Reviewed by: Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford: A Study in Collaboration by John Hope Morey Fiona Houston (bio) Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford: A Study in Collaboration John Hope Morey. Leiden: Brill, 2021. 198 pp. ISBN: 9789004449701. While the relationship and collaboration between Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford is well known and well acknowledged, the nature of the relationship, however, is perhaps no longer, or rarely, analyzed, or challenged. This is not to say that scholars necessarily agree on the nature of the collaboration: did Ford exaggerate the extent of the help he provided for Conrad? Did Conrad underplay the importance of Ford’s services? John Hope Morey’s doctoral dissertation—edited and reproduced “to make it more readily available to a wider readership” (ix) by Gene M. Moore—is by no means recent scholarship (the very opposite is true); yet its tracking and testing of what Morey refers to as [End Page 188] the “Conrad controversy” (x) is vital reading for a new generation of scholars, as well as those who have been immersed in Ford or Conrad studies for years. Many works discuss the collaborative work of these two men, yet few track and test it so thoroughly as Morey, and the publication of this work decades after its original production highlights the importance of questioning accepted assumptions which may perhaps have been repeated without enquiry for many years. Conrad’s and Ford’s reputations have differed greatly from each other over the years, perhaps perpetuated by the loyalties of Ford scholars and Conrad scholars alike in defense of each man, a fact Morey acknowledges. He highlights the extent to which Conrad was “revered,” arguing that his “enormous popularity almost completely obscured the fact that he and Ford had ever collaborated” (2–4). He recognizes that those with “predilections in favour of Conrad [. . . .] scoff at [. . . .] the claims of Ford, while Ford adherents are often guilty of uncritically accepting what Ford said about his relationship with Conrad” (67). It is this contradiction of loyalties that makes this thesis such an important piece of work: written without bias towards either man, but rather laying out the facts and the history of this literary collaboration to try and ascertain the truth. After all, the fact that a close relationship did exist cannot be contested, and “for a period of ten years they talked about fiction, wrestled with English idiom, discussed plots and—most important of all—wrote fiction together” (151). What Morey undertakes is a close study of the nature of that relationship. Throughout the work, Morey dissects numerous claims about the authors’ partnership, testing them against evidence and comparing published works with works that were unpublished at the time of his writing. In many ways, his doctoral dissertation acts as a defense of Ford’s character: Morey devotes a great amount of time to discussing Ford’s reputation and public opinion of him, testing the many claims that were made against his character by friends and supporters of Conrad. Morey claims that through the evidence provided in his thesis, we are able to see that “some of the claims made by Ford—claims which have been scoffed at or ignored for many years—are valid” (65–66). One key line of enquiry Morey undertakes is a detailed analysis of Ford’s claims of his having lent Conrad money. Morey explores the founding of the literary magazine The English Review, investigating Ford’s claims that it was set up in part as a method of providing a source of income for Conrad and providing opportunity for his friend to publish work. Another point of contention against Ford for supporters of Conrad are his claims of the extent of his input in some of Conrad’s work, including Nostromo. Morey, however, again gives credit to Ford, acknowledging that “more than once Ford disclaimed any essential part in Conrad’s work, and took pains to [End Page 189] state explicitly the precise nature of the help he provided” (88). Morey carefully and extensively analyzes the claim that Ford was able to represent and imitate Conrad’s style, allowing him to complete works on his friend’s behalf when Conrad was...

“Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality”: A Possible Source for Under Western Eyes Alan Procter (bio) The third sentence of Under Western Eyes, in the words of Conrad’s Russian-literate narrator, reads, “Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.” In the four parts of the novel that follow, this startling claim gets manifest support in significant ways, just one of which is the lies uttered by various characters in their pursuits of various troubling, self-justified, delusional versions of unreality. But the subordinate tag to his claim, “as is well known,” in those four following parts lapses, the fame uncorroborated, as if its source in the mind of the narrator, like his very acquisition of words themselves, lay too deep to be resurrected. In quite another book, a recent study of the poetry of the Russian Arsenii Tarkovsky, Kitty Hunter Blair, in commenting on a line of Tarkovsky’s poetry, makes reference to an echoed line in a poem of a century earlier, a “much-quoted line” (23). The poem is the brief “Silentium,” its author Feodor Tiuchev (1803–73; also spelled Fyodor Tyutchev). Blair renders the relevant lines from “Silentium” as “a thought once spoken is a lie” (23). Similarly, Charles Tomlinson translates the lines: “Utter your thoughts / They flow in lies” (lns. 9–10). If among literate Russians the line has been much quoted, then the narrator’s claim to its fame is justified, just as his recollection of the line itself is faithful. It is possible, then, to conjecture that Conrad’s own Russian experience included this poem, thereafter perhaps lying deep within him until it resulted here in his narrator’s instinctive unreflective, unelaborated, unidentified recall of it. If so, then a paradox ensues, for Tiuchev’s poem reckons on words to proclaim the primacy of that wordlessness, of inexpression that he so cherished, the “reality” of the narrator’s third sentence of Under Western Eyes. Such cherished reality for Conrad’s characters seems to exist outside the boundaries of their word-filled lives within which they place themselves, or find themselves. Foremost among them, the protagonist and Tekla brave the costs of seeking release from the great foes of reality. In writing his novel, unique as it was in the severity of costs to his own well-being, Conrad may have been seeking for himself a similar release, his silentium. [End Page 179] Alan Procter ALAN PROCTER is an independent scholar. Following a degree in English language and literature in 1958 from the University of Toronto, he engaged for thirty-some years with teenagers and literature in Toronto suburban-school classrooms, and now continues to enjoy the worth of others’ writing. WORKS CITED Blair, Kitty Hunter. Poetry and Film: Artistic Kinship between Arsenii and Andrei Tarkovsky. Tate, 2014. Google Scholar Tiuchev, Feodor. “Silentium.” Translated by Charles Tomlinson, Russian Poets, edited by Peter Washington, Everyman, 2009, p. 45. Google Scholar Copyright © 2019 Texas Tech University Press

Reviewed by: The Inheritors and The Nature of a Crime by Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford Linda Dryden (bio) Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford. The Inheritors and The Nature of a Crime. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. 334 pp. ISBN: 9781139061452. The Cambridge Edition of The Inheritors (1901) and The Nature of a Crime (1909), edited by Jeremy Hawthorn, is the nineteenth volume of Conrad’s works published in this series. As is already evident from the previous volumes, this series of expertly edited and annotated works establishes the definitive texts with a wealth of additional material for context and interpretation. The Editorial Board is comprised of an international team of leading academics in the field of Conrad studies. Prior to the advent of the Cambridge Editions, the major textual resource for Conrad scholars was the less reliable, unannotated, Dent Collected editions. Researchers are now in the fortunate position of having recourse to authoritative texts for all the major Conrad works, and to the wealth of additional material gathered by the individual editors. The current volume is a further welcome addition to the catalogue of studies dedicated to the works of Joseph Conrad. Both The Inheritors and The Nature of a Crime are often overlooked in surveys of Conrad’s literary output, and thus a whole volume dedicated to charting their genesis, interpreting and contextualizing their content, providing extensive textual notes, and offering an account of their critical reception will receive a warm reception from Conrad scholars. Although not the most accomplished works in the Conrad canon, these texts are nevertheless significant for a number of reasons, not least for the fact that, alongside Romance: A Novel (1904), they represent Conrad’s experimental literary collaboration with Ford Madox Ford. As Hawthorn says: Omitted from Dent’s Collected Edition and accordingly often passed over by Conrad readers and scholars in the latter half of the twentieth century, these important fruits of the collaboration between two of the great modernist novelists in English are thus made available to the sort of serious consideration accorded to other works by these authors. (252–53) In this respect the stories are important in that they offer us examples of how these two authors influenced each other, and of how they worked together. In Jeremy Hawthorn, the General Editor of the Cambridge Editions has engaged a renowned and highly respected Conrad scholar, whose extensive knowledge of the writer and exceptional editing skills afford this volume an [End Page 209] extremely satisfying authority. This authority is amply demonstrated in his excellent Introduction, which contains a wealth of information on the genesis of the stories, the influences behind the plotlines, and the contexts in which they were written. The commentary is erudite and extensively researched: it makes for fascinating reading at times, and the range of resources consulted is truly impressive. Using a variety of sources such as Jessie Conrad’s Joseph Conrad and His Circle (1935), Ford’s Return to Yesterday (1931), and of course the Collected Letters, Hawthorn traces the early meetings between the two authors and creates a compelling narrative that details the genesis of The Inheritors. Hawthorn’s investigations reveal evidence of the authors’ working practices. He has carefully evaluated the contribution made by each author to the stories and argues convincingly that in both cases the majority of the text was written by Ford. Relying on Ford’s accounts of the collaborations, textual evidence, and marginal hand-written notes, Hawthorn also establishes strong evidence for Conrad’s textual interventions, and points to the critical moments when he interjected to shift the tone of the narrative, or to change a word or phrase. What emerges is a detailed and extremely plausible account of the collaborative practice that Conrad and Ford engaged in. In the case of The Inheritors, the authors strayed into the territory of a literature that, in the 1920s, would become known as “science fiction,” making the text unique within Conrad’s oeuvre. Hawthorn notes the influence of H.G. Wells on the concept of the fourth dimension in the text: he outlines how The Time Machine (1895), and Conrad’s visit to Dr. John McIntyre in Glasgow for an...

Reviewed by: The Nigger of the “Narcissus” by Joseph Conrad G. W. Stephen Brodsky (bio) Joseph Conrad. The Nigger of the “Narcissus”. Edited by Allan H. Simmons. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017. 364 pp. ISBN: 978110741407. The Nigger of the “Narcissus” (1897) marked Conrad’s arrival as the “definitive new voice in maritime story-telling” (Narcissus, xxix). This authoritative volume of the Cambridge Edition of The Works of Joseph Conrad, lauded by the Times Literary Supplement (Jan. 16, 2018), joins others of the Cambridge University Press Edition franked by the MLA Committee on Scholarly Editions “An Approved Edition.” Allan Simmons, general co-editor of The Works since July 2016 and editor of this volume, is Professor Emeritus of Modern English at St. Mary’s University in Twickenham, UK, where he directs the Centre for Joseph Conrad Studies, sister institution to the founding Centre for Conrad Studies at the Institute for Bibliography and Editing at Kent State University, Ohio. A committee member of the Joseph Conrad Society (UK) and twenty-year veteran general editor of The Conradian, he has already edited Cambridge’s edition of Tales of Unrest, with J. H. Stape (2012), and The Outcast of the Islands (2016). Simmons’s output is as unrelenting as it is prodigious. He was aiming at a completion date for the Cambridge Edition of A Set of Six late in 2019. He is a recipient [End Page 89] of the Joseph Conrad Society of America’s Ian P. Watt Award for Lifetime Achievement in Conrad Studies. “Narcissus”1 conforms to the Cambridge Edition’s general editorial protocols, its General Editor’s Preface describing its organization and technical apparatus and previewing the sources and copy texts: the holograph MS, a revised TS of the Preface, and a revised TS of the first American edition’s preface, “To My Readers in America.” The Acknowledgements page includes a constellation of Conradian elder statesmen and newer but seasoned talent, salient among them the late John H. Stape and Owen Knowles for their “profound engagement and influence”; for “assistance and information,” Peter Lancelot Mallios, Mary Burgoyne, Laurence Davies, Gene M. Moore, John G. Peters, and Kim Salmons (xvii). A standard Biographical Chronology follows the Acknowledgements, which, while adequate for general use, could be more detailed in showing by dates of correspondence, etc., the increasingly complex history of Conrad’s personal and professional life as factors in the novella’s motivation, inception and growth; e.g., Conrad’s relationships with Marguerite Porodowska, Emilie Briquel, and Jessie Conrad née George, William Henley, Fisher T. Unwin, Edward Garnett, and Ford Madox Ford. (In any case a few of the foregoing appear in the Introduction and Essay on the texts.) Simmons is admirably disciplined in presenting Conrad’s motivations for, and hindrances to, his writing of “Narcissus.” His conclusions in the introductory sections on origins and sources are confined to evidentiary certainty, and he eschews ancillary speculative sources (e.g., the 1880 Cutty Sark murder scandal). Rather, distinct sources are cited: (1) autobiographical (Second Mate of the real-life Narcissus) and conversations, e.g., with Fountaine Hope, a sailor since youth as a “Conway” boy (xxx); (2) literary and pictorial (Dickens, De Maupassant, Flaubert, Crane, Loti, Longfellow, Marryat, and Cooper); and (3) contemporary events (imperialism, global trade, trade unionism, the London dockside’s ethnic diversity, the triumph of steam, and universal literacy) (xxxiv, xxxvi). Conrad’s meeting with Edward Garnett on October 8, 1894, is recounted, after he had begun “The Two Vagabonds” in August as a short story, and the nascent novel Outcast. From January to May 1895, it blossomed into a novel. On April 29, Almayer’s Folly was published (Najder 176), and in October 1895, Conrad finished Outcast for Garnett’s critique. (It would appear on March 4, 1896.) Now a “settled” writer (Narcissus xxviii), Conrad decided to write The Sisters, about a character of a Ruthenian culture he had known in his youth, but to which he had never belonged, and about Basque women in a culture he did not know at first hand, in a country to which he had never been. But Edward Garnett guided...

Reviewed by: Joseph Conrad’s Authorial Self / Polish and Other ed. by Wiesław Krajka Cedric Watts (bio) Joseph Conrad’s Authorial Self / Polish and Other. Edited by Wiesław Krajka. Lublin: Maria Curie-Skłodowska University Press, 2018. xi + 402 pp. ISBN: 9788322790564. This is a richly varied collection of essays which sheds new light on Conrad. It opens with an introduction by the editor, Professor Krajka, the prolific author who is well known to Conradians. Though marred by lapses in idiom (the omission of the definite article from some phrases and the indefinite article [End Page 84] from others, particularly on page 8), this gives a thorough account of the contents of the volume. The first chapter is Nathalie Martinière’s “Like a Damaged Kaleidoscope: Multiple Contemporary Images of Joseph Conrad.” She traces the influence of Conrad on Salman Rushdie, W. G. Sebald, Mario Vargas Llosa, Juan Gabriel Vásquez, and José Altamiro. These authors, she explains, reinscribe Conrad “with a symbolic dimension that sometimes seems to matter more than the literary content of his fiction.” Sometimes, but not always. Poignantly, for example, when Salman Rushdie had to choose a protective “cover name” after being condemned to death by the Islamic fatwa, he chose “Joseph Anton,” recalling Conrad and Chekhov. Rushdie wrote: Conrad, the trans-lingual creator of wanderers, lost and not lost, of voyagers into the heart of darkness, of secret agents in a world of killers and bombs, and of at least one immortal coward, hiding from his shame . . . “I must live until I die, mustn’t I?” Wait [said]. So must we all, he [Rush-die] had thought when he read the book, but in the present circumstances the sentence’s power felt like a command. “Joseph Anton,” he told himself, “you must live until you die.” (25) I note that Nathalie Martinière takes literally Roland Barthes’s famous essay, “The Death of the Author,” but as J. C. Carlier demonstrated irrefutably, Barthes’s essay was a brilliant satiric denunciation of the old-fashioned notion that the author should be disregarded. (To emphasise his satiric point, Barthes signed the essay and claimed copyright for it.) The second chapter, by Richard Ambrosini, is entitled “A Memoir ‘in the shape of a novel’: Making the ‘still voice’ of Conrad’s Polish Past Resonate in A Personal Record.” One premise of this chapter seems unduly pessimistic: “A biographical approach will never succeed in providing credible answers to the questions raised by Conrad’s life . . .” (37). (One may respond that Zdzisław Najder’s biographical approach has provided credible answers to numerous questions raised by Conrad’s life.) When discussing “Heart of Darkness,” Ambrosini declares that “Marlow of course is a technique, not a character” (42): in which case we should (“of course”) gain by electing to refer to Marlow as “it,” not “he”; but thereby, obviously, we lose. Citing some of Conrad’s most poignant familial memories, Ambrosini argues vigorously that “the memory-and-writing paradigm” (as opposed to the “life-and-works paradigm”) can “help uncover the way Conrad’s ‘conceptions’ and ‘emotions’ are made to inter-weave in the shape of his novels” (49). The third chapter, by G. W. Stephen Brodsky, is “Anchors and Mirrors: [End Page 85] Joseph Conrad’s Polonism Encoded.” Brodsky contends persuasively that Conrad’s attitude towards his diverse experiences and his fictional protagonists “was shaped by his Polish past: he saw all these protagonists in his szlachta mind’s mirror, with a noble outsider’s objective acuity” (71). This splendid essay is richly allusive and vividly imaginative. Brodsky declares: In his maturity Conrad’s ironism, a humour of situation—transience and belonging nowhere—mirroring his family’s experience in the borderland, would stand in bas-relief against a literalist background of British Imperialist exuberance in the works of Kipling, G. A. Henty and others. (71) In that formulation, I would question only the term “bas-relief:” “High relief” might seem more appropriate to the author of “An Outpost of Progress.” Harold Ray Stevens offers “ ‘A tall cross much out of the perpendicular’: Some Christian Contexts in Conrad’s Life, Letters and ‘Heart of Darkness.’ ” While acknowledging the skepticism...

Reviewed by: The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad Cedric Watts (bio) Joseph Conrad. The Secret Agent. Edited by Richard Niland. New York: W. W. Norton, 2017. viii + 386 pp. ISBN: 9780393937442. This volume is part of the Norton Critical Edition series, which is notably characterized by the provision of ample contextual material. Richard Niland’s edition reproduces the text of the first English book edition of The Secret Agent, published in London by Methuen in 1907. Niland adds, “A small number of printer’s errors and inconsistencies, such as spelling irregularities, have been corrected.” This choice of text is entirely reasonable, for readers will then be seeing the text read by the book’s first reviewers, at a time when Conrad was anxiously perusing their opinions; and those early reviews have so often been cited in subsequent critical discussions of the novel. When I edited The Secret Agent for Orion Dent Everyman in 1997, I similarly took as copytext the Methuen 1907 version. I corrected various words and phrases, some of which contained typographical or proof errors, and I eliminated some inconsistencies. I then listed all my emendations, so that a reader could reconstitute the first edition virtually “warts and all.” Richard Niland has chosen not to list his emendations, so they cannot be perceived. At one point, the Methuen text makes no sense. We are told that Verloc’s shopfront is “heaving with vague piles of cardboard boxes and the shapes of books.” Why “heaving”? The Cambridge University Press text of The Secret Agent (1990), edited by Bruce Harkness and S. W. Reid, explains that a typist had typed “heaving” after misreading a scribbled “gloomy” in the manuscript. A reproduction of page 426 of the manuscript on their page 234 shows how such a remarkable misreading could occur. Accordingly, in my 1997 edition I adopted (with due acknowledgement) the “gloomy” reading. Richard Niland, however, has chosen to retain “heaving.” Though brevity is the soul of wit, Niland’s annotations to the text, while being helpful, are somewhat sparse. For example: the Home Secretary’s strikingly unusual name, “Ethelred,” is not annotated. But the famous Ethelred in [End Page 195] British history is King Ethelred II, always known as “the Unready,” i.e., “he who lacks good advice,” “rede” and “read” once meaning “counsel or advice.” So, the name holds aptness for a government minister, a Home Secretary, who has been wrongly advised. Again, the novel tells us that to Mr. Vladimir, Verloc resembles “a master plumber come to present his bill.” The text proceeds: “The First Secretary of the Embassy, from his occasional excursions into the field of American humour, had formed a special notion of that class of mechanic as the embodiment of fraudulent laziness and incompetency.” Mr. Vladimir appears to be familiar with Charles Dudley Warner’s essay “Plumbers” in Mark Twain’s Library of Humour (264–65), but Richard Niland appears not to be. According to Warner, the typical American plumber is deliberately incompetent and nonchalantly lazy. (Annotations of this matter in the Cambridge and the Watts editions are congruent and complementary.) More importantly: although the appended material of this Norton edition discusses the significance of Cesare Lombroso’s theories, the annotations to the text do not illustrate the remarkable extent to which characterizations have been inflected by details culled from Lombroso. For instance, there is no annotation when the text informs us that Comrade Ossipon, the disciple of Lombroso, appears thus: “A bush of crinkly yellow hair topped his red, freckled face, with a flattened nose and prominent mouth cast in the rough mould of the negro type. His almond-shaped eyes leered languidly over his high cheekbones.” According to Ossipon’s mentor, Lombroso, the nose of the born thief is often “of a flattened, negroid character”; violators of women have lips “protruding, as in negroes”; many congenital criminals also have such mongoloid facial features as prominent cheekbones and oblique eyes; and a high proportion of anarchists (between 31 and 40 percent) are congenital criminals. Certainly, Niland tells us later that Lombroso believed that physical features revealed “a propensity for criminal or atavistic behaviour,” but the ruthless irony that this disciple is a perfect illustration...

In Memory of Thomas C. Moser, Sr Peter Mallios (bio) I’m not sure I would ever have been a Conrad scholar were it not for Tom Moser. My fascination with Conrad dates back to college, but it was only in graduate school, when Tom casually laid in my box an advertisement for a Conrad conference at Drexel University, that I seemed to cross the shadow-line into becoming a professional Conradian. Until that moment, it never actually occurred to me that I could or should give a paper on any subject. But at that conference, sponsored by the Joseph Conrad Society of America, I became part of a community, and shortly thereafter, when I attended my first conference in London at the Polish Social and Cultural Association (P.O.S.K.) hosted by the Joseph Conrad Society, UK, this sense of profound and wonderful solidarity, with people whose experiences and backgrounds stretched across the world and were vastly different than mine, was complete. To this day, I have never known a more generous community of souls than this one, no academic community have I more enjoyed being a part of. Tom was the key to all of this. He was generosity personified: simply to mention his name was to open the door to a vast repertoire of individual stories, which it seemed like every Conrad scholar had, of some significant instance of generosity on Tom’s part that had meaningfully touched and changed their lives and careers. Tom’s generosity toward others became like a magic wand of generosity towards me. This was also true of Tom as a teacher. I came to know him after he had retired, so I never had the privilege of taking a course from him, though I know many who did who extolled his dedication to students. The Tom I knew as a teacher and dissertation advisor taught me in walks around campus or his neighborhood, or in his home study which combined an overflow of papers and books and a small table Ian Watt made for him out of a piece of the hull of the Otago, or in lunches on his patio with his dog. He painstakingly read and wrote comments on every last wayward dissertation page I wrote, always somehow found something in them to save, refine, and push further, and always was lending me books. I remember with special and deeply grateful appreciation the long conversations we would have about Conrad and Faulkner, which may be the first time I found myself challenged by the kinds of questions [End Page 113] comparativism can raise—in the company of the right person prompting those questions. Of course, Tom as a field-shaping scholar, in more fields than one, with his signature lucid prose distilling wide latitudes of thought and launching bold articulations of point of view, coinage and argument, is how many scholars know of Tom and justly appreciate his outsized impact and legacy. Joseph Conrad: Achievement and Decline (1957) is one of those landmark books that are part of the permanent landscape of Conrad studies. Its major argument—about periods of achievement and decline in Conrad’s career—is as timeless in its ability to provoke as the book itself uncannily resonates in its concerns and phrases in different moments of time. The book’s self-declared “uncongenial” subjects and phrases find repeated and unexpected generative afterlives as critical trends and world exigencies move from one moment to the next. The Life in the Fiction of Ford Madox Ford (1980) is similarly a book that opened pathways in studies of Ford that still are a generative precondition of much work about this author. Tom’s two Norton editions of Lord Jim are the only books by another author I truly wish I had published myself. The first edition is the one I read in college, mesmerized, though I never actually was able to finish it at the time. The second edition—this book being of all books the one I love best—is inscribed to me in the copy I have, “For Peter, Classy Conradian and passionate fan of this novel, With affection, Tom.” These words say more about...

Over the course of his career, Conrad’s descriptions of touch form a remarkable trajectory. The early Malay novels, Almayer’s Folly and An Outcast of the Islands, present a woman’s sensual touch as a dangerous, debilitating experience for a man. For the next several years, Conrad’s descriptions of touch are rare and muted, even in situations that would seem to call for more detailed and explicit accounts. Later, some crucial male/male relations produce deeper images of the power of tactility, and this new freedom starts to extend to Conrad’s representations of male/female relations in works like “A Smile of Fortune” and “The Planter of Malata.” In each of these works, he negotiates issues of power, culture, gender, and panic. Finally, in his last completed novels, The Arrow of Gold and The Rover, Conrad directly sets forth embodied emotion and intimacy through the touching of hands, shoulders, and lips, as the dangerous tactility narrated in the early novels set in an exotic Orient is at last able to be domesticated and experienced in an ultimately unexceptional though still highly charged manner. Conrad’s authorial development may be connected to issues occurring in his personal life at this time, and it parallels the changing cultural perceptions of the sense of touch from the late Victorian to the early modern period, in particular the literary transformations of the status of the tactile during this period.