Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad, born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in 1857 in Berdychiv, then part of the Russian Empire and now in Ukraine, became one of the most admired novelists in the English language, though English was his third language after Polish and Russian and he did not speak it fluently until his twenties. He died in 1924, at a time when the British Empire had reached its greatest reach. He matters because he turned a learned language into an instrument of remarkable precision and because he placed moral doubt and human frailty at the centre of the modern novel.

His childhood was shaped by political repression. His father, Apollo Korzeniowski, was a writer, translator and activist for Polish independence. He was imprisoned and the family was exiled first to Vologda and later to Chernihiv. His mother died of tuberculosis in 1865, and his father, who was also gravely ill, died in 1869 when Conrad was eleven. He was raised by his uncle in Kraków. As a boy he read Victor Hugo and Shakespeare, and above all the Polish Romantic poets, especially Mickiewicz and Słowacki, whose work left a lasting mark on his sense of nationhood and language.

At sixteen he left school and went to Marseille to train as a sailor. For more than two decades he worked on ships under several flags. Some episodes of those years are poorly documented, including a voyage in the Caribbean, involvement in political causes and a serious personal crisis. In 1878 he reached England and worked on coastal vessels. He spent his free time reading in English, and by the age of twenty-one he had a broad command of the language, though a foreign cadence never entirely left his syntax. After becoming a British subject, he passed the examinations for officer and eventually became a master in the merchant navy.

The sea supplied the material of his first books. He published Almayer's Folly in 1895, and soon afterwards he married Jessie George and devoted himself entirely to writing. He became acquainted with Ford Madox Ford, Henry James, H. G. Wells and Rudyard Kipling. His stories concern sailors, distant ports and the collision between the individual and an indifferent nature or society. Heart of Darkness addresses the brutality of colonial rule in the Congo indirectly, through a narrative that grows steadily denser. Lord Jim and Nostromo are perhaps his most ambitious novels, and in them moral ambiguity replaces the clean-cut heroism of traditional adventure. His prose, precise and deliberate, departs from Victorian clarity and anticipates much of modernist fiction.

His later years were marked by poor health, depression and money worries. When the First World War broke out he was in Poland and had to return to England, where the Admiralty gave him inspection duties at British ports. He died at Bishopsbourne in August 1924. His legacy sits between realism, impressionism and modernism, and many critics regard him as a bridge between the nineteenth-century novel and the twentieth. His treatment of identity, exile and an adopted language continues to attract close study.