New Edition: Tales of Unrest

PUBLISHED IN 1898, Tales of Unrest was Conrad’s fourth major work and his first volume of short fiction. Its title, as well as crystallising the fin-de-siècle mood of a work made up of tales of ghostly, marital and colonial unrest, also gestures to the fraught circumstances surrounding its production. Having grown frustrated with “The Rescuer” (later The Rescue), the third instalment of a trilogy-in-reverse that also includes his debut and second novels Almayer’s Folly (1895) and An Outcast of the Islands (1896), Conrad laid the new work aside in order to turn his hand to writing short stories. His sea years behind him, he recognized that writing was now his “sole means of support,” and, newly married and having just lost his inheritance in a South African mining venture, could ill afford a period of creative inertia. He was also aware, thanks to the burgeoning popularity of magazines in the late-Victorian literary marketplace, that short fiction offered such a means of support: paid £20 for his first novel, Conrad received half as much again for his first published short story, “The Idiots” (though “The Black Mate,” possibly begun as early as 1886 for a competition held by Tit-Bits, and An Outcast of the Islands, begun as the short story “Two Vagabonds,” complicate its claim to being his first attempt at the form).

Conrad wrote “The Idiots” in May 1896, its Breton setting reflecting that it was written while he and his new wife Jessie honeymooned on Ile-Grande, Brittany, between March and September. Conrad wrote three other works during this period in France: “An Outpost of Progress,” a precursor both in tone and setting to “Heart of Darkness”; “The Lagoon,” another excursion into the Malay Archipelago of his now-stalled Lingard trilogy; and The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” a treatment of the sea and of life at sea no doubt stimulated as much by his proximity to the English Channel as by his previous life as a mariner. As with many of Conrad’s subsequent works, however, the latter would grow beyond its original conception and length. Its place in the volume of stories that Conrad spoke of going “to a Publisher with” in late 1896 was taken by another Malay story, “Karain: A Memory,” and the London-set “The Return,” both composed in Stanford-le-Hope, Essex, where the Conrads had settled on their return to England. As much as economic and creative reasons lay behind the collection, Conrad perhaps also had one eye on his readership. In its geographical scope—a conflation of the far-flung and the domestic—and range of narrative techniques and stylistic devices—from the ironic mode of “An Outpost of Progress” to the temporal gymnastics of the volume’s opener “Karain: A Memory”—Conrad had deftly managed to avoid “wearying the public by the many repetitions of [his] first success,” as one early reviewer had warned. With the appearance of Tales of Unrest, together with The Nigger of the “Narcissus” serialized in the prestigious New Review, Conrad’s identity as a writer of “exotic” and “challenging” fiction was established.

This latest instalment in the Cambridge edition of Conrad’s collected works, edited by Allan H. Simmons and J. H. Stape, aims to recover an experience of reading Conrad stripped of the interventions that produced the texts with which we are now familiar. These interventions range from the punctuation-heavy house styles of the magazines where the tales collected here first appeared (a taint from which only the un-serialized “The Return” is free), to errors and corruptions introduced by Conrad’s typists, editors, compositors—or indeed Conrad himself, who rarely checked revisions against first drafts. Also addressed are the mechanical errors introduced by the faulty typewriter used by Jessie, who was also Conrad’s amanuensis, and whose own writings on Conrad, which shed light on the dates and processes of composition, form part of the critical apparatus...