Joseph Conrad, original name Józef Teodor Konrad

Korzeniowski, (born December 3,

1857, Berdichev, Ukraine, Russian Empire [now Berdychiv,
Ukraine]—died August 3, 1924, Canterbury, Kent, England),
English novelist and short-story writer of Polish descent,
whose works include the novels Lord
Jim (1900), Nostromo (1904), and The Secret Agent (1907)
and the short story “Heart of Darkness” (1902). During his
lifetime Conrad was admired for the richness of his prose and
his renderings of dangerous life at sea and in exotic places.
But his initial reputation as a masterful teller of colourful
adventures of the sea masked his fascination with the
individual when faced with nature’s invariable unconcern,
man’s frequent malevolence, and his inner battles with good
and evil. To Conrad, the sea meant above all the tragedy of
loneliness. A writer of complex skill and striking insight, but
above all of an intensely personal vision, he has been
increasingly regarded as one of the greatest English
novelists.

Early years
Conrad’s father, Apollo Nalęcz Korzeniowski, a poet and
an ardent Polish patriot, was one of the organizers of the committee
that went on in 1863 to direct the Polish insurrection against Russian
rule. He was arrested in late 1861 and was sent into exile
at Vologda in northern Russia. His wife and four-year-old son
followed him there, and the harsh climate hastened his wife’s death
from tuberculosis in 1865. In A Personal Record Conrad relates that
his first introduction to the English language was at the age of eight,
when his father was translating the works of Shakespeare and Victor
Hugo in order to support the household. In those solitary years with
his father he read the works of Sir Walter Scott, James Fenimore
Cooper, Charles Dickens, and William Makepeace Thackeray in
Polish and French. Apollo was ill with tuberculosis and died
in Kraków in 1869. Responsibility for the boy was assumed by his
maternal uncle, Tadeusz Bobrowski, a lawyer, who provided his
nephew with advice, admonition, financial help, and love. He sent
Conrad to school at Kraków and then to Switzerland, but the boy was
bored by school and yearned to go to sea. In 1874 Conrad left
for Marseille with the intention of going to sea.

Life at sea
Bobrowski made him an allowance of 2,000 francs a year and put
him in touch with a merchant named Delestang, in whose ships
Conrad sailed in the French merchant service. His first voyage, on
the Mont-Blanc to Martinique, was as a passenger; on its next
voyage he sailed as an apprentice. In July 1876 he again sailed to
the West Indies, as a steward on the Saint-Antoine. On this voyage
Conrad seems to have taken part in some unlawful enterprise,
probably gunrunning, and to have sailed along the coast of
Venezuela, memories of which were to find a place in Nostromo. The
first mate of the vessel, a Corsican named Dominic Cervoni, was the
model for the hero of that novel and was to play a picturesque role in
Conrad’s life and work.

Conrad became heavily enmeshed in debt upon returning to

Marseille and apparently unsuccessfully attempted to commit
suicide. As a sailor in the French merchant navy he was liable to
conscription when he came of age, so after his recovery he signed on
in April 1878 as a deckhand on a British freighter bound for
Constantinople with a cargo of coal. After the return journey his ship
landed him at Lowestoft, England, in June 1878. It was Conrad’s first
English landfall, and he spoke only a few words of the language of
which he was to become a recognized master. Conrad remained in
England, and in the following October he shipped as an ordinary
seaman aboard a wool clipper on the London–Sydney run.

Conrad was to serve 16 years in the British merchant navy. In June

1880 he passed his examination as second mate, and in April 1881 he
joined the Palestine, a bark of 425 tons. This move proved to be an
important event in his life; it took him to the Far East for the first
time, and it was also a continuously troubled voyage, which provided
him with literary material that he would use later. Beset by gales,
accidentally rammed by a steamer, and deserted by a sizable portion
of her crew, the Palestine nevertheless had made it as far as the East
Indies when her cargo of coal caught fire and the crew had to take to
the lifeboats; Conrad’s initial landing in the East, on an island off
Sumatra, took place only after a 13 1/2-hour voyage in an open boat.
In 1898 Conrad published his account of his experiences on
the Palestine, with only slight alterations, as the short story “Youth,”
a remarkable tale of a young officer’s first command.

He returned to London by passenger steamer, and in September

1883 he shipped as mate on the Riversdale, leaving her at Madras to
join the Narcissus at Bombay. This voyage gave him material for his
novel The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” the story of an egocentric black
sailor’s deterioration and death aboard ship. At about this time
Conrad began writing his earliest known letters in the English
language. In between subsequent voyages Conrad studied for his
first mate’s certificate, and in 1886 two notable events occurred: he
became a British subject in August, and three months later he
obtained his master mariner’s certificate.
In February 1887 he sailed as first mate on the Highland
Forest, bound for Semarang, Java. Her captain was John
McWhirr, whom he later immortalized under the same name
as the heroic, unimaginative captain of the steamer Nan
Shan in Typhoon. He then joined the Vidar, a locally owned
steamship trading among the islands of the southeast
Asian archipelago. During the five or six voyages he made in
four and a half months, Conrad was discovering and
exploring the world he was to re-create in his first
novels, Almayer’s Folly, An Outcast of the Islands, and Lord
Jim, as well as several short stories.
After leaving the Vidar Conrad unexpectedly obtained his first
command, on the Otago, sailing from Bangkok, an experience out of
which he was to make his stories “The Shadow-Line” and “Falk.” He
took over the Otago in unpropitious circumstances. The captain
Conrad replaced had died at sea, and by the time the ship reached
Singapore, a voyage of 800 miles (1,300 km) that took three weeks
because of lack of wind, the whole ship’s company, except Conrad
and the cook, was down with fever. Conrad then discovered to his
dismay that his predecessor had sold almost all the ship’s supply of
quinine.

Writing career: notable works, themes, and style of

Joseph Conrad
Back in London in the summer of 1889, Conrad took rooms near the
Thames and, while waiting for a command, began to write Almayer’s
Folly. The task was interrupted by the strangest and probably the
most important of his adventures. As a child in Poland, he had stuck
his finger on the centre of the map of Africa and said, “When I grow
up I shall go there.” In 1889 the Congo Free State was four years old
as a political entity and already notorious as a sphere of imperialistic
exploitation. Conrad’s childhood dream took positive shape in the
ambition to command a Congo River steamboat. Using what
influence he could, he went to Brussels and secured an appointment.
What he saw, did, and felt in the Congo are largely recorded in
“Heart of Darkness,” his most famous, finest, and
most enigmatic story, the title of which signifies not only the heart of
Africa, the dark continent, but also the heart of evil—everything that
is corrupt, nihilistic, malign—and perhaps the heart of man. The
story is central to Conrad’s work and vision, and it is difficult not to
think of his Congo experiences as traumatic. He may have
exaggerated when he said, “Before the Congo I was a mere animal,”
but in a real sense the dying Kurtz’s cry, “The horror! The horror!”
was Conrad’s. He suffered psychological, spiritual,
even metaphysical shock in the Congo, and his physical health was
also damaged; for the rest of his life, he was racked by recurrent
fever and gout.

Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad, 1916.

New York Public Library

Conrad was in the Congo for four months, returning to England in

January 1891. He made several more voyages as a first mate, but by
1894, when his guardian Tadeusz Bobrowski died, his sea life was
over. In the spring of 1894 Conrad sent Almayer’s Folly to the
London publisher Fisher Unwin, and the book was published in April
1895. It was as the author of this novel that Conrad adopted the
name by which he is known: he had learned from long experience
that the name Korzeniowski was impossible on British lips.

Unwin’s manuscript reader, the critic Edward Garnett, urged Conrad

to begin a second novel, and so Almayer’s Folly was followed in 1896
by An Outcast of the Islands, which repeats the theme of a foolish
and blindly superficial character meeting the tragic consequences of
his own failings in a tropical region far from the company of his
fellow Europeans. These two novels provoked a misunderstanding of
Conrad’s talents and purpose which dogged him the rest of his life.
Set in the Malayan archipelago, they caused him to be labeled a
writer of exotic tales, a reputation which a series of novels and short
stories about the sea—The Nigger of the “Narcissus” (1897), Lord
Jim (1900), Youth (1902), Typhoon (1902), and others—seemed only
to confirm. But words of his own about the “Narcissus” give the real
reason for his choice of settings: “the problem . . . is not a problem of
the sea, it is merely a problem that has risen on board a ship where
the conditions of complete isolation from all land entanglements
make it stand out with a particular force and colouring.” This is
equally true of his other works; the latter part of Lord Jim takes
place in a jungle village not because the emotional
and moral problems that interest Conrad are those peculiar to jungle
villages, but because there Jim’s feelings of guilt, responsibility, and
insecurity—feelings common to mankind—work themselves out with
a logic and inevitability that are enforced by his isolation. It is this
purpose, rather than a taste for the outlandish, that distinguishes
Conrad’s work from that of many novelists of the 19th and early 20th
centuries. They, for the most part, were concerned to widen the
scope of the novel, to act, in Balzac’s phrase, as the natural
historians of society; Conrad instead aimed at the isolation and
concentration of tragedy.

In 1895 Conrad married the 22-year-old Jessie George, by whom he

had two sons. He thereafter resided mainly in the southeast corner
of England, where his life as an author was plagued by poor health,
near poverty, and difficulties of temperament. It was not until 1910,
after he had written what are now considered his finest novels—Lord
Jim (1900), Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907), and Under
Western Eyes (1911), the last being three novels of
political intrigue and romance—that his financial situation became
relatively secure. He was awarded a Civil List pension of £100, and
the American collector John Quinn began to buy his manuscripts—for
what now seem ludicrously low prices. His novel Chance was
successfully serialized in the New York Herald in 1912, and his
novel Victory, published in 1915, was no less successful. Though
hampered by rheumatism, Conrad continued to write for the
remaining years of his life. In April 1924 he refused an offer of
knighthood from Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, and he died
shortly thereafter.

In his own time Conrad was praised for his power to depict life at sea
and in the tropics and for his works’ qualities of “romance”—a word
used basically to denote his power of using an elaborate prose style
to cast a film of illusory splendour over somewhat sordid events. His
reputation diminished after his death, and a revival of interest in his
work later directed attention to different qualities and to different
books than his contemporaries had emphasized.

An account of the themes of some of these books should indicate

where modern critics lay emphasis. Nostromo (1904), a story of
revolution, politics, and financial manipulation in a South American
republic, centres, for all its close-packed incidents, upon one idea—
the corruption of the characters by the ambitions that they set before
themselves, ambitions concerned with silver, which forms the
republic’s wealth and which is the central symbol around which the
novel is organized. The ambitions range from simple greed to
idealistic desires for reform and justice. All lead to moral disaster,
and the nobler the ambition the greater its possessor’s self-disgust
as he realizes his plight.


Experience a dramatization of Joseph Conrad's chilling short

story “The Secret Sharer”

This 1973 dramatization of Joseph Conrad's short story “The Secret

Sharer” (1910) tells the tale of a young sea captain whose inner
conflicts pit his concern for a +fugitive against the safety of the ship and
men he commands. It was produced by Encyclopædia Britannica
Educational Corporation.

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.See all videos for this article


 Take an in-depth look at Joseph Conrad's haunting short story
“The Secret Sharer” with Charles Van Doren

In this 1973 production, Charles Van Doren, former vice president of

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., takes a close look at Joseph Conrad's
haunting story “The Secret Sharer.”

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.See all videos for this article

“Heart of Darkness,” which follows closely the actual events of

Conrad’s Congo journey, tells of the narrator’s fascination by a
mysterious white man, Kurtz, who, by his eloquence and hypnotic
personality, dominates the brutal tribesmen around him. Full
of contempt for the greedy traders who exploit the natives, the
narrator cannot deny the power of this figure of evil who calls forth
from him something approaching reluctant loyalty. The Secret
Agent (1907), a sustained essay in the ironic and one of Conrad’s
finest works, deals with the equivocal world of anarchists, police,
politicians, and agents provocateurs in London. Victory (1915)
describes the unsuccessful attempts of a detached, nihilistic observer
of life to protect himself and his hapless female companion from the
murderous machinations of a trio of rogues on an isolated island.

Conrad’s view of life is indeed deeply pessimistic. In every idealism

are the seeds of corruption, and the most honourable men find their
unquestioned standards totally inadequate to defend themselves
against the assaults of evil. It is significant that Conrad repeats again
and again situations in which such men are obliged to admit
emotional kinship with those whom they have expected only to
despise. This well-nigh despairing vision gains much of its force from
the feeling that Conrad accepted it reluctantly, rather than with
morbid enjoyment.
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