Beschreibung:

Conrad, Joseph and Ford Madox Hueffer THE INHERITORS. NEW YORK: MCCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO., 1901 8vo, first edition, presentation copy inscribed by the author to H.G. Wells ("To | H.G. Wells | affectionately | from Joseph Conrad | 1901") on front free endpaper, title-page printed in orange and black, original pictorial beige smooth cloth with illustration in red, black and gilt, spine lettered in black, minor spotting, slightly skewed, some professional restoration to hinges An exceptional association copy. Association copies of books inscribed by Conrad to major writers are extremely scarce. Of additional rarity is Conrad's inscription: there are no records for copies of The Inheritors inscribed solely by Conrad sold at auction in the last forty years. Conrad and Wells first made contact after Wells’ review of An Outcast of the Islands in the Saturday Review in 1896. When Conrad moved to Pent Farm in 1898 he and Wells became near-neighbours and were in regular contact until around 1906. Knowles and Moore note that ‘The period from 1898 to 1905 represents the high point of their relationship. One indicator of their imaginative closeness is signalled by their mutual echoing of each other’s work – in Conrad’s case, through likely echoes in ‘Heart of Darkness’ of The Time Machine (1895), The Invisible Man (1897) and The War of the Worlds (1898), as well as a very obvious debt in his collaborated work with Ford Madox Ford, The Inheritors (1901), to Wells’s scientific romances in general’. After this period, the two writers began to show marked differences in their social, artistic and political views. Yet in 1907 Conrad would dedicate The Secret Agent to Wells as ‘...the historian of the ages to come’. By 1909 the friendship had significantly cooled. Writing in his Experiment in Autobiography (1934), Wells stated ‘We never really “got on” together. I was perhaps more unsympathetic and incomprehensible to Conrad than he was to me. I think he found me Philistine, stupid and intensely English’.