In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

84 In The Soul of London (1905), an impressionistic foray through the English capital, Ford Madox Ford recalls a sight that “always piques my curiosity.” An “odd terrace” thrown together by some speculative builder sits in abandoned decay on a road beyond the city. The structure “contains four immense, thinwalled , pretentious stucco houses . . . break[ing] off in uncompleted doors, uncompleted foundations, and a plot of grimy wasteland.” In this deserted edi- fice Ford imagines “a bold speculation’s falling to pieces, getting the nickname ‘Blank’s Folly,’ growing begrimed, being forgotten” (38). The sight is one that had become common in London’s late-Victorian suburbs—a speculative housing scheme gone to pot before residents even arrived. But Blank’s Folly also recalls the title and central image of the first novel by Ford’s friend and collaborator , Joseph Conrad. Though set in eastern Borneo, Almayer’s Folly (1895) presents a scenario not unlike Ford’s: the trader Kaspar Almayer builds a “new but already decaying house” to accommodate British colonists rumored to be annexing part of the Malay Archipelago (4). Like Blank’s Folly, Almayer’s not only fails to attract residents but quickly molders on its “uneven ground,” with “stones, decaying planks, and half-sawn beams . . . piled up in inextricable confusion ” (12). As I argue in this chapter, the premature domestic decay central to Conrad’s first novel parallels portrayals of suburban housing schemes like Blank’s Folly. Of all the authors in this study, perhaps none seems further removed from suburbia than Conrad. This is especially so with Almayer’s Folly. Its setting has inspired a great deal of speculation into Conrad’s travels in the Malay Archipelago , even though Conrad spent a relatively short time there. By contrast, we know little of Conrad’s early years in London. Soon after his first visit in 1878, the city became his shore-leave home until he abandoned sailing in 1894. 4 Outposts of Progress Joseph Conrad’s Suburban Speculation Outposts of Progress 85 During this peripatetic period dominated by sea travel, Conrad’s total time in London still adds up to roughly four years. We might imagine this time spent lodging near the East End docks or along the lower Thames, but surprisingly, Conrad lived for about twenty-seven months altogether in the city’s northern suburbs—Tollington Park and later Stoke Newington. The period was personally significant: Conrad passed exams for second mate, first mate, and master mariner and became a naturalized British citizen. It was also a watershed moment in suburban history, a period of speculative development run rampant , and Conrad arrived on the crest of a building wave that brought an influx of lower-middle-class residents to the suburbs, thanks to falling costs, rising incomes, and cheaper means of mass transport. Indeed, Britain’s top four areas of population growth in the 1880s were London railway suburbs dominated by the lower middle class. The term suburbia was coined to describe this social terrain, and by the end of the decade, a distinct genre of suburban fiction had emerged. The speculative building that fueled this monumental growth also brought with it a striking phenomenon: London’s “suburbs were glutted with new but tenantless houses” (Dyos, Victorian 82). Conceived and written amid this sea change in metropolitan daily life, Almayer’s Folly engages many of the concerns that underwrite late-Victorian suburbia. The prematurely decaying house that gives the novel its title typifies the poor construction and rapid ruin thought to characterize the legion of new homes cropping up in London’s outskirts. And like many of those dwellings, Almayer’s folly is built speculatively, anticipating residents who never arrive. Almayer himself, the first of Conrad’s many hollow imperialists, embodies two social types often associated with suburbia—the speculative builder and the lower-middle-class clerk. Almayer’s Folly thus invokes the central motifs of the suburban fiction that emerged in the 1880s and 1890s. In what follows I argue that these motifs—of speculative building, of new but rapidly decaying residences , and of a rising petit-bourgeois culture—gave Conrad a popular vocabulary for indicting imperial expansion. Transplanted to the jungles of Borneo, the suburban home becomes in Conrad’s hands a means of exposing the folly of modern imperialism. Despite the titular status of Almayer’s house, critics tend to downplay its significance in light of its occupant’s foolish dreams and Conrad’s own domestic anxieties. By contrast...

Share