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the author who is reinvented as an Englishman. Whereas the group with whom Conrad actually served on the Palestine could hardly have been of more international composition—although the captain and several of the crew were English, there were also men from Australia, Norway, Ireland, and the Caribbean island of Saint Kitts—the courageous, dutiful seamen of the Judea are all English; they are Liverpool men who, Marlow affirms, have “the right stuff” (p. 24). In fact, the story’s chief thematic preoccupation is with what is represented, in highly traditional terms, as a uniquely English sort of virtue that seafaring provides the opportunity for actualizing. This tendency is epitomized in Marlow’s explanation for why the crew have conducted themselves with exemplary honor and steadfastness under the most trying of circumstances:

[I]t was something in them, something inborn and subtle and everlasting. I don’t say positively that the crew of a French or German merchantman wouldn’t have done it, but I doubt whether it would have been done in the same way. There was a completeness in it, something solid like a principle, and masterful like an instinct—a disclosure of something secret—of that hidden something, that gift of good or evil that makes racial difference, that shapes the fate of nations (p. 26).

In espousing the notion of the superiority of Anglo-Saxons over other imperial “races,” the story, which was written during the ascendancy of competition among imperial powers, participates in fairly common place rhetoric for the era. Yet given how skeptical Conrad tended to be about such matters, this apparent endorsement of a vision of Englishness that borders on jingoism is puzzling. To some extent we can make sense of such pronouncements by recognizing that he wrote the story for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, knowing that its readers were predominantly pro-imperial Tory-Conservatives. It is also possible that, as a naturalized Briton, he felt obliged to affirm publicly the chauvinistic assumptions of his compatriots—that is, to present himself, as the American-turned-Briton T. S. Eliot subsequently would do a generation later, as more English than the English.

These strategic considerations aside, Conrad’s idealistic depiction of English virtue in “Youth” appears to a limited extent to reflect his own convictions, and, insofar as this is the case, it represents only one side of a complex ambivalence toward his adoptive country, the other side of which would be displayed three years later in the poignant short story “Amy Foster” (1901). Actually, Conrad never wrote a more Anglophilic story than “Youth” or a more Anglophobic one than “Amy Foster.” On the one hand, “Youth” is a tale of imaginary belonging written by someone who acutely felt himself to be an outsider in the British merchant marine: as Najder observes, “there is no evidence to suggest that [a] sense of professional solidarity and comradeship in dangerous work was indeed part of Korzeniowski’s personal experience. It seems more probable that he felt lonely and alienated throughout his service” (p. 163). The fact that he was referred to by some of his shipmates, ironically, as “the Russian Count” reinforces this contention. On the other hand, in “Amy Foster” the experiences of the protagonist, an abused immigrant in Britain, clearly reflect Conrad’s own sentiments of being an unwelcome outsider.

The tale is narrated by Kennedy, a doctor whose thoughtful, cosmopolitan outlook sharply differs from that of the story’s provincial, rural Britons. Kennedy befriends the protagonist, Yanko, the sole survivor of a shipwreck off the Kentish coast, and gradually comes to learn the stranger’s story. Having washed ashore after the America-bound ship loaded with European émigrés on which he was a passenger has foundered, the long-haired Slavic stranger who speaks no English is immediately subjected by xenophobic Britons to both verbal and physical abuse. Mistaken for a madman or a criminal, he is treated in a manner comparable to that of the pathetically misunderstood