Conrad's Essays

BOOK REVIEWS ness. The Celtic twilight of the Scottish Highlands, the decline of Welsh and Cornish languages and peoples, were part of a global demise of peoples who did not fit English notions of technological and economic development . (See Scott Ashley's work on the ways that Stevenson and other Europeans saw in the empire the morbidity of the Highlands and other "Celtic" societies.) I have been writing about the Gypsies of the fin de siècle, another wandering "tribe" who were treated as pariahs and presumed to be dying out, so were therefore studied by the Gypsy lorists. Like the North American Iroquois, the African Bushmen, and the South Sea Islanders, they also represented a kind of freedom, close to nature, and a "fascinating beauty." George Augustus Robinson's "friendly mission" attempted to civilize the Tasmanians by instilling daily work habits, newsletters, an aboriginal police force, and a weekly market. Against such civilizing technique, Arthur Symons called the nomadic propertyless Gypsies "the last romance left in the world." If the doom-sayers, prophets of Progress, had been right, they would all be gone now. But those presumed to be self-extinguishing are not entirely gone. While only about seven million indigenous people remain in the main regions covered by Brantlinger's study, between 200 and 357 million remain world-wide, primarily in China and India. These have been disappearing at unprecedented rates through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Concerned with dominant discourses of political economy, natural science, and ethnology, Brantlinger's book is a British studies book more than a cultures-in-contact book. He does not typically emphasize the responses of those who became and are becoming extinct. However , in his conclusion he cites these world-wide numbers of indigenous people, and then the American Indian Movement, Aboriginal Rights movement in Australia, and the World Council of Indigenous Peoples, who since the 1950s have been expressing resistance to the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. REGENIA GAGNIEB University of Exeter Conrad's Essays Joseph Conrad. Notes on Life and Letters. J. H. Stape, ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. liii + 449 pp. $94.99 £70.00 IMMERSED in the composition of Nostromo but needing to produce saleable copy, Conrad began writing "a series of sea sketches" in early 1904, later published as The Mirror of the Sea (1906). At this time 229 ELT 48 : 2 2005 he suggested to his agent, J. B. Pinker, that the sketches might be combined with his incidental essays. In the event, Pinker was unenthusiastic , and the idea of a dual-perspective volume had to await the appearance of Notes on Life and Letters. First published in Britain in February 1921, and in America two months later, Notes on Life and Letters collects essays, reviews, and occasional work that span nearly the whole of Conrad's career. The earliest piece, a eulogy of Alphonse Daudet, originally appeared in 1898, the last, "Stephen Crane: A Note without Dates," in 1919 in the London Mercury 's inaugural issue. Of the twenty-six pieces comprising the volume (accepting Conrad's convention of counting the two review-essays on Anatole France as a single entry), only three first came out in venues other than periodicals. An author writing at the turn of the century, Conrad was able to reap the rewards of the Victorian publishing boom. Taking advantage of the growth in literacy, authors put their literary affairs on a professional footing by employing literary agents. Newspapers and journals hungry for copy provided an outlet for writing by established and emerging writers. Reciprocally, occasional writing served to keep an author's name in the public eye. Notorious for his inability to live within his means, occasional writing provided Conrad with a way of supplementing his income, and he openly confessed to writing such articles "pour la marmite" (for the money). Moreover, as the marketing of many essays in Notes on Life and Letters demonstrates, he could be paid more than once for the same piece of work: British and American serial publication, book publication in both markets, and, a further consequence of the expansion of the literary marketplace, the sale of manuscripts and typescripts to...