1908 was Conrad's fiftieth year, and it did not start well. In a
listless letter to Marguerite Poradowska sending her the new year's
greetings, he wrote: 'Moi je suis fatigué et attristé. Le travail m'est
très difficile et les affaires en general ne marchent pas'. ¹ He had
reason to be depressed. Although in the judgement of today he had
already achieved enough to set him among the greatest novelists of
all nations and his last two novels had shown his powers at their
height, the situation appeared very different at the time. Thus where-
as his early work had been duly recognised and The Nigger of the
'Narcissus', followed by Lord Jim, had carried him to the crest of
critical acclaim, his two latest novels had had a mixed reception.
The critical reaction to Nostromo, which he knew to be his most
ambitious book and which had cost him so much effort, must have
been particularly galling. In the reviews he was treated with a
respect which acknowledged his position as one of the leading
novelists of the day, and there was much praise for the book, the
ever-loyal Garnett above all doing his best to point out its quality; ²
but there was much wistful harking back to the earlier tales, while in
places, such as The Times literary Supplement, ³ where it was reason-
able to expect some measure of understanding and appreciation,
Nostromo was handled with fatuous obtuseness.

The reaction to The Secret Agent had been similar and there were
a number of complaints that Conrad's method, particularly his use of
the time-shift, put his work above the head of the average reader.
This was the most worrying aspect; the sales of both books had
been mediocre, and Conrad was increasingly becoming a novelist of
the élite without popular appeal. Several years back Henry James
had already concluded that Conrad's work was 'of the sort greeted
more by the expert and the critic than (as people say), by the man in
the street', ⁴ and the reviewer of The Secret Agent in the Athenaeum
stressed the same point:

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