The editors, Laurence Davies and J. Stape, who preserve the high level of achievement to which the previous volumes had accustomed us, mention the sad fact that this is the first volume to appear since the deaths of F.
Karl, Philip Conrad and Bruce Harkness. After 65 pages of introductory and editorial material, the next provide the text of all the letters written or dictated by Conrad during those three years that have been preserved. I failed to find anywhere in the volume any mention by the editors of the number of letters now given to the public, many for the first time, but a swift count yields the following figures: in , in , in ; thus the volume contains letters or fragments of letters, for a few are not known in their entirety, but only from excerpts in catalogues and the like.
The volume also offers a series of excellent illustrations. To get rid at once of the only disagreeable part of the reviewer's task, I must mention a few imperfections, which seem to become more inevitable these days, when the fruit of the editors' exemplary textual labour has to pass through many hands, sometimes in several countries, before seeing the light of print, a light that tends to be occasionally dimmed by inferior expertise.
Misprints are few and far between, but, for instance, "overture" becomes "overtrue" 52n. A thin handful of factual errors includes a misquotation of Shakespeare n. The evolution of Conrad's English is not the editors' responsibility. My impression that it became less assured in the later years of his career is, on the whole, reinforced by the perusal of this volume. Admittedly, Conrad was already ageing, often ill, nearly always hurried, weary, stressed and anxious, and it was more or less inevitable that he should write rather less well than in the past.
Conrad, who occasionally deplores his bad accent in spoken English , none the less attempts to teach English phonetics to a correspondent who had questioned his ascribing to Donkin the pronunciation of "minute" as "minnyt": "I know that the phonetic spelling of the Oxd. Dictionary is a mere phantasy; for no one says minit, giving exactly the same sound to both i 's in that word. Robert Browning, perhaps the all-time champion of accuracy in the pairing of sounds, rhymes "on life's one minute" with "out of the gulf or in it" "Old Pictures in Florence," Stanza XVIII.
