Conrad & Wells

IN HIS 1912 MEMOIR A Personal Record Joseph Conrad wrote: “At a time when nothing which is not revolutionary in some way or other can expect to attract much attention I have not been revolutionary in my writings.” Linda Dryden quotes the passage halfway through Joseph Conrad and H. G. Wells: The Fin-de-Siècle Literary Scene as an example of how Conrad chafed against Wells’s expectation that the novel should serve a political agenda (preferably one that matched Wells’s own). The quote might serve equally well, however, as a description of Dryden’s writing. Joseph Conrad and H. G. Wells is not a revolutionary book. It will not radically overhaul our ideas about Wells and Conrad, nor will it redefine modernism. It would be a mistake, however, to overlook it on those terms. Dryden’s careful literary history and nuanced readings add new shades and detail to our received portraits of Wells and Conrad. From scholars of either author or of Edwardian literature, this book deserves attention.

The book tracks the waxing and waning of the friendship between Conrad and Wells, examining how the two influenced each other’s writing and why they grew apart in the years preceding World War I. The two began corresponding in 1896 and first met in 1898. Wells had written a positive review of Conrad’s An Outcast of the Islands; Conrad admired Wells’s scientific romances. Both, Dryden argues, were anxious to take the novel to new places beyond the strictures of Victorian realism. Though they seemed kindred spirits for a time, the friendship ebbed in the Edwardian period, as it became clear their political and literary visions were incompatible. By 1905, they had become the writers literary critics now recognize—Conrad the incipient modernist, Wells the utopian propagandist. As Dryden puts it, “Their different perceptions of the artist’s task, didactic, polemical and visionary in Wells’s case, sensory, sympathetic and politically wary in Conrad’s, defined a chasm between them that could not be bridged, however much they tried to reach across it.”

Though the friendship dissolved, its traces are preserved in their writing. Perhaps the most compelling thread of Joseph Conrad and H. G. Wells is its intertextual reading of Heart of Darkness alongside Wells’s novels. Many critics and students have noticed parallels between Heart of Darkness and The Time Machine, but Dryden shows via a strand of analysis which resurfaces in three chapters that the resonances between Wells’s and Conrad’s novels extend much further than that. In chapter 1, she identifies Wells’s The Invisible Man as an influence on Heart of Darkness, suggesting that Kurtz’s “reign of terror” in a Congolese village is a colonial adaptation of Griffin’s rapacious violence, the former’s isolation mirroring the latter’s invisibility. Chapter 3 demonstrates that the influence was mutual by showing how Tono-Bungay borrows themes and plot elements from Heart of Darkness, including its disgust with the imperial enterprise. Its style is very different from Heart of Darkness—more eyewitness report than well-wrought urn—but “one may argue,” writes Dryden, “that in its nihilism, scepticism, and overall atmosphere of wasted lives and exploitation, Tono-Bungay comes the nearest to a Conradian view of the early twentieth century that Wells ever attempted.” The intertextual reading of Heart of Darkness concludes in chapter 4 with a brief consideration of The Time Machine as a source for Heart of Darkness. Conrad adopted The Time Machine’s narrative frame and its use of unnamed professionals as listeners, a strategy that Dryden regards as political because it unmasks a connection between the familiar agents of capitalism and imperialism in England and the evil consequences of their work, whether in the distant future or in the faraway colonies.

While the first three chapters describe the development of Wells and Conrad’s friendship and mutual literary influence, chapters 4 through 6 explore the diverging political and aesthetic values that drove them apart. The ultimate...