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similarity to those of modern ones. Nor, among modern readers, is there a comfortable consensus, since Heart of Darkness has the power to divide opinion sharply, particularly in its treatment of race and imperialism. Yet the story continues to find a wide audience by virtue of the subliminal power at work in its treatment of collapse and breakdown. As T. S. Eliot seems to have recognized in 1925, the work’s path-finding significance lies in its use of a simulated nightmare-quest by which to dramatize the relationship between the self and the modern world, with its attendant feelings of moral and metaphysical panic: ‘I asked myself what I was doing there, with a sensation of panic in my heart as though I had blundered into a place of cruel and absurd mysteries not fit for a human being to behold’ (93). Written in 1898–9, a dark sentiment of this kind helps to explain why Conrad’s ‘line’ in the twentieth century–from T. S. Eliot through Graham Greene, V. S. Naipaul, William Golding and beyond–has been such a powerful one.
    Owen Knowles
    NOTES
    Works cited in the text of the Introduction can be found in Further Reading.
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    1. Last Essays , in Dent’s Collected Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad , 22 vols. (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1946–55), p. 17.
    2. Edward Garnett, ed., Letters from Conrad, 1895–1923 (London: Nonesuch, 1928), p. xii.
    3. Beatrice Webb, Our Partnership , ed. Barbara Drake and Margaret Isobel Cole (London: Longmans Green, 1948), p. 140.
    4. C. de Thierry, ‘Imperialism’, New Review 17 (1897), p. 318.
    5. Last Essays , in Works of Joseph Conrad , p. 17.
    6. The Times , 13 May 1897, p. 7.
    7. F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad (London: Chatto & Windus, 1948).
    8. This lecture was first delivered by Chinua Achebe in 1975, but not published until two years later: ‘An Image of Africa’, Massachusetts Review 17.4 (1977), pp. 782–94.
    9. Robert Kimbrough, ed., Joseph Conrad: ‘Heart of Darkness’ , 3rd edn (New York: Norton, 1988), p. 79.
    10. Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus and On Heroes and Hero Workship , ed. W. H. Hudson (London: Dent, 1967), p. 289.
    11. Leavis, The Great Tradition , p. 180.
    12. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘How to Write a Blackwood’s Article’, The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Random House, 1938), p. 341.

Introduction to ‘The Congo Diary’
    â€˜The Congo Diary’ is the title given to one or both of two small, leather-bound notebooks in which Conrad kept notes about his travels in the Congo in 1890. The first notebook contains the diary reproduced in this edition. Covering the opening stage of a twelve-week journey inland to Stanley Falls in the Upper Congo, the entries begin on 13 June (the day after Conrad had arrived in Africa), record daily events during a 230-mile (320-kilometre) overland trek from Matadi to Nselemba, where they end on 1 August. At Kinchasa (modern-day Kinshasa), the River Congo becomes navigable, and from here on 3 August Conrad continued his remaining 1000-mile (1600-kilometre) journey aboard the Roi des Belges and began his second notebook. This more specialized document, ‘The Up-river Book’, is not reproduced here. Devoted exclusively to navigational notes, maps and sketches made during the first sixteen days of the river journey, it was written with the purely practical purpose of assisting Conrad when he might be called upon to navigate the steamer on some future upriver trip.
    With only three of Conrad’s letters from the Congo having survived, the diary reproduced here has an obvious biographical importance. Although revealing little about Conrad’s responses, its jottings and sketches nevertheless show where he went, what he was doing, who he met and some of the things he saw and experienced during the first part of his six-month stay in Africa. Additionally, the diary