The Right Accent: Conrad and the English Review

"My acceptance as an English writer is an accomplished fact."

—Joseph Conrad to J. B. Pinker, 18 September 1908

Joseph Conrad's contributions to the English Review (see figure 1) represent a considerable and important body of work. This article explores his changing relations with this journal from 1908 until 1917: a decade in which he redefined his role as an English writer. Before approaching Conrad's contributions to the English Review, it is necessary to get back behind Ford Madox Ford's retrospective mythologies. Spinning delightful yarns in Return to Yesterday (1931), Ford suggested that the English Review, like a glitteringly evanescent, fin-de-siècle little magazine, was doomed to an early death. "To imagine that a magazine devoted to imaginative literature and technical criticism alone would find more than a hundred readers," he commented, "was a delusion that I in no way had" (Ford, Return 377–78). For this reason he had included articles on politics and international affairs, "the lugubrious pomposities which stuffed," or so he thought with hindsight, "the brain of the unfortunate English reader of reviews" (Ford, "Foreword" xviii). Twenty years earlier, in a collection of his English Review editorials assembled shortly after he had been ousted from control of the journal, he bemoaned his failure "to enjoin upon the Englishman a critical attitude" (Ford, Critical 4). This self-pitying note, however, is belied by the bravura of his editorials on the major social, political, and intellectual issues of the day. The self-confidence displayed by these editorials positioned the English Review as a

Fig. 1.

The English Review, January 1909, cover.

clear successor to the great Victorian reviews of general culture. As Mark Morrisson has shown, Ford's review was intended as a competitor to the prestigious Fortnightly Review and as an English counterpart to established Continental reviews, like the Mercure de France (17–53). Ford liked to recall that he had founded the English Review as a successor to the Yellow Book—only his journal had been brave enough to publish Thomas Hardy's indelicate poem "A Sunday Morning Tragedy," which broached the controversial topic of abortion (Return 385). However, the magazine's avant-garde credentials should not be exaggerated: unlike the dandyish Yellow Book, Ford's English Review cultivated the patrician tone of the Victorian "higher journalism," hinting at connections with influential political elites. His inaugural editorial in December 1908, "The Functions of the Arts in the Republic," declared "No party bias" while assigning the imaginative writer the important task of stimulating intellectual debate in this "Republic" of letters.

The demise of Ford's editorial reign, after little more than a year, coincided with several personal quarrels, including Conrad's temporary break with the English Review in the summer of 1909. These events have been explained by reference to Ford's editorial mismanagement, a state of affairs exacerbated by his willful refusal to contemplate the economic realities of Edwardian journalism. Ford estimated that his spectacularly improvident generosity toward contributors cost the review over £300 per month—an enormous sum that cannot have pleased his financial backer, Arthur Marwood. In May 1909 Ford tried to persuade his brother-in-law, David Soskice, to help secure investors for the review, provoking Conrad to a regrettable display of petulance toward this "Russian Jew refugee" (CL 4: 266). Soskice became the convenient scapegoat for Conrad's refusal to continue his association with Ford's English Review. Adopting the line taken in Conrad's private letters, Zdzisław Najder has contended that Conrad's long "simmering" annoyance with Ford "boiled over, mostly because of Ford's irresponsibility and even arrogance" (105). Conversely, Max Saunders adduces three principal reasons for the sea change in Conrad's relations with Ford: (1) squeamishness over Ford's affair with Violet Hunt, (2) sheer prejudice against Soskice, and (3) an anxiety about continuing his autobiographical sketches in the English Review (Ford 270–72). This article explores in detail the circumstances surrounding this split in an attempt to demonstrate that Conrad had very strong reasons to dislike Soskice's...