Guide to the classics: Joseph Conrad’s 1900 novel ‘Lord Jim’ sees humanity’s darkness

For me, no novel provides a better account of what we humans are up against in our pursuit of the true and the good than Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim (1900). It does this alongside Conrad’s other great works, Heart of Darkness (1899) and Nostromo (1904).

Lord Jim reveals that, even in our secular age, we remain creatures of ineluctable faith. Our sense of being good derives from this faith. But the kicker is that, perhaps inevitably, it is bad faith, because what we do for it – how we reaffirm our faith – is all too often not good.

Conrad scholar Royal Roussel provides the best articulation of this when he says that Conrad’s novels are concerned with “the self’s alienation from the source of its own existence”.

Once we grasp the form of this alienation, we have a key for understanding much that is dark within humanity, from the atrocities of colonisation that Conrad writes about, to the dubious nationalisms and identity politics of our own time. It provides insight into the inability many of us have to scrutinise our own devotions and failings.

Biography and legacy

Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski was born in 1857 in Berdychiv, which is now in Ukraine. At the time, Berdychiv was part of the Russian Empire.

Conrad’s parents were...

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