Conclusion

Abstract

Conrad’s investigation of financial crime has taken us back to where we began: the literary marketplace. It is appropriate to end this volume with a further consideration of Chance, a novel whose commercial success — relative to Conrad’s previous works — has tended to perplex latter-day critics. Cedric Watts, for instance, finds the novel ‘remarkably disappointing’ and not ‘obviously popular in its nature’; other eminent Conrad scholars, such as Jeremy Hawthorn, Jakob Lothe and John G. Peters, have made no secret of their view that, even if we do not accept the ‘achievement and decline’ model of Conrad’s literary career, Chance is nonetheless a partial or complete failure — technically, aesthetically, or both.¹ Some have attributed its relative success to vigorous marketing — in David Trotter’s words, riding its ‘promotional luck’ — particularly the campaigns in the US by the publisher of the New York Herald, Gordon Bennett, and F.N. Doubleday’s thrusting young editor Alfred A. Knopf; others suggest it made a lucrative appeal to women readers through its allusions to suffragism and its appealingly romantic cover illustration of a young woman and young sailor on the deck of a ship.²