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  • Joseph Conrad's "Wild Story of a Journalist"
  • Matthew Rubery

In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the provinces remote from the scene of action, feel, many of them, scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies.

—Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776)

We shudder at the brutality of the way a butcher uses the knife: ah, but this is nothing at all compared to the most dreadful recklessness and callousness with which a journalist, addressing himself to the whole country, if possible, uses untruth.

—Søren Kierkegaard, Journals (1849)

Henry Stanley traveled to Africa in January 1871 with the following assignment from the New York Herald: "Find out Livingstone, and get what news you can relating to his discoveries."1 Month after month readers watched the newspapers for reports of the silent explorer. News of Dr. David Livingstone's discoveries—and his own discovery, in this case—reached London in May 1872 to the delight of international audiences.2 One impressed reader was Joseph Conrad, who recalled hearing the accomplishments of explorers "whispered to me in my cradle" and reading as a boy Livingstone's Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (1857), a source of the sentimental daydreams that would one day make him a steamboat captain on the Congo.3 The newspaper itself read like an exploration narrative at such moments, never more so than in the journalism of Stanley, who introduced the press to territory formerly reserved for the explorer's lone voice. Stanley's dispatches gave audiences the impressions of a correspondent, the adventures of an explorer, and the plots of a novelist, all in a single column. Yet these dispatches also gave audiences a misleading perspective on events, as Conrad learned when his own African experiences failed to correspond with [End Page 751] press descriptions. He returned to England in 1891, disenchanted and resentful of events excluded from the London newspapers. Conrad did not forget Stanley's publicity lesson. In 1898, while writing a fictional work drawing from his experiences in Africa, he would make the novel's most compromised character a journalist.

Stanley and Livingstone's story, which first appeared in the newspapers, is a reminder of how influential print journalism was for late-Victorian authors. The newspaper made available to the novel, to adapt a phrase from Mikhail Bakhtin, "new worlds of verbal perception."4 Conrad's perception of the world was influenced as much by the daily press as by serious literature. He read with the skeptical perspective of a cosmopolitan émigré forced to rely on the newspaper's foreign correspondence for news of Poland, France, Africa, and, while at sea, of home. Foreign news at the time was a pastiche of accounts from British political figures, Reuters wire service, and the paper's own journalists. The foreign correspondence provided him with the latest intelligence in a commercial format often lacking perspective or thick cultural description. In Conrad's view, correspondents were responsible for public misperception of events experienced only through the pages of the daily newspaper. Letters and essays reveal his recurrent frustrations with international reportage as inadequate mediations of complex psychological and political situations. As Marlow says in Chance (1913), "Is it ever the business of any pressman to understand anything? I guess not."5

Conrad was reacting to recent developments in journalism which saw the foreign correspondent established as a legitimate profession by the end of the nineteenth century.6 Michael Schudson has argued that the professional reporter was an invention of the 1880s and 1890s, decades in which editors began employing experienced writers rather than informal sources (including their friends) as the paper's "own correspondent."7 According to Lucy Brown, foreign correspondence became increasingly prominent after the Franco-Prussian War, when public interest shifted from war reporting to foreign reporting on diplomatic relations.8 The generic term "correspondent" by Conrad's time had come to include recognizable names like Nellie Bly, William Howard Russell, and, of course, Henry Stanley. More than any previous journalist, Stanley made exploration of Africa a public spectacle...

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