Abstract

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.” 1 In 1908, Conrad and his literary collaborator Ford Madox Ford were completing The Nature of a Crime, a slight tale of one London professional’s addiction to embezzlement. 2 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. It notes that the narratives concentrate on upwardly mobile and creative characters of the middle classes, rather than on aristocrats or on the working poor and unemployed who were the subject of contemporaneous social surveys and were the most immediately affected by their social superiors’ financial criminality and mismanagement. The article then asks why – given that Northern incomes, raw materials, and finished goods frequently had their origins in the colonies and developing nations – these fictions rarely examined the impacts of global resource exploitation on regions outside Europe. A number of possible reasons why the 1908-10 authors did not attend to the colonies are explored. The fictions’ few allusions to colonies and developing nations are found to further the authors’ collective critique of Europe’s materialist, capitalist culture rather than to investigate colonial circumstances. In other words, “the condition of England” takes priority over “the condition of the colonies,” and “the condition of the clever and aspiring” takes precedence over “the condition of the handicapped and impoverished” in a way which matches the phenomenon of self-centredness that the texts are critiquing