Novel
Lord Jim
Joseph Conrad · 1900
Synopsis
Jim, the young son of an English parson, is chief mate of the Patna, an old rust-eaten steamer carrying eight hundred pilgrims towards the Red Sea. On a night of dead calm, the ship strikes something. Jim goes down to look: the forward bulkhead is bulging, the rust is coming off it in flakes, and there are seven boats for eight hundred sleeping people. The captain and the engineers free a boat in whispers, without waking anyone. Then, from below, in the dark, they call out “George”, an engineer who has stayed on board.
Context
The book starts from a fact of 1880: the officers of a steamer carrying nearly a thousand pilgrims abandoned it in mid-ocean, believing it lost; the ship was towed to Aden, where it arrived shortly after them. The captain had his certificate suspended for three years, and the court criticised the conduct of the first mate. The latter later settled in Singapore, where the author, passing through in 1883, probably heard of the affair. He meant to make only a short story of it: he wrote a few pages, put them aside, and took them up again only at the request of his editor, for his magazine, where the novel appeared as a serial from October 1899 to November 1900.
Who it is for
A long novel, told for the most part by a witness, Marlow, who reports other voices; new French translation in 2026.
Prizes and reception
Published in volume form on 9 October 1900, after fourteen instalments in a magazine; it was translated into French as early as 1922.
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