Heart of Darkness

The book

A sailor takes a steamboat up a river into a colony to retrieve an agent who has stopped sending reports and started being worshipped. What he finds is less a man than a demonstration of what the enterprise was always for.

Why Gustave Doré

Doré died in 1883, six years before Conrad went up the Congo, and the timing is the argument. His 'London: A Pilgrimage' had already shown him willing to draw an empire's underside without flattering it — and the book Conrad wrote is about exactly the machinery Doré's Europe was running.

An illustrated Heart of Darkness by a Victorian is nearly unthinkable. That is what makes it worth attempting.

What to look for

Vegetation as wall. The river narrows through the cycle and the forest closes; nothing on either bank is ever fully legible, which is the point of the book and something engraving does better than paint.

Plates

The Nellie at DuskThe Knitters of Black WoolThe Grove of the MachinesThe Bit of White WorstedThe Manager's SmileThe PaintingThe Earliest Beginnings of the WorldThe White FogThe Shoes OverboardThe HarlequinThe Magnificent WomanMistah Kurtz — He Dead