The Joseph Conrad Society (UK)

The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad

General Editor
Allan H. Simmons
St Mary’s University, Twickenham, London

Editorial Board
Linda Bree, Wolfson College, University of Cambridge
Alexandre Fachard, Université de Genève
Robert Hampson, Royal Holloway, University of London
Owen Knowles, University of Hull

Joseph Conrad’s fiction is a staple of Modern Literature courses in universities around the world. Sustaining this position, an international community of Conrad scholars is served by Societies, journals and annual conferences dedicated to the life and works of this author. Yet there has been no fully critical edition of Conrad’s work to support this activity since that produced, often in unedited or poorly edited form, in the 1920s.

The objective of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad is, by revisiting and examining the extant source materials, to produce the first complete and textually correct edition of Conrad’s writings, that will serve this and future generations of scholars.

Despite Conrad’s best efforts, his works appeared in defective and even, at times, highly disfigured forms during his writing career. Corrupted by poor typists of his manuscripts, subject to the vigorous intervention of compositors and editors insouciant to the nuances of his prose, who imposed house-styles and their own notions of correct grammar and usage, Conrad’s work was often smoothed out and sometimes even outrightly censored.

The task of Cambridge Edition editors involves identifying the various kinds and layers of meddling by the agents who saw Conrad’s work into print. Knowledge of this intervention is fundamental and critical to the editorial task, which, in the policy of this Cambridge Edition, is to remove not only outright errors but also, as needs be, the multiple editorial and compositorial interventions that the source documents alone can give witness to.

The essential task of The Cambridge Edition, then, is to recover for the modern reader, to the extent made possible by research into the original documents, the rhythms and stylings that Conrad himself gave to his prose. Each volume aims to present Conrad’s work as it would have appeared had he been able to guide it through the print process in ideal circumstances, rather than under various pressures that often saw it appear in corrupt forms. Cambridge Edition texts differ in important ways from those currently available and from the historical texts published during the author’s lifetime. Unencumbered by house styles and layers of editorial interference, the Edition rescues many readings not found in print before and restores Conrad’s own expressive punctuation.

Each volume is submitted for review by the Modern Language Association’s Committee on Scholarly Editions, and we are delighted to record that the majority carry the CSE seal of approval.