Cambridge Edition: Victory

WHILE ALL OF THE VOLUMES to appear to date in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad have been a great addition to the scholarly community interested in the works of Conrad, it may be that this edition of Victory is the most valuable book yet produced. It has the advantage of many more prepublication documents than most of the other volumes in this edition. More than that, however, the textual history of this volume is far more fraught with difficulty than any other Conrad work of which I am aware. As outlined in the essay on the text, the American serial made many changes, particularly abridgements of the original typescript, in order to make it fit the purpose of Munsey's Magazine of producing entire novels rather than an installment of a novel in a single issue of the magazine. This document then became the basis for all other editions to appear during Conrad's lifetime. Doubleday, who produced the first book edition of the novel, attempted to restore deleted passages but was only partly successful. To make matters worse, Conrad had already sold the manuscript to the collector John Quinn, and so, no longer in possession of the original manuscript, when proofs arrived for correction, Conrad could not compare the proofs to what he originally intended and was instead making corrections to proofs that only imperfectly approximated the original document sent to Munsey's Magazine. The editors of this edition have carefully compared the existing typescripts, book and serial editions, and the manuscript in an effort to produce a text that is closer to what Conrad seems to have originally intended. Although this has been the stated goal of all of the volumes of this edition, Victory has required far more restoration and emendation than the other volumes. The result is an edition that is very different from all previous editions of the novel.

As with the other volumes in this series, the accompanying material is first rate. Richard Niland provides a useful and insightful introduction to the novel, and the late J. H. Stape and Alexandre Fachard give us extensive emendation tables, a thorough essay on the text that discusses the history of the novel's composition, the disposition of the various prepublication documents, and the manner in which the serial and book editions were produced during Conrad's lifetime. The editors' textual notes are particular valuable in understanding why they made some of the choices they did in their emendations, especially those related to the abridgements that occurred during the production of the Munsey's Magazine text. As with many of the volumes in this series, the editors' familiarity with Conrad's handwriting, style of composition, and habits of revision allow for a greater chance of success in dealing with difficult textual cruxes. The explanatory notes are particularly helpful and are the most extensive of any accompanying an edition of Victory. The editors also include such helpful appendices and other materials as a glossary of nautical terms, a glossary of foreign words and phrases, tables of deleted passages, borrowings and echoes of French sources, a contemporaneous map of the Malay Archipelago, and both the "Author's Note" that appeared in the Collected Editions of Conrad's works as well as the note that preceded the first English edition of the novel.

All in all, this is a really fine edition of the novel.