Author Chronologies

General Editor: Norman Page, Emeritus Professor of Modern English Literature, University of Nottingham, UK

Published titles include:

William BakerA WILKIE COLLINS CHRONOLOGYA HAROLD PINTER CHRONOLOGY

J. L. BradleyA RUSKIN CHRONOLOGY

Michael G. Brennan and Noel J. KinnamonA SIDNEY CHRONOLOGY 1554– 1654

Gordon CampbellA MILTON CHRONOLOGY

Alison Chapman and Joanna MeacockA ROSSETTI FAMILY CHRONOLOGY

Edward ChithamA BRONTË FAMILY CHRONOLOGY

Martin GarrettA BROWNING CHRONOLOGYELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING AND ROBERT BROWNINGA MARY SHELLEY CHRONOLOGY

A. M. GibbsA BERNARD SHAW CHRONOLOGY

Graham HandleyAN ELIZABETH GASKELL CHRONOLOGY

J. R. HammondA ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON CHRONOLOGYAN EDGAR ALLAN POE CHRONOLOGYAN H. G. WELLS CHRONOLOGYA GEORGE ORWELL CHRONOLOGY

Edgar F. HardenA WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY CHRONOLOGYA HENRY JAMES CHRONOLOGYAN EDITH WHARTON CHRONOLOGY

Lisa HopkinsA CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE CHRONOLOGY

John KellyA W. B. YEATS CHRONOLOGY

Owen KnowlesA CONRAD CHRONOLOGY, SECOND EDITION

Nicholas MaltzahnAN ANDREW MARVELL CHRONOLOGY

John McDermottA HOPKINS CHRONOLOGY

Roger NorburnA JAMES JOYCE CHRONOLOGYA KATHERINE MANSFIELD CHRONOLOGY

Norman PageAN EVELYN WAUGH CHRONOLOGYAN OSCAR WILDE CHRONOLOGY

John PillingA SAMUEL BECKETT CHRONOLOGY

Peter PrestonA D. H. LAWRENCE CHRONOLOGY

Author ChronologiesSeries Standing Order ISBN 978–0–333–71484–3 hardback(outside North America only )

You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above.

Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

A Conrad ChronologySecond edition

Owen KnowlesResearch Fellow, English Department, University of Hull, UK

© Owen Knowles 2014

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6– 10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.

Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published 1989 This edition published 2014 byPALGRAVE MACMILLAN

Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.

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Softcover reprint of the hardcover 2nd edition 2014 978-1-137-45238-2

ISBN 978-1-349-49737-9 ISBN 978-1-137-45239-9 (eBook)DOI 10.1057/9781137452399

To Christine – again

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vii

List of Maps viii

Series Editor’s Preface ix

Preface to the Second Edition xi

List of Abbreviations xiv

A Note on Names, Titles, Usages and Money xvii

Introduction xviii

A Conrad Chronology 1

Select Who’s Who 185

Locations and Addresses 212

Maps 216

Select Bibliography 219

Index 222 1 People, Places and Organizations 222 2 Conrad’s Works 235 3 Conrad’s Reading 238 4 Other Topics 242

Contents

viii

1 Conrad’s Divided Poland 216

2 Conrad’s Malay Archipelago 217

3 The River Congo, 1890 218

These maps appear by kind permission of The Centre for Joseph Conrad Studies, St Mary’s University College, Twickenham, London.

List of Maps

ix

Most biographies are ill- adapted to serve as works of reference – not surprisingly so, since biographers are likely to regard their function as the devising of a continuous and readable narrative, with excur-sions into interpretation and speculation, rather than a bald recital of facts. There are times, however, when anyone reading for business or pleasure needs to check a point quickly or to obtain a rapid overview of part of an author’s life or career; and at such moments turning over the pages of a biography can be a time- consuming and frustrat-ing occupation. The present series of volumes aims at providing a means whereby the chronological facts of an author’s life and career, rather than needing to be prised out of the narrative in which they are (if they appear at all) securely embedded, can be seen at a glance. Moreover, whereas biographies are often, and quite understand-ably, vague over matters of fact (since it makes for tediousness to be forever enumerating details of dates and places), a chronology can be precise whenever it is possible to be precise. Thanks to the survival, sometimes in very large quantities, of letters, diaries, notebooks and other documents, as well as to thoroughly researched biographies and bibliographies, this material now exists in abundance for many major authors. In the case of, for example, Dickens, we can often ascertain what he was doing in each month and week, and almost on each day, of his prodigiously active working life; and the student of, say, David Copperfield is likely to find it fascinating as well as useful to know just when Dickens was at work on each part of that novel, what other literary enterprises he was engaged in at the same time, whom he was meeting, what places he was visiting, and what were the relevant circumstances of his personal and professional life. Such a chronology is not, of course, a substitute for a biography; but its arrangement, in combination with its index, makes it a much more convenient tool for this kind of purpose; and it may be acceptable as a from of ‘alternative’ biography, with its own distinctive advantages as well as its obvious limitations.

Since information relating to an author’s early years is usually scanty and chronologically imprecise, the opening section of some

Series Editor’s Preface

x Series Editor’s Preface

volumes in this series groups together the years of childhood and adolescence. Thereafter each year, and usually each month, is dealt with separately. Information not readily assignable to a specific month or day is given as a general note under the relevant year or month. The first entry for each month carries an indication of the day of the week, so that when necessary this can be readily calcu-lated for other dates. Each volume also contains a bibliography of the principal sources of information. In the chronology itself, the sources of many of the more specific items, including quotations, are identified in order that the reader who wishes to do so may consult the original contexts.

Norman Page

xi

First published in 1989, A Conrad Chronology now enjoys – gratifyingly – something of the status of a standard reference work in its field. Since that time, however, a great deal has happened in the world of Conrad studies, with the intervening period being a veritable golden age in the publication of primary documents associated with the writer’s life and work. The original Chronology is not thereby rendered invalid, but some of its entries now seem decidedly sketchy, tentative or out- of- date. In light of this, and after consultation with Palgrave Macmillan editors, it has been decided that the time has come for a new and revised edition of the Chronology. This second edition – an amended and considerably enlarged version of its predecessor – aims to bring the chronological record fully up- to- date for a new genera-tion of Conrad students and general readers.

What are these more recent developments in Conrad studies? As the later ‘Select Bibliography’ (pp. 216– 218) makes clear, the most important scholarly event since 1989 has been the addition of a further six volumes to the author’s (now complete, nine- volume) Collected Letters, covering that part of his life from 1908 to his death in 1924. With many of the letters previously unpublished, these richly annotated volumes offer a compelling portrait of Conrad’s sense of himself as man and writer passing from middle age into his last years (which also bear witness to the growing legend of the writer as ‘wonderful’ Great Man). Running in tandem with this edition, two companion volumes of letters ‘to and about’ Conrad have provided new and different biographical contexts: letters to the writer from his friends, editors and admirers are especially illumi-nating in restoring the quality of exchange and debate with others that inevitably belongs to a major correspondence like Conrad’s; letters about him can powerfully evoke his prominence in a network of third- party correspondence and so breathe new life into the tired description of Conrad’s career as ‘a life in letters’.

Another striking development of the last two decades has been the accelerated progress of the monumental Cambridge Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad, now expanded by some ten further volumes.

Preface to the Second Edition

xii Preface to the Second Edition

Each of these critical editions has the main end of providing a properly edited text; but each also supplies, as an essential feature of its editorial method, a full- scale history of the composition and publication of the particular work. An exceptionally rich resource for the chronologist, these multiplying volumes offer an accurate, richly detailed and sometimes day- to- day calendar of the working novelist’s progress. As a by- product of its main endeavours, the Cambridge Edition also includes another valuable resource in the form of a four- volume collection of contemporary British and American reviews of Conrad’s writings (running to some 2,600 pages). Superseding all other anthologies, this quartet of volumes now makes it possible to follow in amazingly close detail the critical reception of Conrad’s works on first publication and the growth of a major writer’s early reputation.

Historical scholarship of such richness and magnitude has inevi-tably impacted upon the second edition of the Conrad Chronology in a variety of ways. At a basic level, it has necessitated some correc-tion and amendment to entries, as undated documents have in the course of time been definitively dated or at least plausibly assigned to a particular month or year. In a handful of exceptional cases, these corrections to the Chronology have involved the re- assigning of entries to entirely different years; numerous other smaller amend-ments to dates, if less dramatic, can nevertheless impact upon a larger sequence of events and significantly unsettle our perception of an existing chronology.

In gathering and assimilating more recent findings, the present volume is inevitably much longer and more detailed than its prede-cessor. Its enlargement also involves, I trust, an enriched texture and a more vivid day- to- day history of all the stages of Conrad’s life as man and writer – his working routines, family activities, friendships, illnesses, finances, collaborations, contracts and reading. Given the additional new volumes in the Collected Letters, however, the most substantial expansion in the Chronology occurs, as might be expected, during the years 1908 to 1924. This  – the second half of Conrad’s literary career – has its own distinctive phases: the fragile state of his health following upon a breakdown in 1909 (also involving the ques-tion of an artistic decline); the dramatic upturn in his finances after the commercial success of Chance (1914) and Victory (1915); and the disheartening ordeal of the First World War. But also reflected more

Preface to the Second Edition xiii

clearly in this revised chronology is the different quality in Conrad’s life after the War, as he becomes an ‘eminent’ and lionized public figure, sought after by publishers, aware of his place in the burgeon-ing Conrad industry, making acts of valediction and settlement with the future.

Material from unpublished sources has also added many new entries: the substantial correspondence of Conrad’s wife Jessie, now in the process of being edited for publication, has been used to provide different perspectives on the Conrads’ domestic and family life; other materials from the archives of the literary agent J.  B.  Pinker (Northwestern University at Evanston), the publishers F.  N.  Doubleday (Princeton) and J. M. Dent (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), and from the rich holdings at the New York Public Library (Berg) have helped to clarify both Conrad’s often tangled professional dealings and the high- powered marketing strat-egies brought to his later fiction.

In line with these changes, the Chronology’s concluding apparatus (its ‘Who’s Who’, bibliography and gazetteer) is also thoroughly revised and updated in order to incorporate recent biographical and critical sources. Additionally, the method of referencing quotations in the main chronology has been re- styled throughout: quotations from letters from, to and about Conrad (as well as from reviews, reminis-cences and other primary documents) are all now identified by refer-ence to the most up- to- date and accessible collections.

In the preparation of this second edition, I am especially indebted to the General Editor, Professor Norman Page, to Benjamin Doyle and Sophie Ainscough at Palgrave Macmillan, for their patience and support, and to Linda Auld and Mervyn Thomas for their input.

xiv

Individuals

Apollo Apollo Korzeniowski (father)

Blackwood William Blackwood

Bobrowski Tadeusz Bobrowski (uncle)

Borys Borys Conrad (son)

Curle Richard Curle

Dawson Francis Warrington Dawson

Ewa Ewa Korzeniowska (mother)

Ford Ford Madox Ford

Garnett Edward Garnett

Gibbon Reginald Perceval Gibbon

Gosse Edmund Gosse

Graham R. B. Cunninghame Graham

Hope George Fountaine Weare Hope

James Henry James

JC Joseph Conrad

Jessie Jessie Conrad (wife)

John John Conrad (son)

Pinker James Brand Pinker (literary agent)

Poradowska Marguerite Poradowska

Rothenstein William Rothenstein

Walpole Hugh Walpole

Works

The Arrow The Arrow of Gold

The Mirror The Mirror of the Sea

List of Abbreviations

Abbreviations xv

The Nigger The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’

An Outcast An Outcast of the Islands

Collections

LE Last Essays

NLL Notes on Life and Letters

SS A Set of Six

TH Tales of Hearsay

TLS ’Twixt Land and Sea

TOS Typhoon, and Other Stories

TU Tales of Unrest

WT Within the Tides

YOS Youth, A Narrative; and Two Other Stories

Other Abbreviations

Baines Jocelyn Baines, Joseph Conrad: A Critical Biography (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1960).

CD ‘The Congo Diary’, in Joseph Conrad, Last Essays, ed. Harold Ray Stevens and J. H. Stape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 123– 37.

CDOUP Joseph Conrad: Congo Diary and Other Uncollected Pieces, ed. Zdzisław Najder (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1978).

CL The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, General Editors Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies, with Owen Knowles, Gene M. Moore and J. H. Stape, 9 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983– 2007).

CPB Conrad’s Polish Background: Letters to and from Polish Friends, ed. Zdzisław Najder, trans. Halina Carroll (London: Oxford University Press, 1964).

CR Joseph Conrad: The Contemporary Reviews, General Editors Allan H. Simmons, John G. Peters and

xvi Abbreviations

J. H. Stape, with Richard Niland, Mary Burgoyne and Katherine Isobel Baxter, 4 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

CUFE Conrad under Familial Eyes, ed. Zdzisław Najder, trans. Halina Carroll- Najder (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

Gordan J. D. Gordan, Joseph Conrad: The Making of a Novelist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1940).

JCC Jessie Conrad, Joseph Conrad and his Circle (London: Jarrolds, 1935).

JCTR John Conrad, Joseph Conrad: Times Remembered (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

LBM Joseph Conrad: Letters to William Blackwood and David S. Meldrum, edited by William Blackburn (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1958).

MDF ‘My Dear Friend’: Further Letters to and about Joseph Conrad, ed. Owen Knowles (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008).

MFJC Borys Conrad, My Father: Joseph Conrad (London: Calder & Boyars, 1970).

Najder Zdzisław Najder, Joseph Conrad: A Life (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2007).

PMMag Pall Mall Magazine.

Portrait A Portrait in Letters: Correspondence to and about Conrad, ed. J. H. Stape and Owen Knowles (Amsterdam: Rodopi 1996).

RAC Royal Automobile Club.

Stape 2007 J. H. Stape, The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad (London: Heinemann, 2007).

Stape 2009 J. H. Stape, ‘Sketches from the Life: The Conrads in the Diaries of Hugh Walpole’, The Conradian, 34.1 (2009), 163– 84.

Note: Conrad letters (or extracts from them) known to exist through their appearance in auction- catalogues but not included in Collected Letters are identified by the designation ‘Private collection’.

xvii

Although the name ‘Joseph Conrad’ is an anglicized form adopted as a pen- name in 1894, I have used the abbreviation ‘JC’ throughout this chronology, even during the writer’s early Polish years. In line with common practice, the abbreviation for Ford Madox Hueffer derives from the surname (Ford) he adopted in 1919, with the Hueffer surname retained only for his wife Elsie, from whom he was estranged in 1909.

For the sake of clarity and economy, items in the Conrad canon are formally identified by their publication titles as found in the Dent Collected Edition ( 1946– 54). Details of the various working- titles used by Conrad during composition and, in the case of shorter items, for first magazine publication can be found in Theodore Ehrsam’s A Bibliography of Joseph Conrad (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1969). All page references to Conrad’s works (with the excep-tion of ‘The Congo Diary’) are also to this Dent Edition. Unless otherwise stated, the place of publication for all books referred to in the concluding ‘Select Who’s Who’, ‘Locations and Addresses’ and ‘Select Bibliography’ is London.

Where the context does not make it clear, all references to streets, business premises, theatres, hotels and cafés are to a London loca-tion. All singular verbs in the following entries that lack an explicitly identified subject refer to Conrad. Unspaced points (...) in quoted material represent an omission made by the compiler; spaced points (. . .) signify an ellipsis already present in the quoted material.

Present- day equivalents for sums of money referred to in this chro-nology can be arrived at by multiplying amounts by approximately 360, a figure provided by the average earnings indicator on the Economic History Services website (www.eh.net).

A Note on Names, Titles, Usages and Money

xviii

The documentary materials that help us to understand the life and works of Joseph Conrad ( 1857– 1924) are dauntingly large in quantity and variety (embracing as they do official records, letters, diaries, reminiscences, bibliographies, and so on). They can also be as far- flung as the author’s life itself, which included three countries of residence and touched upon all five continents: ‘citizen of the world’, a descriptive epithet from Conrad’s Victory, also has personal application to a man and writer with so many contacts in so many countries and whose letters are now housed in places as far apart as London, Canberra and Honolulu.

As a work of distillation and assimilation, this chronology is designed to provide a clear, readable and compact digest of Conrad’s fascinating life as it develops from year to year. Its form – that of a series of diary or chronicle entries – clearly differs from the continu-ous prose demanded in conventional biography and so caters for the reader who may wish to check a single fact, follow the evolution of a Conrad work or find an answer to questions of ‘where, when, and with whom?’ In addition, the main contents are supplemented by a ‘Select Who’s Who’, indexes and maps that provide easy access to a wide range of information.

Daringly unchronological though Conrad may be in his fiction, the heat and stress of his own unfolding present as a writer can emerge with striking force in the chronological diary- form: its lin-ear sequences seem especially suitable for following the eccentric ‘runaway’ quality of Conradian composition, the interacting and cumulative stresses (and sometimes panic) during his hectic major period, and the survival tactics that he developed to live with serial deadlines and financial need. At the same time, this chronology is not situated exclusively in a continuous present. Process and pattern are as important in rendering a life- history as are grain and texture, and I have sometimes taken the opportunity to stand back and pro-vide larger narrative and contextual direction in order to underline significant phases, landmarks and rituals in Conrad’s career. These directions, whether implicit or explicit, should become fully evident

Introduction

Introduction xix

to the reader who wishes to enjoy this chronology as a continuous narrative.

Two main emphases are at work in the choice and disposition of material. While attempting to cover the whole of Conrad’s life, I have given special emphasis to the literary career that begins with the publication of Almayer’s Folly in 1895. Hence the first 30 years of his life – divided almost equally between his Polish youth and a widely- travelled career at sea  – are covered summarily in order to achieve a closer day- by- day focus upon the writer living and working within an English context.

In the treatment of that literary life, a main emphasis falls on the compositional and publishing history of Conrad’s writings, both fictional and non- fictional. The lesser item in the Conrad canon gen-erally receives a single entry that combines date of completion, first newspaper or magazine appearance, and a reference to the volume in which it was later collected. Novels and important short stories are naturally treated with greater detail in an attempt to follow their difficult and sometimes painfully slow evolution. In Conrad’s case, the unfolding drama of composition has many varied sub- plots: it involves the growth into full- length novels of what were originally conceived as short stories; long- term checks and delays with some novels (such as The Rescue and Chance); and crisis conditions pro-duced by his choosing to juggle with competing projects at the same time – and this is not to mention manuscripts burnt by fire and sunk with the Titanic!

In approaching a literary life such as Conrad’s there must inevitably be room for considerable flexibility, since the history of his develop-ment and reputation can never be divorced from a whole complex of related factors – the history of his illnesses, writer’s block, financial difficulties, collaborations, dependencies, his professional reading and the marketing of his fiction. Again, the process by which Conrad unburdened himself creatively often required many others to help him carry the burden, with the result that several of his novels were, in the widest sense, collaborative occasions. Hence an account of his unfolding career would be unthinkable without detailed references to a group of intimates and supporters such as Edward Garnett, John Galsworthy, his agent J. B. Pinker, R.  B.  Cunninghame Graham, Perceval Gibbon and William Rothenstein. These and other figures will appear in the following pages to indicate that there is more,

xx Introduction

much more, than a grain of truth in H. G. Wells’s wry suggestion in 1904 that the needy and impractical Conrad ‘ought to be adminis-tered by trustees’ (to Bennett, 29 March).

While accuracy has everywhere been sought for in matters of dat-ing and historical detail, the search itself can easily be frustrated by notoriously shadowy places in Conradian biography. For one thing, parts of his early life still only yield rescued fragments and tentative dates. Even when documentary evidence is fuller, other gaps and indeterminacies can arise through the fallible memory, or Conrad’s self- mythologizing, or his self- confessed proneness to optical delu-sions about the scope of his work- in- progress. While every effort has been made to consult and weigh available evidence, the reader should be forewarned that the elusive Conrad, like his own Lord Jim, does not always emerge in clear and singular outline and that we may sometimes have to be content with the humanly approximate.

A further difficulty can arise in the attempt to chronicle Conrad’s reading of other authors and works, partly because that reading is so prodigious as to demand a chronology in itself. But it is also the case that, while much is known about Conrad’s revered writers and about his habit of reading ‘professionally’ for his own fiction, one cannot always specify when or how often he took up certain works. Though he read avidly as a seaman, devoured source- books as a writer, and owned a large library at his death, he kept no formal record or com-monplace book to indicate specific times and volumes. In an area where completeness would be an impossible ideal, I  have at least tried to indicate the various kinds of reading undertaken by Conrad at various stages of his life. Some of these general kinds can be listed as follows: early contacts with literature and influences upon the apprentice writer; reading for professional reasons (of non- fiction as well as fiction); reading of works by writers in the Conrad circle; books sent to him by his contemporaries; his familiarity with litera-tures of three languages; books that he reread frequently; and the kinds of reading that he enjoyed for relaxation.

As a digest of existing factual knowledge, this chronology owes an obvious debt to an entire community of Conrad scholars from pioneers such as G. Jean- Aubry and J. D. Gordan to later figures such as Zdzisław Najder, Norman Sherry, and the editors of letter- collections. Institutions have also played an important part, and I should like to thank the library staffs at the Beinecke Rare Book and

Introduction xxi

Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut; the Berg Collection, Astor, Lennox and Tilden Foundations, New York Public Library; the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Austin (Texas); the Lilly Library, University of Indiana at Bloomington; Princeton University Libraries; Pierpoint Morgan Library, New York; the British Library; and the Brynmor Jones Library, University of Hull for their patience and help.

On a more personal note, I owe thanks to a number of friends and colleagues, especially Mary Burgoyne, Keith Carabine, Alexandre Fachard, the late Hans van Marle, Gene M. Moore, J. H. Stape and Ray Stevens, all of whom have generously shared the fruits of their work- in- progress. My most considerable debts of gratitude are to Laurence Davies, whose exemplary annotation in the Collected Letters volumes has been a wonderful resource, and to Allan Simmons, who has unfailingly provided wise advice, practical help and good- humoured encouragement.