Joseph Conrad's The Nigger of the 'Narcissus': A Note on Its Critical ReceptionAuthor(s): Martin RaySource: The Review of English Studies, New Series, Vol. 36, No. 143 (Aug., 1985), pp. 385-387Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/516035 .

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unvisited tombs is significant given Margaret Fuller's death in a shipwreck off the coast of Fire Island, New York. Her body was not recovered. Yet the effect of her being was diffusive. This is an under- lying theme in the recollections of Emerson, Clarke, and Channing.

George Eliot never published the lengthy essay which she men- tioned to Chapman. She did, however, begin a story entitled 'Miss Brooke' and assiduously incorporated it into Middlemarch. Her heroine, Dorothea Brooke, like Margaret Fuller, was a woman in the nineteenth century bound to experience disappointment and unrealized dreams, unfulfilled plans. The echoes of the life and work of the American feminist which resound in Middlemarch lead to a conclusion overlooked by the novel's critics. George Eliot wrote her tribute to Margaret Fuller not in a triad or quaternion but into the character of Miss Brooke and the pages of Middlemarch.

PATRICIA DEERY

JOSEPH CONRAD'S THE NIGGER OF THE 'NARCISSUS': A NOTE ON ITS CRITICAL

RECEPTION

THE following note on the critical reception of Conrad's The Nigger sheds some new light on his literary reputation in the early years of his career, and also reveals more fully the role which H. G. Wells played in promoting Conrad's work.

The Academy, in its issue of 6 November 1897, announced that it intended to 'crown' a book of signal merit each year: 'the author of the work will receive an award from this journal of ONE HUNDRED GUINEAS. We have also in contemplation the "crowning" of a book each year by an author of younger reputation, to whom we shall make an award of FIFTY GUINEAS.'1 Conrad's The Nigger would be eligible for both prizes under these conditions. It would be published during 1897 (it ran as a serial in the New Review from August to December, and was published in book form on 2 December) and it was the work of an author who was in only the third year of his writing career.

On 8 January 1898 the Academy explained that it had written to certain men of letters inviting them to submit on the enclosed postcard the names of certain books which they deemed worthy of the prizes. The Academy then printed a selection of the replies it had received, from, among others, Edmund Gosse, Andrew Lang, W. L. Courtney, Clement Shorter, and Richard Garnett. The sample ends with the reply from H. G. Wells, the full text of which reads as follows:

1 Academy, lii (6 Nov. 1897), 376.

NOTES 385

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386 NOTES

Henley & Henderson's edition of Burns is the sort of book that particularly deserves 'crowning'-a magnificent performance of the utmost value to English literature, and not a very remunerative one to its authors. Mr. Henry James's What Maisie Knew ranks next, perhaps. The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' is, to my mind, the most striking piece of imaginative work, in prose, this year has produced. Captain Courageous I couldn't read by reason of the illustrations; so I know nothing thereof.2

Another critic to nominate The Nigger was Israel Zangwill, who mentioned it as one of his four contenders, and in the next week's issue we learn that Sir Douglas Straight, the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, had recommended it as one of his two choices for the pair of prizes.3

Ford Madox Ford described Wells as Conrad's 'chief backer before the public'4 in the early days of his writing career, and Conrad himself acknowledged to Wells his gratitude for 'the long list of your good offices', and remarked that 'if it were not for you a lot of people would not know of my existence, anything palpable, and still less of my involved form of narrative'.5 The two men had become acquainted in May I896, when Wells wrote a review of An Outcast of the Islands which ended with the remark that Conrad's novel 'is, perhaps, the finest piece of fiction that has been published this year as "Almayer's Folly" was one of the finest that was published in i895'.6 Wells completed his triple accolade of Conrad, we can now see, by nominating The Nigger as the best work of 1897: that is, Wells has publicly testified that Conrad, in each of the first three years of his career, has produced the best book of the year. It is not surprising that Conrad should be deeply indebted to Wells for this remarkably generous acclaim of a new writer.

The Academy had originally planned to award one of its two prizes to a writer of promise, but in its issue of 15 January 1898 they announced that instead they would award both prizes on the basis of 'excellence of performance' rather than 'richness of promise'. Accordingly, they adjudged the winners to be the poet Stephen Phillips and W. E. Henley, Conrad's editor at the New Review which had recently completed the serialization of The Nigger. The Academy continued with an explanation of its reasons for choosing these two

2 Academy, liii (8 Jan. 1898), 34. 3 Ibid. (I5 Jan. 1898), p. 75. This comment has not been listed by any of Conrad's

bibliographers. 4 Joseph Conrad: a Personal Remembrance (London, 1924), p. 46. 5 Georges Jean-Aubry, Joseph Conrad: Life and Letters (London, 1927), i. 326, 32I. 6 Saturday Review, lxxxi (I6 May 1896), 509-Io, rpt. in Conrad: the Critical Heritage, ed.

Norman Sherry (London, I973), pp. 73-6.

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NOTES 387

winners, and mentioned various other writers who had been under consideration: 'other claimants were, especially in fiction, numerous, and possessed of considerable right to be heard. Mr Joseph Conrad's Nigger of the "Narcissus" was judged to be too slight and episodic, although we consider it a remarkable imaginative fact, marked by striking literary power.'7 It was possibly the late decision by the Academy not to 'crown' a new author which deprived Conrad of a prestigious prize so early in his career, which he might otherwise have won. MARTIN RAY

7 Academy, liii (I5 Jan. 1898), 47.

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