joseph Conrad: Voice, Sequence, History, Genre, Ohio State University Press, 2008.

Edward Said, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 1966

Allan H. Simmons, Joseph Conrad: (Critical Issues), London: Macmillan, 2006.

J.H. Stape, The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996

John Stape, The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad, Arrow Books, 2008.

Peter Villiers, Joseph Conrad: Master Mariner, Seafarer Books, 2006.

Ian Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, London: Chatto and Windus, 1980

Cedric Watts, Joseph Conrad: (Writers and their Work), London: Northcote House, 1994.

Other writing by Joseph Conrad

Lord Jim (1900) is the earliest of Conrad’s big and serious novels, and it explores one of his favourite subjects – cowardice and moral redemption. Jim is a ship’s captain who in youthful ignorance commits the worst offence – abandoning his ship. He spends the remainder of his adult life in shameful obscurity in the South Seas, trying to re-build his confidence and his character. What makes the novel fascinating is not only the tragic but redemptive outcome, but the manner in which it is told. The narrator Marlowe recounts the events in a time scheme which shifts between past and present in an amazingly complex manner. This is one of the features which makes Conrad (born in the nineteenth century) considered one of the fathers of twentieth century modernism.
Buy the book from Amazon UK
Buy the book from Amazon US

Heart of Darkness (1902) is a tightly controlled novella which has assumed classic status as an account of the process of Imperialism. It documents the search for a mysterious Kurtz, who has ‘gone too far’ in his exploitation of Africans in the ivory trade. The reader is plunged deeper and deeper into the ‘horrors’ of what happened when Europeans invaded the continent. This might well go down in literary history as Conrad’s finest and most insightful achievement, and it is based on his own experiences as a sea captain. This volume also contains ‘An Outpost of Progress’ – the magnificent study in shabby cowardice which prefigures ‘Heart of Darkness’.
Buy the book from Amazon UK
Buy the book from Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2013

Joseph Conrad web links

Joseph Conrad at Mantex
Biography, tutorials, book reviews, study guides, videos, web links.

Joseph Conrad – his greatest novels and novellas
Brief notes introducing his major works in recommended editions.

Joseph Conrad at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of free eTexts in a variety of formats.

Joseph Conrad at Wikipedia
Biography, major works, literary career, style, politics, and further reading.

Joseph Conrad at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, production notes, box office, trivia, and quizzes.

Works by Joseph Conrad
Large online database of free HTML texts, digital scans, and eText versions of novels, stories, and occasional writings.

The Joseph Conrad Society (UK)
Conradian journal, reviews. and scholarly resources.

The Joseph Conrad Society of America
American-based – recent publications, journal, awards, conferences.

Hyper-Concordance of Conrad’s works
Locate a word or phrase – in the context of the novel or story.

More on Joseph Conrad
Twentieth century literature
Joseph Conrad complete tales

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

The Informer was written before January 1906 and first published in December 1906, in Harper’s Magazine. It was later collected in A Set of Six, 1908 (UK), 1915 (US). The other stories in this collection of Joseph Conrad’s work are Gaspar Ruiz, An Anarchist, The Brute, The Duel, and Il Conde.

The Informer – critical commentary

Conrad took an active and well-informed interest in relations between anarchist or revolutionary movements (which at the time were thought to be one and the same thing) and the upper echelons of the very society they were supposed to be in the process of overthrowing.

This was a phenomenon he explored more thoroughly in both The Secret Agent (1907) and Under WesternEyes (1911). There he shows complex relationships and often contradictory policies between police and government officials in their dealings with anarchists – and certainly rivalries between foreign agencies.

The Informer encapsulates all these elements in one short tale. The anarchists are exploiting the sympathies of the upper-class young woman. She owns the house because her father is a rich government official – and he works in an office in the house next door.

The anarchists hide behind a veneer of respectability (which they are supposed to despise) and even carry on clandestine business activities in imitation of the bourgeoisie they theoretically wish to overthrow. They also have an informer, Severin, planted firmly within their midst.

But the major character study in political contradictions is Mr X himself – a man who operates at the highest levels of political activism: it is he who has been sent from Paris to investigate the possibility of a spy in the group. But in fact he is mainly taken up with the pursuit of everything that is a product of cultural refinement in bourgeois society – its artefacts, cuisine, and fine wines. He is very technically an anarchist in a very theoretical sense, but in fact all the values and the culture to which he devotes himself are the product of the leisured bourgeois class.

Conrad is fully aware of this glaring contradiction, and it is this which forms the principal interest in the tale. That is the reason that Mr X has been sent to the narrator as an example of a ‘collector’s item’ by his friend in Paris.

The Informer – study resources

A Set of Six – CreateSpace editions – Amazon UK

A Set of Six – CreateSpace editions – Amazon US

The Complete Works of Joseph Conrad – Kindle eBook

A Set of Six – eBook versions at Project Gutenberg

Joseph Conrad: A Biography – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Routledge Guide to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad – Amazon UK

Notes on Life and Letters – Amazon UK

Joseph Conrad – biographical notes

The Informer – plot summary

The un-named English narrator, a collector of antiques, is visited, on the recommendation of a friend in Paris, by Mr X – a fellow collector, an anarchist, and a bon viveur. Mr X explains the complicity between anarchists and certain elements of the classes they wish to overthrow. He describes the Hermione Street anarchist headquarters in London set up in the house of a young middle-class woman supporter. The group take over the ground floor restaurant, establish a business exporting tinned soup on the top floor, and set up a printing press in the basement. But despite good organisation, all the actions planned there are foiled by the police. Mr X arrives from Paris to investigate the possibility of there being an informer in the group. He interviews the Lady Amateur patroness of the group, and meets her admirer Severin.

A plan emerges to blow up the building next door which houses a government department. Mr X is sure that the police will raid the Hermione Street headquarters, so he organises a fake raid by sham police, hoping to flush out the informer. When the bogus raid takes place the group are ‘arrested’ in the cellar, and then are joined by the Lady Amateur and her lover. Severin gives himself away to the fake inspector by trying to protect her, and when his mistake is exposed he takes poison and dies. Mr X then takes the Lady Amateur home.

Joseph Conrad – video biography

The Informer – principal characters

Joseph Conrad’s writing

Manuscript page from Heart of Darkness

The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad offers a series of essays by leading Conrad scholars aimed at both students and the general reader. There’s a chronology and overview of Conrad’s life, then chapters that explore significant issues in his major writings, and deal in depth with individual works. These are followed by discussions of the special nature of Conrad’s narrative techniques, his complex relationships with late-Victorian imperialism and with literary Modernism, and his influence on other writers and artists. Each essay provides guidance to further reading, and a concluding chapter surveys the body of Conrad criticism.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Joseph Conrad’s writing table

Further reading

Amar Acheraiou Joseph Conrad and the Reader, London: Macmillan, 2009.

Jacques Berthoud, Joseph Conrad: The Major Phase, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.

Muriel Bradbrook, Joseph Conrad: Poland’s English Genius, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1941

Harold Bloom (ed), Joseph Conrad (Bloom’s Modern Critical Views, New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 2010

Hillel M. Daleski , Joseph Conrad: The Way of Dispossession, London: Faber, 1977

Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan, Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Aaron Fogel, Coercion to Speak: Conrad’s Poetics of Dialogue, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1985

John Dozier Gordon, Joseph Conrad: The Making of a Novelist, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1940

Albert J. Guerard, Conrad the Novelist, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1958

Robert Hampson, Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992

Jeremy Hawthorn, Joseph Conrad: Language and Fictional Self-Consciousness, London: Edward Arnold, 1979

Jeremy Hawthorn, Joseph Conrad: Narrative Technique and Ideological Commitment, London: Edward Arnold, 1990

Jeremy Hawthorn, Sexuality and the Erotic in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad, London: Continuum, 2007.

Owen Knowles, The Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990

Jakob Lothe, Joseph Conrad: Voice, Sequence, History, Genre, Ohio State University Press, 2008

Gustav Morf, The Polish Shades and Ghosts of Joseph Conrad, New York: Astra, 1976

Ross Murfin, Conrad Revisited: Essays for the Eighties, Tuscaloosa, Ala: University of Alabama Press, 1985

Jeffery Myers, Joseph Conrad: A Biography, Cooper Square Publishers, 2001.

Zdzislaw Najder, Joseph Conrad: A Life, Camden House, 2007.

George A. Panichas, Joseph Conrad: His Moral Vision, Mercer University Press, 2005.

John G. Peters, The Cambridge Introduction to Joseph Conrad, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

James Phelan, Joseph Conrad: Voice, Sequence, History, Genre, Ohio State University Press, 2008.

Edward Said, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 1966

Allan H. Simmons, Joseph Conrad: (Critical Issues), London: Macmillan, 2006.

J.H. Stape, The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996

John Stape, The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad, Arrow Books, 2008.

Peter Villiers, Joseph Conrad: Master Mariner, Seafarer Books, 2006.

Ian Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, London: Chatto and Windus, 1980

Cedric Watts, Joseph Conrad: (Writers and their Work), London: Northcote House, 1994.

Other writing by Joseph Conrad

Lord Jim (1900) is the earliest of Conrad’s big and serious novels, and it explores one of his favourite subjects – cowardice and moral redemption. Jim is a ship’s captain who in youthful ignorance commits the worst offence – abandoning his ship. He spends the remainder of his adult life in shameful obscurity in the South Seas, trying to re-build his confidence and his character. What makes the novel fascinating is not only the tragic but redemptive outcome, but the manner in which it is told. The narrator Marlowe recounts the events in a time scheme which shifts between past and present in an amazingly complex manner. This is one of the features which makes Conrad (born in the nineteenth century) considered one of the fathers of twentieth century modernism.
Buy the book from Amazon UK
Buy the book from Amazon US

Heart of Darkness (1902) is a tightly controlled novella which has assumed classic status as an account of the process of Imperialism. It documents the search for a mysterious Kurtz, who has ‘gone too far’ in his exploitation of Africans in the ivory trade. The reader is plunged deeper and deeper into the ‘horrors’ of what happened when Europeans invaded the continent. This might well go down in literary history as Conrad’s finest and most insightful achievement, and it is based on his own experiences as a sea captain. This volume also contains ‘An Outpost of Progress’ – the magnificent study in shabby cowardice which prefigures ‘Heart of Darkness’.
Buy the book from Amazon UK
Buy the book from Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2013

Joseph Conrad web links

Joseph Conrad at Mantex
Biography, tutorials, book reviews, study guides, videos, web links.

Joseph Conrad – his greatest novels and novellas
Brief notes introducing his major works in recommended editions.

Joseph Conrad at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of free eTexts in a variety of formats.

Joseph Conrad at Wikipedia
Biography, major works, literary career, style, politics, and further reading.

Joseph Conrad at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, production notes, box office, trivia, and quizzes.

Works by Joseph Conrad
Large online database of free HTML texts, digital scans, and eText versions of novels, stories, and occasional writings.

The Joseph Conrad Society (UK)
Conradian journal, reviews. and scholarly resources.

The Joseph Conrad Society of America
American-based – recent publications, journal, awards, conferences.

Hyper-Concordance of Conrad’s works
Locate a word or phrase – in the context of the novel or story.

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

The Inn of the Two Witches was written in 1913. Its first appearance in print was as part of the collection Within the Tides published by J.M.Dent in 1915. The other stories in this collection were The Partner, Because of the Dollars, and The Planter of Malata.

The Inn of the Two Witches – critical commentary

It is astonishing that so late in his career as 1913, around the same time as writing novels as serious in intent as Chance (1913) and Victory (1915) Conrad should be writing a story so densely packed with literary cliché . Almost every element of the narrative comes from the traditional stockpile of stale narrative devices.

The manuscript found in an old box. A young sea officer with his colourful (lower-rating) friend ‘Cuban Tom’, who comes complete with a pigtail. A mysterious dwarf who wears an enormous cape and a yellow hat (like something out of a Grimm fairy tale). A lying shopkeeper with one eye. Two old crones who sit huddled before a fireplace, stirring a cauldron of broth with a wooden spoon. Their gipsy servant girl who is a combination of Polly Flinders clothing and a sexual allure reminiscent of Blue Velvet. The rescue party which arrives at the very last minute – but in the nick of time.

These are characters and scenarios out of children’s stories and nursery rhymes – not a serious tale of any kind. The only other item of note is that this story – like Conrad’s other tales set in the past – does not seem successful artistically or intellectually as an account of history. Even though many of his greatest fictions are ‘imagined’ and not based in personal experience, it seems as if it was the events and preoccupations of contemporary society which led him to his most expressive literary forms.

One thinks of the Greenwich bomb outrage of 1888 and the anarchist plottings of the late nineteenth century which gave him the raw materials for The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes. The stories set in the Napoleonic wars (and even earlier) are not nearly so successful. This is true of The Warrior’s Soul, Gaspar Ruiz, and The Duel.

Misogyny

It does not take a great deal of interpretive skill to see this tale as yet another version of Conrad’s barely-concealed negative view of females. An upright and honest sailor is lured to his death by two old crones (the ‘witches’) and then is killed by a sexually alluring young girl, who crushes him to death on a bed. The inner-narrator Byrne is destined for the same fate, but manages to avoid being in the bed at the appointed time. He has in fact been hunting for his bosom pal, Cuban Tom, and having found him has put him back on the bed.

At this point, interpretation of the story becomes an examination of Conrad’s personal psychology. Why has he chosen these topics – and has he done so consciously or unconsciously? Older approaches to literary interpretation will attempt to link these issues to comparable features in Conrad’s own physical or mental life (so far as this can be known). More recent approaches to literary criticism will dismiss these requirements altogether and focus on what is present in the text.

These approaches stem from Roland Barthes’ seminal essay The Death of the Author which seeks to argue that the author’s personal biography is irrelevant in judging a work of art. This includes any idea of trying to establish what the author intended in the work. Barthes did not deny that there might be a link between an author’s life and the text under consideration, but he argued that this was only one possible means of interpretation amongst many others.

These ideas might be kept in mind when reading the prefaces and introductions which writers such as Conrad and (his friend) Henry James were at great pains to provide for their works. These prefaces were often written some time after the actual composition of the work (especially in the case of James) and purport to give an account of the genesis of the original ‘inspiration’ for the work, as well as the author’s ‘intention’ in writing it. Contemporary literary criticism should treat these accounts very sceptically as evidence for interpretation, and rely more confidently on the evidence of the text itself.

The Inn of the Two Witches – study resources

The Inn of the Two Witches – CreateSpace editions – Amazon UK

The Inn of the Two Witches – CreateSpace editions – Amazon US

The Complete Works of Joseph Conrad – Kindle eBook

The Inn of the Two Witches – eBook versions at Project Gutenberg

Joseph Conrad: A Biography – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Routledge Guide to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad – Amazon UK

Notes on Life and Letters – Amazon UK

Joseph Conrad – biographical notes

The Inn of the Two Witches – plot summary

The story comes from an account given by a sixty year old man in the middle of the nineteenth century. An un-named outer narrator discovers a handwritten manuscript in a box of old books he buys. The document has been written by Edgar Byrne, relating to an incident that took place in 1813 when he was a young officer just off the coast of northern Spain.

Edgar Byrne and his close friend Tom Corbin (‘Cuban Tom’) go ashore seeking to make contact with Gonzales, a local leader against the French. They make enquiries at a wine shop run by one-eyed Bernadino regarding transport for a trip into the mountains. Told that none is available, Tom goes off with a boy as a guide.

Byrne is met by a small man in a large yellow hat who tells him they were deceived by the wine shop owner, who is his brother-in-law. He suggests that Byrne commandeer a mule from the shopkeeper and go off in pursuit of Tom.

Byrne reports this to his captain back on board their ship: they have mixed feelings about the incident and how to proceed. But next morning at dawn Byrne makes a lone landing on the coast. He walks over hills all day, and at night comes to an inn run by two old women who are the aunts of Bernadino.

When he asks them about Tom, they confirm that he stayed the night before and left in the morning. They offer him accommodation in the same room where Tom slept, containing an enormous four-poster bed which was once occupied by an archbishop.

Byrne is full of disquiet and suspicions, and thinks he can hear Tom’s voice warning him to be careful. He feels that there is somebody in the room, and when he searches it finds Tom’s dead body in the wardrobe. There are no signs on his body of how he might have died. Byrne feels afraid that there is a plan afoot to kill him in the same way before morning. He then sees that the huge upper canopy of the four-poster descend, crushing the occupant of the bed with its enormous weight.

Suddenly there is a frantic knocking at the door of the Inn. Byrne rushes down unarmed and is knocked out by Gonzales and his men, who have come in search of the English. The three women are despatched, as is Bernadino. Then Byrne and Tom’s body are carried back to the ship, and Tom is later buried at sea.

Joseph Conrad – video biography

The Inn of the Two Witches – principal characters

Joseph Conrad’s writing

Manuscript page from Heart of Darkness

The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad offers a series of essays by leading Conrad scholars aimed at both students and the general reader. There’s a chronology and overview of Conrad’s life, then chapters that explore significant issues in his major writings, and deal in depth with individual works. These are followed by discussions of the special nature of Conrad’s narrative techniques, his complex relationships with late-Victorian imperialism and with literary Modernism, and his influence on other writers and artists. Each essay provides guidance to further reading, and a concluding chapter surveys the body of Conrad criticism.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Joseph Conrad’s writing table

Further reading

Amar Acheraiou Joseph Conrad and the Reader, London: Macmillan, 2009.

Jacques Berthoud, Joseph Conrad: The Major Phase, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.

Muriel Bradbrook, Joseph Conrad: Poland’s English Genius, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1941

Harold Bloom (ed), Joseph Conrad (Bloom’s Modern Critical Views, New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 2010

Hillel M. Daleski , Joseph Conrad: The Way of Dispossession, London: Faber, 1977

Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan, Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Aaron Fogel, Coercion to Speak: Conrad’s Poetics of Dialogue, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1985

John Dozier Gordon, Joseph Conrad: The Making of a Novelist, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1940

Albert J. Guerard, Conrad the Novelist, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1958

Robert Hampson, Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992

Jeremy Hawthorn, Joseph Conrad: Language and Fictional Self-Consciousness, London: Edward Arnold, 1979

Jeremy Hawthorn, Joseph Conrad: Narrative Technique and Ideological Commitment, London: Edward Arnold, 1990

Jeremy Hawthorn, Sexuality and the Erotic in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad, London: Continuum, 2007.

Owen Knowles, The Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990

Jakob Lothe, Joseph Conrad: Voice, Sequence, History, Genre, Ohio State University Press, 2008

Gustav Morf, The Polish Shades and Ghosts of Joseph Conrad, New York: Astra, 1976

Ross Murfin, Conrad Revisited: Essays for the Eighties, Tuscaloosa, Ala: University of Alabama Press, 1985

Jeffery Myers, Joseph Conrad: A Biography, Cooper Square Publishers, 2001.

Zdzislaw Najder, Joseph Conrad: A Life, Camden House, 2007.

George A. Panichas, Joseph Conrad: His Moral Vision, Mercer University Press, 2005.

John G. Peters, The Cambridge Introduction to Joseph Conrad, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

James Phelan, Joseph Conrad: Voice, Sequence, History, Genre, Ohio State University Press, 2008.

Edward Said, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 1966

Allan H. Simmons, Joseph Conrad: (Critical Issues), London: Macmillan, 2006.

J.H. Stape, The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996

John Stape, The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad, Arrow Books, 2008.

Peter Villiers, Joseph Conrad: Master Mariner, Seafarer Books, 2006.

Ian Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, London: Chatto and Windus, 1980

Cedric Watts, Joseph Conrad: (Writers and their Work), London: Northcote House, 1994.

Other writing by Joseph Conrad

Lord Jim (1900) is the earliest of Conrad’s big and serious novels, and it explores one of his favourite subjects – cowardice and moral redemption. Jim is a ship’s captain who in youthful ignorance commits the worst offence – abandoning his ship. He spends the remainder of his adult life in shameful obscurity in the South Seas, trying to re-build his confidence and his character. What makes the novel fascinating is not only the tragic but redemptive outcome, but the manner in which it is told. The narrator Marlowe recounts the events in a time scheme which shifts between past and present in an amazingly complex manner. This is one of the features which makes Conrad (born in the nineteenth century) considered one of the fathers of twentieth century modernism.
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Buy the book from Amazon US

Heart of Darkness (1902) is a tightly controlled novella which has assumed classic status as an account of the process of Imperialism. It documents the search for a mysterious Kurtz, who has ‘gone too far’ in his exploitation of Africans in the ivory trade. The reader is plunged deeper and deeper into the ‘horrors’ of what happened when Europeans invaded the continent. This might well go down in literary history as Conrad’s finest and most insightful achievement, and it is based on his own experiences as a sea captain. This volume also contains ‘An Outpost of Progress’ – the magnificent study in shabby cowardice which prefigures ‘Heart of Darkness’.
Buy the book from Amazon UK
Buy the book from Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2013

Joseph Conrad web links

Joseph Conrad at Mantex
Biography, tutorials, book reviews, study guides, videos, web links.

Joseph Conrad – his greatest novels and novellas
Brief notes introducing his major works in recommended editions.

Joseph Conrad at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of free eTexts in a variety of formats.

Joseph Conrad at Wikipedia
Biography, major works, literary career, style, politics, and further reading.

Joseph Conrad at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, production notes, box office, trivia, and quizzes.

Works by Joseph Conrad
Large online database of free HTML texts, digital scans, and eText versions of novels, stories, and occasional writings.

The Joseph Conrad Society (UK)
Conradian journal, reviews. and scholarly resources.

The Joseph Conrad Society of America
American-based – recent publications, journal, awards, conferences.

Hyper-Concordance of Conrad’s works
Locate a word or phrase – in the context of the novel or story.

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

The Lagoon was written in 1896 and published in Cornhill Magazine in 1897. It was later collected in Tales of Unrest which appeared in 1898. The other stories in the collection are Karain, A Memory, An Outpost of Progress, The Return, and The Idiots. Joseph Conrad later claimed ‘It is the first short story I ever wrote’, but he might have meant it was the first he ever published.

The Lagoon – commentary

Literary style

No matter if it is his first-written or his first-published story, this tale is notable for the literary style that Conrad made his own

In the stillness of the air every tree, every leaf, every bough, every tendril of creeper and every petal of minute blossoms seemed to have been bewitched into an immobility perfect and final.

He uses verbal repetition (‘every tree, every leaf’) then repetition of construction with variation (‘every tendril of creeper and every petal of minute blossoms’) followed by what is almost his trademark – an abstraction qualified by ponderous nouns (‘an immobility perfect and final’). It is also worth noting that the expression ‘an immobility perfect and final’ is not conventional English syntax. Adjectives normally come before the thing they qualify (‘a perfect and final immobility’) – but then the amazing thing is that English was Conrad’s third language (after Polish and French) and he often imports constructions and even transliterations from other languages into his very idiosyncratic English.

The Lagoon – study resources

Tales of Unrest – CreateSpace editions – Amazon UK

Tales of Unrest – CreateSpace editions – Amazon US

The Complete Works of Joseph Conrad – Kindle eBook

Tales of Unrest – eBook versions at Project Gutenberg

The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Routledge Guide to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad – Amazon UK

Joseph Conrad: A Biography – Amazon UK

Notes on Life and Letters – Amazon UK

Joseph Conrad – biographical notes

The Lagoon – plot summary

A white European sailor and his crew arrive at Arsat’s outpost on the edge of a lagoon in the Malayan archipelago, to find that his friend’s wife is dying of fever. The two men fall into reminiscence, and Arsat recounts how he came to form the relationship with his woman.

He abducts her from her family with his brother’s help. His bother taunts him for not being more defiant, but Arsat knows that he will be killed if caught. Nevertheless, Arsat greatly admires his brother’s courage and strength.

When they are pursued by the local Rajah’s men, Arsat’s brother holds them at bay with a gun whilst Arsat and the woman escape. But when all his shots are fired the pursuing men catch the brother and kill him.

At this point in the narrative Arsat’s wife dies. The white man offers to take Arsat away on the ship, but he chooses to stay by the lagoon.

Joseph Conrad – video biography

The Lagoon – principal characters

Joseph Conrad’s writing

Manuscript page from Heart of Darkness

The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad offers a series of essays by leading Conrad scholars aimed at both students and the general reader. There’s a chronology and overview of Conrad’s life, then chapters that explore significant issues in his major writings, and deal in depth with individual works. These are followed by discussions of the special nature of Conrad’s narrative techniques, his complex relationships with late-Victorian imperialism and with literary Modernism, and his influence on other writers and artists. Each essay provides guidance to further reading, and a concluding chapter surveys the body of Conrad criticism.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Joseph Conrad’s writing table

Further reading

Amar Acheraiou Joseph Conrad and the Reader, London: Macmillan, 2009.

Jacques Berthoud, Joseph Conrad: The Major Phase, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.

Muriel Bradbrook, Joseph Conrad: Poland’s English Genius, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1941

Harold Bloom (ed), Joseph Conrad (Bloom’s Modern Critical Views, New Yoprk: Chelsea House Publishers, 2010

Hillel M. Daleski , Joseph Conrad: The Way of Dispossession, London: Faber, 1977

Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan, Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Aaron Fogel, Coercion to Speak: Conrad’s Poetics of Dialogue, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1985

John Dozier Gordon, Joseph Conrad: The Making of a Novelist, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1940

Albert J. Guerard, Conrad the Novelist, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1958

Robert Hampson, Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992

Jeremy Hawthorn, Joseph Conrad: Language and Fictional Self-Consciousness, London: Edward Arnold, 1979

Jeremy Hawthorn, Joseph Conrad: Narrative Technique and Ideological Commitment, London: Edward Arnold, 1990

Jeremy Hawthorn, Sexuality and the Erotic in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad, London: Continuum, 2007.

Owen Knowles, The Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990

Jakob Lothe, Joseph Conrad: Voice, Sequence, History, Genre, Ohio State University Press, 2008

Gustav Morf, The Polish Shades and Ghosts of Joseph Conrad, New York: Astra, 1976

Ross Murfin, Conrad Revisited: Essays for the Eighties, Tuscaloosa, Ala: University of Alabama Press, 1985

Jeffery Myers, Joseph Conrad: A Biography, Cooper Square Publishers, 2001.

Zdzislaw Najder, Joseph Conrad: A Life, Camden House, 2007.

George A. Panichas, Joseph Conrad: His Moral Vision, Mercer University Press, 2005.

John G. Peters, The Cambridge Introduction to Joseph Conrad, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

James Phelan, Joseph Conrad: Voice, Sequence, History, Genre, Ohio State University Press, 2008.

Edward Said, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 1966

Allan H. Simmons, Joseph Conrad: (Critical Issues), London: Macmillan, 2006.

J.H. Stape, The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996

John Stape, The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad, Arrow Books, 2008.

Peter Villiers, Joseph Conrad: Master Mariner, Seafarer Books, 2006.

Ian Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, London: Chatto and Windus, 1980

Cedric Watts, Joseph Conrad: (Writers and their Work), London: Northcote House, 1994.

Other writing by Joseph Conrad

Lord Jim (1900) is the earliest of Conrad’s big and serious novels, and it explores one of his favourite subjects – cowardice and moral redemption. Jim is a ship’s captain who in youthful ignorance commits the worst offence – abandoning his ship. He spends the remainder of his adult life in shameful obscurity in the South Seas, trying to re-build his confidence and his character. What makes the novel fascinating is not only the tragic but redemptive outcome, but the manner in which it is told. The narrator Marlowe recounts the events in a time scheme which shifts between past and present in an amazingly complex manner. This is one of the features which makes Conrad (born in the nineteenth century) considered one of the fathers of twentieth century modernism.
Buy the book from Amazon UK
Buy the book from Amazon US

Heart of Darkness (1902) is a tightly controlled novella which has assumed classic status as an account of the process of Imperialism. It documents the search for a mysterious Kurtz, who has ‘gone too far’ in his exploitation of Africans in the ivory trade. The reader is plunged deeper and deeper into the ‘horrors’ of what happened when Europeans invaded the continent. This might well go down in literary history as Conrad’s finest and most insightful achievement, and it is based on his own experiences as a sea captain. This volume also contains ‘An Outpost of Progress’ – the magnificent study in shabby cowardice which prefigures ‘Heart of Darkness’.
Buy the book from Amazon UK
Buy the book from Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2013

Joseph Conrad web links

Joseph Conrad at Mantex
Biography, tutorials, book reviews, study guides, videos, web links.

Joseph Conrad – his greatest novels and novellas
Brief notes introducing his major works in recommended editions.

Joseph Conrad at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of free eTexts in a variety of formats.

Joseph Conrad at Wikipedia
Biography, major works, literary career, style, politics, and further reading.

Joseph Conrad at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, production notes, box office, trivia, and quizzes.

Works by Joseph Conrad
Large online database of free HTML texts, digital scans, and eText versions of novels, stories, and occasional writings.

The Joseph Conrad Society (UK)
Conradian journal, reviews. and scholarly resources.

The Joseph Conrad Society of America
American-based – recent publications, journal, awards, conferences.

Hyper-Concordance of Conrad’s works
Locate a word or phrase – in the context of the novel or story.