Lord Jim

Jim is a water-clerk, moving from port to port across the Eastern seas, because he can never stay anywhere long enough for anyone to learn what he did on the Patna. He was chief mate of a decrepit steamer carrying eight hundred pilgrims to Mecca when it struck something in the night and seemed certain to sink; he jumped into a lifeboat with the ship's other officers and left the pilgrims to what he believed was a sure death. The Patna did not sink. Jim survives the official inquiry that follows — his career does not. What the rest of the book asks is whether a single moment of panic has to be the truth of a man forever, and it follows Jim east to the remote settlement of Patusan, where nobody has heard of the Patna, to find out.

The story is told almost entirely by Marlow, a ship's captain who sat through Jim's inquiry, sought him out afterward, and never quite let the case go — piecing it together at second and third hand, from what Jim told him directly and what he later heard from others, so that the reader assembles Jim the way Marlow himself had to. Conrad worked on it through 1899 and into the summer of 1900, and it grew, as he wrote in an author's note added years later, from a short story about the pilgrim-ship episode alone into something that filled thirteen issues of Blackwood's Magazine before it appeared as a book.

Bibliomancer restores the 1900 text exactly as Conrad wrote it.