Conrad in Context

Abstract

If the period in which Conrad mainly wrote was not an interregnum, a simple waiting for the Great War to change everything in 1914, but a time in which a new consciousness was forged, then it was a time in which an essentially twentieth century awareness had to embrace changes in commerce as well as art. Writers have to eat, and families have to be provided for, as Conrad the husband and father realised. Discussion of art that ignores the processes of production, including the financial considerations, is liable to become detached from a reality of which the artists themselves are always aware. Conrad may have perceived himself at the centre of the forging of the modern consciousness, but he never forgot his financial problems, and the need of a writer to have a reading public.