A Set of Six by Joseph Conrad (review)

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Reviewed by:

• A Set of Six by Joseph Conrad
• G. W. Stephen Brodsky (bio)

Joseph Conrad. A Set of Six.
Edited by Allen H. Simmons and Michael Foster, with Owen Knowles.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. 517 pp.
ISBN: 9781107189133.

THE BOOK

This newly authoritative volume of A Set of Six, the seventeenth of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad, has been published in association with the project’s founding institution, the Centre for Conrad Studies at the Institute for Bibliography and Editing, Kent State University, Ohio, and the Center for Joseph Conrad Studies, St. Mary’s University, Twickenham, London. Like the earlier volumes of the Cambridge Edition, it is a masterly tour de force of bibliographic editing.

A Set of Six was the third of Conrad’s short story collections. With its Author’s Note (and another to the first American Edition), this volume brings together the serialized tales “Gaspar Ruiz” (Pall Mall Magazine, 1906), “The Informer” (Harper’s Magazine, 1906), “The Brute” (Daily Chronicle, 1906; and McClure’s Magazine, 1907), “An Anarchist” (Harper’s, 1906), “The Duel” (Pall Mall Magazine, 1908), and “Il Conde” (first appearing in A Set of Six, then serialized in Cassell’s, 1908). Published originally on August 6, 1908, by Methuen, in its diversity and sheer quantity the volume was Conrad’s most ambitious of his collections.¹ Only his first collection, Tales of Unrest (1898)² with five stories set variously in Malaya, France, the Congo, and London, approaches that record.

The task for a collection’s editors is greater than merely the sum of its parts. Especially for a collection as diverse as A Set of Six, the challenge is exponential. Conrad’s experiences, inspirations, and sources to be traced for each tale are like a paraphrase of Polonius—geographical-topographical, historical-political, and personal-social—to be riffled for gold. The sum total of these and the ur-texts, manuscripts, typescripts, first-published, and subsequent editions, is much greater than simply a multiple of six.

Sources for the stories individually have been many and varied, sending the editors on a cross-country paperchase, and demanding their judicious choices in a maze of preprint materials. Sources have been painstakingly mined in locales as various as Yale’s Beinecke Library (Author’s Note), Philadelphia’s Rosenbach of the Free Library of Philadelphia (“The Informer” and “The Duel”), the Dartmouth College Library (“The Brute”), Huntington Library (“An Anarchist”), and Princeton University’s Firestone Library (“Il Conde”). [End Page 191]

The preprint materials have been holograph manuscripts complete and incomplete, unrevised typescript, typescript revised in Conrad’s hand and composite manuscript-typescript. Accordingly, the reader interested in the editorial processes behind the final authoritative text must navigate among many more sigla identifying variants, both preprint and published, for each tale, than for a single novel.

THE EDITORS

The primary editor of this volume, Allan Simmons, Professor Emeritus, St. Mary’s University, has earned iconic stature among Conrad scholars for his bibliographic editing of Conrad. General Editor of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad, he is a committee member of the Joseph Conrad Society (UK), and Advisory Editor of The Conradian. He co-edited the Cambridge Edition’s The Shadow-Line (2013) with the late John H. Stape, edited An Outcast of the Isles (2016), The Nigger of the “Narcissus” (2017), and, most saliently for present purposes, co-edited with John Stape the Cambridge Edition of Tales of Unrest (2012). So, he had already proved his mettle for the daunting challenge presented by A Set of Six.

Michael Foster, Senior Lecturer in English and Applied Linguistics at St. Mary’s University, UK, is a welcome new face in the editorship of The Cambridge Edition. American by birth, and with a teaching background in Oriental countries, he offers a unique transcultural sensibility, both for Conrad topics and for intertextual idiosyncrasies in British and American publications of A Set of Six. His background in sociolinguistics and language acquisition brings a uniquely philological perspective on Conrad’s authorship. We can do no better than to quote his co-editor Allan Simmons: “with his meticulous approach to reading” he is “impressively attentive to detail...