The Crime of Material Culture, the Condition of the Colonies and Utopian/Dystopian Impulses, 1908-10

During the years 1908-10 in Britain and Northern Europe, a number of literary authors were producing fictions that both reflected and critiqued what Joseph Conrad later described as “the crudely materialistic atmosphere of the time.” In 1908, Conrad and his literary collaborator Ford Madox Ford

(Hueffer) were completing The Nature of a Crime, a slight tale of one London professional’s addiction to embezzlement. Taking this Conrad-Ford microcosm of Edwardian materialism as its point of departure, this article

first analyses how a range of 1908-10 fictions represent local financial practices and the impacts of Northern money-making and materialistic culture.