The Publication of Victory in Munsey's Magazine and the London Star

Fig. 6.

Munsey's Magazine, February 1915, cover. Illustration by Walter Dean Goldbeck.

The reception of Victory has often hinged on Joseph Conrad's wider use of popular literary forms in his later career and the appearance of his work in periodicals of allegedly low aesthetic standards. In 1957 Thomas Moser initiated an influential theory of decline that continues to attract responses:

How can a writer as complex and profound as Conrad have written these stories? Their stock characters belong in the romantic melodramas of inferior magazines, as do their conventional love-trysts, and their pernicious sentimental "message." Can a writer stop writing serious books and begin to turn out work indistinguishable from popular trash?

(106–07)

A long tradition of criticism exists to challenge Moser's thesis, but arguments about the aesthetic merit of the novel are complicated by the textual history of Victory, which includes versions of Victory in the American mass-market periodical Munsey's Magazine (see figure 6) and the high-circulation evening newspaper, the London Star (see figure 7).¹ These periodicals might easily be written off as ephemeral media of their respective readerships, but that does little to help understand the significance of the appearance of Conrad's Victory (an enduring work of art) in this context. The following pages contribute to our understanding of this aspect of Conrad's literary career by exploring the relationship between Conrad and the readers of Munsey's Magazine and the London Star through their contribution to the life of Victory as a serialized text.

Fig. 7.

The Star (London), 14 September 1915, cover.

The first English edition of Victory was published on 24 September 1915, more than three years after Conrad began writing the short story, "Dollars," from which it evolved. The text of the English edition descended from the corrected proofs of Doubleday's American edition, but Conrad undoubtedly made more changes to these proofs and further corrected Methuen's proofs before the English edition was published.² The Doubleday text was set from what Conrad called the "second-state" typescript, a clean copy of the typescript that had accumulated during the process of composition (CL 5: 203). This "second-state" typescript was also the setting copy used by Munsey's Magazine, but Conrad denounced the magazine text as unsuitable. To his literary agent, James Pinker, he wrote,

Pray let Doubleday know by cable if necessary that he must not set up Victory from the magazine text. It won't do […]. They have cut, transposed and altered the paragraphing more than I can stand […]. I look upon the matter as of considerable importance. We must have the same text for book form in Eng and the US.—and that text cannot be the Munsey Magazine text.

(CL 5: 435)

Strongly asserting that the magazine text was not suitable to stand as the text he wished to be known by in literary circles, Conrad continued his dominant practice of rejecting the authority of serializations in favor of subsequent book form. Magazine texts may have added to the financial outcomes of his creative efforts, but they held limited aesthetic value for the novelist. The attribution of aesthetic value was left to the readers of the periodicals in which Conrad's work appeared.

Despite looking down on the magazine forms of his works, Conrad had a good idea of the types of readers a text like Victory could attract. Early in the process of composition, Conrad gave Pinker an outline with which to sell the unfinished story to American publishers:

As, for instance that it has a tropical Malay setting—an unconventional man and a girl on an island under peculiar circumstances to whom enters a gang of three ruffians also of a rather unconventional sort—this intrusion producing certain psychological developments and effects. There is philosophy in it and also drama—lightly treated—meant for cultured people—a piece of literature before everything—and of course fit for general reading. Strictly...