Works · Novella · 1899

Heart of Darkness

First appeared Feb–Apr 1899 in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine

Nocturne plate · illustration (AI-generated, 2026)

On a becalmed yawl in the Thames estuary at dusk, the seaman Charlie Marlow begins to tell his friends how he once got a job captaining a river steamer for a trading company in Africa. He travels up the Congo through chained work gangs and idle stations, hearing a rising rumour about Kurtz, the Company’s best ivory agent, who has gone silent far upriver. The steamer is wrecked, repaired, and pushed on through fog and drumming. What Marlow finds at the Inner Station, and the lie he later tells in Europe, drive the tale back toward London.

The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.

Section I. Checked against Project Gutenberg ebook #219 (Gutenberg text (the book text, 1902 volume lineage))

Facts

The February 1899 number of Blackwood’s, in which the story began, was the magazine’s thousandth and ran about twice the usual length; Conrad sent about ninety pages and Blackwood split the first offering into two instalments, so the serial’s division did not match what Conrad expected.[1]
The story draws on Conrad’s own journey up the Congo in 1890, undertaken after he secured in Brussels an appointment to command a river steamboat; illness cut the stay short, at about four months by one account and about six by another.[2][4]
The book is a frame narrative: the text opens aboard the cruising yawl Nellie, ‘bound down the river’ and waiting for the turn of the tide, before Marlow’s account takes over.[3]

Setting

Undated; the Congo Free State era, narrated on the Thames[3]

the Thames estuary (the yawl Nellie)
the Congo River
the Company’s stations
a European trading city

Themes

Notes on dates 1 note on disputed dates and attribution

Length and date of Conrad’s Congo stay: Gale says about six months in 1890; the University of Valencia biography says about four months within 1889 to January 1891. The year of the journey is given as 1890.

Threads

Threads in

No sourced relation to an earlier work is recorded.

Threads out

No sourced relation from a later work on this timeline is recorded.

Contemporaries

Works on the timeline that first appeared within three years of 1899, and the other writers alive when Heart of Darkness appeared (ages computed from sourced dates).