Introduction: Part II

In this final installment of Conradiana's volume on Conrad and serialization, the focus falls on the period 1908 to 1918, from the founding of the English Review to the serial publication of The Shadow-Line and "The Tale." This was the period of Conrad's fullest involvement with mass-market periodicals. The second installment showed how, during the middle phase of his career, Conrad adapted to the new realities of the market for print and published widely with a range of magazines, most of which were illustrated magazines intended for a general readership. Through his agent, J. B. Pinker, he became adept at placing his work on both sides of the Atlantic so that almost all his fiction was published in both American as well as British periodicals before appearing in book form in either country. In this third phase, through his engagement with serialization in mass-market periodicals, Conrad also became conscious of ways of writing for a dual readership: a general readership and a readership interested in formal and psychological complexities. This was the period when Conrad laid the basis for his popular success, and the serialization of his work played a vital part in this process.

The major works of this period were Under Western Eyes, Chance, and Victory, and the essays that follow show the significance of serialization in each of these cases. Ford's recollections in Return to Yesterday provide the background to the founding of the English Review. Jessie Conrad's account of how the first issue was prepared for the press presents, with eloquent restraint, the immediate domestic impact of Conrad's close involvement with this particular serial. Ford descended on the Someries, the Conrad's home, with his assistants (Douglas Goldring and Miss Thomas) and the copy for the first issue:

Lights blazed from every room downstairs […]. Orders, directions, or suggestions were shouted from room to room. It was an uproar all night, and the next day the house was in chaos. My monthly stock of provisions were soon devoured […].

(Conrad 131)

Conrad had a uniquely personal relationship with the first issue of the English Review, but, as Jason Harding's essay makes clear, Conrad continued to have a substantial involvement with the journal after Ford gave up the editorship (and after his friendship with Ford had ended). Ford persuaded Conrad to write his reminiscences for the En-glish Review, and Harding convincingly demonstrates how Conrad's confrontation with Polish ghosts and negotiation of his fractured identity through these essays provide a significant context for Under Western Eyes, on the one hand, and "Some Reflections on the Loss of the Titanic" and The Shadow-Line, on the other. Under Western Eyes offers an ideological challenge to the Russian authors whose work in translation was serialized alongside it in the English Review, while the Englishness of the Review provided a suitable haven from which Conrad could revisit his "adoption" by the British Merchant Navy.

With the English Review, Ford was trying to "start a Movement," and his models were the great Victorian reviews of general culture or contemporary French reviews (Goldring 25). He was out of step with—or, rather, consciously opposed to—developments in British and American publishing. Conrad's relations with the English Review are quite different from his relations to the other serials in which his work appeared in this period, and the English Review is quite a different kind of periodical. Most important, all of Conrad's subsequent novels first appeared in serial form in mass-market publications. Victory, for example, appeared in Munsey's Magazine in the United States and in the large-circulation London evening paper, the Star. In his account of Victory's serialization history, Roger Osborne shows how the novel addresses a dual readership and how it could be made to fit the codes of magazine fiction, while carrying the cultural cachet of serious literature. This involved the publishers in foregrounding the role of Lena and emphasizing the plot elements of romance, adventure, and love. At the same time, as Osborne argues, the truncated text of Victory that...