So wrote Conrad in 1903 to Kazimierz Waliszewski. He paid homage to his uncle and guardian not only in his private letters. He dedicated his first book, Almayer's Folly, ‘To the memory of T.B.’; and in A Personal Record wrote: ‘[My uncle] had been for a quarter of a century the wisest, the firmest, the most indulgent of guardians, extending over me a paternal care and affection, a moral support which I seemed to feel always near me in the most distant parts of the earth.’

Even if Conrad were less effusive in his statements about Bobrowski, the latter would have to attract the attention of Conrad's biographers and critics for purely factual reasons. For over twenty years, most of Conrad's money came from Bobrowski's purse, and during all these years Bobrowski was also Conrad's main link with his home country and his faithful (if grumbling) adviser. Bobrowski's influence on his nephew is undeniable.