Joseph Conrad

First edition of Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad.

• Joseph Conrad (Polish-British).
• Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1900.
• 452 pages.
• Original green cloth binding with black lettering, fore-edge machine deckle.

"'Nothing can touch me,' he said in a last flicker of superb egoism."

On a quest to forget about his cowardly actions during a crisis at sea, Jim lands at a remote port in the South Seas, where he becomes a community leader but eventually sacrifices his life for moral redemption.

Many of Conrad's works, still steeped in a white European perspective, nevertheless grapple with race and colonialism in a more skeptical way than most of his white contemporaries, and Lord Jim is no exception. Historian Elleke Boehmer contrasts Lord Jim to Rudyard Kipling's Kim, published a year later, noting that Conrad voices deep concern about British colonialism while Kipling's support of the Empire shows through in his narrative; Lord Jim, she notes, "can be seen as a defining tale of the doubt which threatened the project of European expansion."