Introduction

Abstract

John Conrad, Joseph Conrad’s younger son, recorded in an affectionate memoir many memorable anecdotes of his father’s eccentricities. One of these was Conrad’s propensity to appropriate surreptitiously his family’s reading material. If he saw his wife or one of his children reading a book, Conrad would ‘cruise around’ the family home ‘and pounce on it if we put it down while we went out of the room. When we returned the book had vanished and could not be found; most mysterious until we realised what was happening. A day or so later the book reappeared in exactly the same place from which it had vanished, and open at exactly the same page.’¹ At Christmas, genre fiction would also stimulate some secret nocturnal reading. John recalled, ‘I was always given a bound volume of the previous twelve issues’ of the Boy’s Own Paper, the appeal of which was its ‘adventure stories, well written and exciting, with instalments spread over several months’ issues.’ The volume also attracted the interested attention of another member of the Conrad household: ‘I am pretty sure that J.C. read it after I had gone to bed because I found little spills of cigarette ash between the pages.’² It is a delightful vignette. The successful author, in his well-appointed house near Canterbury, secretly enjoys the twin pleasures of a cigarette and an adventure story, perhaps as a break from the highly wrought prose and penetrative psychological characterization of one of his own fictions.