Conrad Chronology: Second Edition

THIS WELL ESTABLISHED SERIES fills a crucial gap in the academic market between author biography and interpretive scholarship. Where a biography tells the story of a subject’s life, with the inevitable inflections accorded by the biographer, a chronology presents the basic facts of that life unadorned, reducing it to the bare dates and events. Each volume in Palgrave Macmillan’s Author Chronologies series—whose blossoming range of subjects already extends from Sir Philip Sidney, Christopher Marlowe and John Milton to Samuel Beckett, George Orwell and Harold Pinter—provides the factual details of an author’s life, often allowing for a day-by-day account of the life out of which his or her literature emerges. In the case of Joseph Conrad (1857–1924), biographers have done well to locate the source materials that shape his life. So rich and varied are its patterns that one recent biography chose as its title The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad(by J. H. Stape).

Born Józef Teodor Konrad Nałecz Korzeniowski, into a family of ardent Polish patriots in the Russian-annexed Ukraine, Conrad spent two decades as seaman, largely in the British merchant service, travelling in the colonial world, and then spent his final three decades, mainly living in the Kent countryside, drawing upon his experiences as an English author, writing in his third language after Polish and French, and producing nearly thirty volumes of fiction and essays that would not only redraw the contours of the English novel but also see this émigré Pole regarded as one of the exemplars of our literary style. Telling the story of this life has occupied biographers for nearly a century now, and their respective approaches—national, maritime, psychological—have organized the facts to serve different narratives. The overwhelming advantage of a chronology lies in its presentation of these bare facts, inviting the reader to compose the articulating narrative and, typically, affording the textual scholar direct access to the life from whence the art emerges. Unsurprisingly, Owen Knowles’s A Conrad Chronology, first published by Macmillan in 1989, quickly became an indispensible reference work for Conradians.

But the details of a life lived a century ago are necessarily dependent upon the current state of historical scholarship, and recent advances in archival research and genealogical findings, together with the completion of the magisterial nine-volume Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad and the reinvigorated Cambridge Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad, that now boasts thirteen volumes, have all meant that it was timely to update A Conrad Chronology. When the first edition appeared, a mere three of the nine volumes of the Collected Letterswere in print. Knowles’s Second Edition makes excellent use of the complete correspondence—and helpfully cross-refers to volume and page number in the Collected Letters, providing an incentive to the reader to delve further—together with other recent research findings to supply new information, confirm (or deny) incomplete or speculative detail and provide the most precise and succinct record of Conrad’s daily life available. As Knowles says in his “Preface to the Second Edition,” it is the publication of Conrad’s correspondence that has made the greatest contribution to the updated Conrad Chronology.

The book is simple to use—but its easy access to the days, events and encounters of Conrad’s life cannot detract from the effort that underpins it. Knowles has, once again, done a great service to Conradians and to future Conrad scholarship. The increased scope of the revised Chronologyis quickly apparent: the “Early Years: 1857–73” sequence has expanded from four pages to six, “Sea Years: 1874–93” from twelve to twenty. Everywhere, new details flesh out the life. For instance, to the list of friendships Conrad made during his voyages in the Torrensthe Chronologyadds Walter Banks, a civil engineer from Lancashire, who travelled to Australia in November 1891. This detail is embellished with news that the men met fairly regularly when they were both back in London, and is then...