Joseph Conrad and H. G. Wells: The Fin-de-Siècle Literary Scene by Linda Dryden (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Joseph Conrad and H. G. Wells: The Fin-de-Siècle Literary Scene by Linda Dryden Jeremy Withers DRYDEN, LINDA. Joseph Conrad and H. G. Wells: The Fin-de-Siècle Literary Scene. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015. 216 pp. $90.00 hardcover. Linda Dryden’s Joseph Conrad and H. G. Wells examines the literary community that flourished in the countryside of Kent and Sussex in England as the nineteenth century passed into the twentieth. Important authors such as Ford Madox Ford, Henry James, and Stephen Crane, as well as the two authors Dryden’s study is most concerned with—Joseph Conrad and H. G. Wells—all found themselves here in a self-imposed exile from the artistic center of London. It is here that early modernist authors like Ford, Conrad, and James continued their experimentations in pushing the novel in bold, new directions, while Wells began his transition away from the “scientific romances” that had made him famous and moved towards more social realist novels and, eventually, more openly didactic works. Dryden’s book focuses on the complex web of influence, allusion, and debate that connected Wells with early modernists like Conrad while they were all living as neighbors for about a decade at the turn of the century. As Dryden is quick to point out though in her introduction, the Conrad/Wells relationship is not exactly untrodden scholarly territory. Studies like Miranda Seymour’s Ring of Conspirators and Nicholas Delbanco’s Group Portrait have gotten there first. What Dryden believes sets her study apart, however, is that these earlier studies “only cursorily discuss literary influence—their discussions are largely expository and anecdotal, and are neither inter-textual nor analytical” (8). Dryden is certainly warranted in asserting as much: Seymour’s and Delbanco’s studies are indeed largely biographical in nature, while Dryden’s book is steeped in exploring the myriad ways important works by Wells and Conrad such as Heart of Darkness, The Secret Agent, and Tono-Bungay reveal a heavy debt each author owed the other. In particular, the chapter “Quap, Ivory and Insect Empires” offers up a wealth of interesting insights about the ways in which Conrad’s influence can be detected in somewhat lesser-read works by Wells such as the novel Tono-Bungay and the short story “The Empire of the Ants.” Even though Wells was the more openly revered writer by early modernists like Conrad and James, here we see Wells couldn’t help but assimilate some imagery, language, and themes from devotees like Conrad. Despite the many strengths and virtues of Dryden’s important study, a few weaknesses present themselves. The chapter on Robert Louis Stevenson feels a bit superfluous and digressive at times, something Dryden appears aware of when she writes that this chapter’s focus on Stevenson, Conrad, and Ford “takes the discussion away from Wells for a time” (58). Dryden primarily includes this chapter on Stevenson to discuss why Ford and Conrad’s collaborative novel Romance failed, but the argument ends up sounding a bit repetitious in its points. She repeats at several points that the collaboration was mostly a money-making endeavor, that it failed to subvert the romance genre, that it was too self-consciously experimental in style, and so forth. Additionally, Dryden’s marginalization of certain key essays central to her topic can be bewildering at times. For example, she neglects to mention in any way Achebe’s important and well-known post-colonial re-reading of Heart of Darkness titled “Racism in Africa.” (The essay is not even listed in her bibliography.) Over and over again, Dryden asserts that Heart of Darkness is a successful anti-imperialist narrative, yet the fact that she does not respond to or acknowledge in any way Achebe’s challenging of that orthodox, positive reading of Conrad’s text is problematic. Also, [End Page 570] more of an engagement by Dryden with an important essay like Martin Ray’s one on the Wells/Conrad conflict as manifested in the latter’s The Secret Agent would have been beneficial. Lastly, by the end of Dryden’s book it does start to sound like a one-sided promotion of Conrad...