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First English Edition, first impression dates from Oct. 16, 1903 (see Supino below) in a printing of 2000 copies. Hard cover, 12mo, in original blue cloth with a Glasgow-style art deco design employing a ruled frame with a number of filled squares and rectangular ruled areas framing the title and authors' names to the front board, blocked in white. Titles to the spine are in gold, in a different but similar frame, with Smith, Elder & Co. appearing at the foot. Top edge trimmed and stained grey, bottom edge untrimmed. Printed at William Clowes and Sons, Limited, London and Beccles. Typo p. 34 "itno." COLLATION: signed, [i-viii], [I] 2-463, [1], [8pp. publisher's catalogue, marked 2 H.] **CONDITION: Very Good.Minus. Some rubbing to the joints edges and tips, also at head and foot of the spine. Rear hinge starting, but holding firm. Foxing seen to text block edges and lightly throughout. Inscribed in fountain pen to ffep. with a former owner's name. Now in mylar.**"Romance" Co-Author, Ford Madox Hueffer, (1873-1939), aka Ford Madox Ford from 1919, later adopted the name of his famous grandfather, the Pre-Raphaelite artist Ford Madox Brown. He was also related through the maternal line to William Michael Rosetti's wife Lucy Madox Brown. Living near the Romney Marsh, in Kent, Hueffer became friends with the area's literary circle who included the authors Henry James, Stephen Crane and H.G.Wells as well as a somewhat impoverished Joseph Conrad around the turn of the twentieth century. Conrad's early supporter and editor, Edward Garnett introduced Conrad and Hueffer in 1898, and their work "Romance," was their second joint publishing effort. It had some commercial success, helping the financially-struggling Joseph Conrad whose earlier titles had met with critical acclaim yet left the author in financial peril. **AN ADVENTURE STORY which begins in England, then continues in the West Indies, Cuba and finally back to England, "Romance" has a complex political plot and a large international cast of characters: Jamaican, Cuban, English, Scottish, Irish, Spanish and Mexican. The action involves the competing interests to Jamaica's sugar trade, and how commercial and colonial policies become corrupted by greed. A young Englishman, John Kemp, the down-at-heels grandson of an unidentified Earl, is eager to escape a quotidian existence, and plans to travel to Jamaica to learn the ropes of running the Horton Pen sugar plantation, owned by the Rooksby family, whose scion, Edward Rooksby, has just married his sister, Veronica. On the way to the ship, he is the victim of a case of mistaken identity and becomes a wanted man, initiating a relationship with a couple of mysterious marauders, Don Carlos and his retainer Castro. Don Carlos has a remote family connection to Kemp, and encourages him to join him at a secret pirate base at Rio Medio, Jamaica. Once arrived in Jamaica, Admiral Rowley's English warship is too large to effectively engage with the smaller pirate vessels which plague the seas, secretly supported by foreign officials in Cuba. John becomes aware of the divisive social and political environment. Slavery, which powers the local commerce, is condemned at home in England (outlawed in 1834,) but a local Jamaican Separatist faction of planters and the Irish ex-pat revolutionary O'Brien, become aligned in the desire to thwart the British by means of secession to the United States, where slave labor still remains legal. A romantic subplot joins John Kemp and Seraphina, daughter to a Castillian trader of influence, Don Ramon Balthasar, in Kingston, with piratical connections... A very good read. REFS: Lohf and Sheehy 120. D. Supino, "Joseph Conrad: A Bibliographical Catalogue of Editions to 1930 " (Univ. of Liverpool, 2022), A9.1.0, p. 114, 115. Keating, 56 (edition only).pp. 131-133 gives the original plot outline by the authors.
Ref: CONRD 9228
$95.00