Abstract
Joseph Conrad is unique as a writer. Not just as all writers differ from one another, but in the way his life and two careers mark him out as being different from any previous — and perhaps any more recent — novelist in the realms of English literature. Of no other major novelist could another author write the description John Galsworthy, in a letter to his sister, gave of Conrad:
he is a man of travel and experience in many parts of the world… He has been right up the Congo and all around Malacca and Borneo and other out of the way parts, to say nothing of a little smuggling in the days of his youth.1
Galsworthy wrote this in 1893 after his first meeting with Conrad, and they were to become lifelong friends.
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Notes
H. V. Marrot, The Life and Letters of John Galsworthy (London: William Heinemann, 1935), p. 88.
Letter written 16 June 1862; printed in Tygodnik Illustrowany, No. 4, 1920; cited in Jocelyn Baines, Joseph Conrad: A Critical Biography (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1967), pp. 13–14.
W. D. Handcock (ed.), English Historical Documents, XII, 1874–1914 (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1977), p. 191.
George Macaulay Trevelyan, British History in the Nineteenth Century and After (1782–1919) (London: Longmans, Green, 1966), p. 372.
Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989), pp. 65–7.
W. H. S. Jones, The Cape Horn Breed (London: Jarrolds, 1968), pp. 115–16.
Albert Thys, Au Congo et au Kassai (Brussels, 1888), p. 7.
cited in C. T. Watts (ed.), Joseph Conrad’s Letters to R. B. Cunninghame Graham (Cambridge: University Press, 1969), p. 151. The original is ‘on se croirant devant au pays maudit, véritable barrière qui semble créée par la nature pour arrêter le progrès’.
Edward Garnett (ed.), Letters from Conrad: 1895–1924 (London: Nonesuch Press, 1928), p. xix.
Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (London: Duckworth, 1924), p. 201.
F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), pp. 196–9.
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© 1992 Brian Spittles
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Spittles, B. (1992). The Unique Background. In: Joseph Conrad. Writers in their Time. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22205-6_1
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