Conrad makes attack upon colonisation, expansion, even upon Imperialism.” Many later critics have concluded otherwise, but nearly all have agreed with the additional observation that, subjected to the novella’s scorching skepticism, “cheap ideals, platitudes of civilisation are shrivelled up.” Finally, the early anonymous reviewer lauds Conrad’s “concentrated, tenacious, thoughtful” style, a “high-water mark of English fiction” in which “hrases strike the mind like lines of verse.” (For the complete review, see Joseph Conrad: The Critical Heritage, ed.
The implied stance toward European annexation of non-European territory, an essential question about the novella then and now, is addressed directly: “It must not be supposed that Mr. Heart of Darkness, the reviewer writes, is “a great expression of adventure and romance,” thus placing it in the context of the Romance Revival: a late-nineteenth-century turn away from domestic realism in fiction and toward the exoticism and action more familiarly associated with writers like Robert Louis Stevenson and H. Several are singled out in an unsigned review that appeared in the Manchester Guardian on 10 December 1902.
Early notices called attention to those features of the novella that have made it an object of intense interest for over a century. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was first published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in three installments in 1899, then in book form in 1902 as one of the “other stories” in Youth: A Narrative and Two Other Stories.
Editorial Introduction to Heart of Darkness
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