THE BEGINNINGS: BORNEO, 1887 AND LONDON, 1889

It was in London and in 1889 that a thirty-one-year-old ship's officer whom the world was to know as Joseph Conrad began to write his first novel. One fine autumnal morning he did not, as usual, dawdle after his breakfast but instead summoned the landlady's daughter to clear the table. Conrad told the story some twenty years later, in A Personal Record; that book's ‘immediate aim’, he explains, was to present ‘the feelings and sensations connected with the writing of my first book and with my first contact with the sea’. As regards writing his ‘first book’ Conrad insists on the obscurity of his sudden impulse: ‘I was not at all certain that I wanted to write, or that I meant to write, or that I had anything to write about’ (p. 70); nevertheless, Conrad concludes, ‘What I am certain of is, that I was very far from thinking of writing a story, though it is possible and even likely that I was thinking of the man Almayer’ (p. 74).

Conrad had met ‘Almayer’ some two years earlier. A back injury had forced Conrad into a hospital at Singapore in the summer of 1887; and when he was better he shipped as first mate on the Vidar, an 800-ton steamship which traded in local products in various islands of the Malay Archipelago.