The Inheritors and The Nature of a Crime by Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford (review)

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• The Inheritors and The Nature of a Crime by Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford
• Linda Dryden (bio)

Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford. The Inheritors and The Nature of a Crime. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. 334 pp. ISBN: 9781139061452.

The Cambridge Edition of The Inheritors (1901) and The Nature of a Crime (1909), edited by Jeremy Hawthorn, is the nineteenth volume of Conrad’s works published in this series. As is already evident from the previous volumes, this series of expertly edited and annotated works establishes the definitive texts with a wealth of additional material for context and interpretation. The Editorial Board is comprised of an international team of leading academics in the field of Conrad studies. Prior to the advent of the Cambridge Editions, the major textual resource for Conrad scholars was the less reliable, unannotated, Dent Collected editions. Researchers are now in the fortunate position of having recourse to authoritative texts for all the major Conrad works, and to the wealth of additional material gathered by the individual editors.

The current volume is a further welcome addition to the catalogue of studies dedicated to the works of Joseph Conrad. Both The Inheritors and The Nature of a Crime are often overlooked in surveys of Conrad’s literary output, and thus a whole volume dedicated to charting their genesis, interpreting and contextualizing their content, providing extensive textual notes, and offering an account of their critical reception will receive a warm reception from Conrad scholars. Although not the most accomplished works in the Conrad canon, these texts are nevertheless significant for a number of reasons, not least for the fact that, alongside Romance: A Novel (1904), they represent Conrad’s experimental literary collaboration with Ford Madox Ford. As Hawthorn says:

Omitted from Dent’s Collected Edition and accordingly often passed over by Conrad readers and scholars in the latter half of the twentieth century, these important fruits of the collaboration between two of the great modernist novelists in English are thus made available to the sort of serious consideration accorded to other works by these authors.

(252–53)

In this respect the stories are important in that they offer us examples of how these two authors influenced each other, and of how they worked together.

In Jeremy Hawthorn, the General Editor of the Cambridge Editions has engaged a renowned and highly respected Conrad scholar, whose extensive knowledge of the writer and exceptional editing skills afford this volume an [End Page 209] extremely satisfying authority. This authority is amply demonstrated in his excellent Introduction, which contains a wealth of information on the genesis of the stories, the influences behind the plotlines, and the contexts in which they were written. The commentary is erudite and extensively researched: it makes for fascinating reading at times, and the range of resources consulted is truly impressive. Using a variety of sources such as Jessie Conrad’s Joseph Conrad and His Circle (1935), Ford’s Return to Yesterday (1931), and of course the Collected Letters, Hawthorn traces the early meetings between the two authors and creates a compelling narrative that details the genesis of The Inheritors.

Hawthorn’s investigations reveal evidence of the authors’ working practices. He has carefully evaluated the contribution made by each author to the stories and argues convincingly that in both cases the majority of the text was written by Ford. Relying on Ford’s accounts of the collaborations, textual evidence, and marginal hand-written notes, Hawthorn also establishes strong evidence for Conrad’s textual interventions, and points to the critical moments when he interjected to shift the tone of the narrative, or to change a word or phrase. What emerges is a detailed and extremely plausible account of the collaborative practice that Conrad and Ford engaged in.

In the case of The Inheritors, the authors strayed into the territory of a literature that, in the 1920s, would become known as “science fiction,” making the text unique within Conrad’s oeuvre. Hawthorn notes the influence of H.G. Wells on the concept of the fourth dimension in the text: he outlines how The Time Machine (1895), and Conrad’s visit to Dr. John McIntyre in Glasgow for an...