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Article Excerpt
They read at meals; they read before going to the mill. They read Dickens and Scott and Henry George and Bulwer Lytton and Ella Wheeler Wilcox and Alice Meynell and would like 'to get hold of any good history of the French Revolution, not Carlyle's please,' and B. Russell on China, and William Morris and Shelley and Florence Barclay and Samuel Butler's Note Books they read with the indiscriminate greed of a hungry appetite, that crams itself with toffee and beef and tarts and vinegar and champagne all in one gulp.
(Woolf qtd in Davies xxxv-xxxvi)
So wrote Virginia Woolf of the mass reading public in 1931. But how true was this really of the reception of Joseph Conrad's literature, modernist masterpieces, serious works of art that challenged the reader to think, to consider, to interpret the meaning of the episodes that, in the words of the narrator of Heart of Darkness, enveloped Conrad's tales, bringing them out "only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine" (Youth 48)? The question of how literature of this kind might be marketed successfully at thefin de siecle was of critical concern to Conrad, who was interested from the start in both securing his reputation within the literary domain and, at the same time, with being "read by many eyes and by all kinds of them, at that" (Letters 6: 333) (1) These seemingly antagonistic commitments to, on the one hand, "modernist" aesthetics and, on the other, popular success, were not as incompatible in Conrad's mind as they perhaps appear today. Indeed, Conrad's desire to learn "what pleases the general public" was driven simultaneously by financial requirement and an artistic compulsion since, in the early days at least, he believed that economic successes were the fruits of artistic and literary achievement (Letters 4: 102). (2) In fact, Conrad insisted on the compatibility of art with popularity, writing perhaps most famously in the "Preface" to The Nigger of the "Narcissus" that the artist makes his appeal to the senses, "to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation," to "innumerable hearts," to "all humanity" (viii). And Conrad's philosophy was not so out of step with that of other early modernist writers, who, although of course aware that they belonged to a different, and even new school, did not conceive of their work as being radically different in kind from the more popular genre-based fiction of the day. Accordingly, at the turn of the nineteenth century, "what we now see as a chasm between two distinct literary cultures, the great divide, was scarcely more than a crack" (Daly 4). In reality, modernist authors
wrote for the same magazines, were published by the same houses, and, in the case of the men at least, sometimes belonged to the same clubs. The proto-modernist Henry James was a close friend of two of the most significant 'romanticists': Robert Louis Stevenson and George Du Maurier [...] Joseph Conrad's work appeared in mainstream periodicals like Blackwood's, not in 'little magazines' of the kind that flourished when modernism came into its own. (Daly 4)
It is worth emphasizing, as Nicholas Daly indicates, that if Conrad as an author did not conceive of himself as producing radically new or different work, neither did his publishers or agents. Indeed, the lines between popular and "modern" were so blurred in British culture at the fin de siecle, that in 1899 a collaboration of authors as diverse as Henry James, Robert Barr, George Gissing, H. Rider Haggard, H. G. Wells, H. B. Marriott-Watson, Stephen Crane, A. E. W. Mason, Edwin Pugh, and Conrad himself was formed for the purpose of producing a gothic play, The Ghost. Conrad, James, Crane, Wells, and Gissing, all of whom remain recognized names today, clearly did not seek to alienate themselves either professionally or personally from less literary writers who by the end of the twentieth century would be all but forgotten, despite the fact that their fiction clearly drew inspiration from and aspired to different traditions. In this context of blurred boundaries between elite and popular cultures, Conrad's expectation that his serious literature would appeal to readers of all tastes and from all backgrounds seems not unreasonable. Moreover, and although his schemes took time to develop, Conrad did indeed learn to become a cunning self-promoter who sought first to attain and then to bolster his reputation among literary-minded professionals while simultaneously demanding the attention of the man on the street. The suggestion that Conrad attained both popularity and prosperity through shrewd marketing is one that has been proposed by Cedric Watts and Susan Jones, both of whom persuasively argue, with principal reference to Chance and the later fiction, that it was due to the very public appeal to a female readership that Conrad's fortunes took a turn for the better. This paper seeks to further the claims of Watts and Jones by proposing, first, that the grains from which later publicity campaigns would grow were, even in 1895, already established in Conrad's attitude to his work and, second, that it was not only through an appeal to women that his readership was able to expand, but through the development of multiple marketing schemes by which Conrad and his associates sought to attract "all kinds of eyes" to his work. Accordingly, I argue that, with the support of his publishers and agents, Conrad developed a precedent for the marketing of serious literature upon which later modernists could depend as an early paradigm for how their writing might successfully be promoted to the public.
It is true that widespread popularity did not come swiftly to Conrad, whose early works sold slowly, despite encouraging reviews. Yet, a glance at a handful of these reviews suggests that critics for the popular press, in addition to those writing for more literary publications, consistently approved of his work. The Daily Chronicle wrote of An Outcast of the Islands that "Mr. Conrad has justified the expectations roused by Almayer's Folly. That was altogether as remarkable a first venture of fiction as we can remember. An Outcast of the Islands is a work of extraordinary force and charm," and the Manchester Guardian found his writing "fresh" and "original," asserting as early as 1896 that "we shall be surprised if Mr. Conrad does not make a name for himself in the near future" (qtd. in Carabine 253, 254). Moreover, as Donald Rude and Kenneth Davies have observed of the American critical reception of The Nigger of the "Narcissus," Conrad's third published novel was admired in such columns as George W. Smalley's "Timely Chat on Books and Authors" (The Herald) and in such local publications as The News (Indianapolis), The Baltimore Sun, The Saturday Gazette (Boston), and the Free Press (Detroit), among others (49-52). Moreover, Conrad displayed a concern for the marketplace from his very initiation into the literary field. Early on, however, unlike in later years, Conrad placed gaining a literary reputation before appealing to the public, seeking out prestigious publishers for his fiction in the form of Fisher Unwin whose imprint was large enough to secure him, in Unwin's words, "serious critical attention in the literary journals" (Letters 1: 180). (3) Having attained this "serious critical attention" with the publication of his first two novels, however, Conrad began to find the financial rewards somewhat lacking, and so he turned with some reluctance to serialization, (4) that widespread method of publication at the fin de siecle which could...
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