A Tragedy in Modern Life: One Day More

Abstract

Joseph Conrad’s first play was an adaptation of his short story “To-morrow” (1902). “To-morrow” first appeared in the Pall Mall Magazine in 1902 and was collected along with “Typhoon”, “Falk” and “Amy Foster” in Typhoon and Other Stories (1903). Traditionally, although critics may not have dismissed “To-morrow” as readily as, say, “The Brute” (1908), there certainly seems to have been difficulty finding a natural place for “To-morrow” in the Conrad oeuvre. Jocelyn Baines’s comment is typical:

It is not one of Conrad’s most impressive short stories and there is something gratuitously unpleasant in a madman and a blind old tyrant being the cause of Bessie Carvil’s tragedy. It has in fact a rather un-Conradian flavour and it is not surprising to discover that Hueffer apparently had a hand in it. (Baines, 1959, 269)

Baines’s remark that the story is “un-Conradian” because Ford Madox Ford was involved in it stems from Conrad’s letter to Ford where he states that “To-morrow” is “all your suggestion and absolutely my conception” (CL2, 372).