Invading Other People's Territory: "The Inheritors"

In this paper, however, I focus not on reciprocal influences and stimulations, but restrict myself to examining some aspects of the turn-of-the-twentieth-century novel signed by Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Hueffer, published just over one hundred years ago in New York by McClure, and in London by Heinemann.2 Having dealt elsewhere with possible influences on it by Edouard Drumont and Israel Zangwill,3 I will here indicate different ways in which works and ideas by H. G. Wells may have contributed to the shaping of the first completed but also the least studied of the three novels coauthored by Conrad and Ford. 4 Not only did the material offered by personal experience seem to have run dry, but, frustrated by his lack of commercial success, disgusted at being labeled a mere spinner of sea yarns, and afflicted by his slow progress with The Rescuer, Conrad was also looking for some new subject for a novel that would sell and for new ways of presenting it. Rather disillusioned by the scant financial possibilities offered his growing family by his new writing career, Conrad confided to one of his greatest friends, the Scottish hidalgo R. B. Cunninghame Graham, "Wouldn't I jump at a command, if some literary shipowner suddenly offered it to me!"5 In Glasgow, where he failed to get a berth, Conrad was given hospitality by Graham's surgeon, Dr. John McIntyre (1857-1928), who, in Conrad's words, was "a scientific swell who talks art." In the study of this pioneer radiologist, by way of entertainment, the Scottish writer and critic Neil Munro6 was nonchalantly placed at the X-ray machine, while the doctor was showing Conrad the astonishing potentialities offered by the application of the principle that Rontgen had casually discovered in 1895.