I don’t say positively that the crew of a French or German merchantman wouldn’t have done it, but I doubt whether it would have been done in the same way. There was a completeness in it, something solid like a principle, and masterful like an instinct—a disclosure of something secret—of that hidden something, that gift of good or evil that makes racial difference, that shapes the fate of nations (p. 26).

In espousing the notion of the superiority of Anglo-Saxons over other imperial “races,” the story, which was written during the ascendancy of competition among imperial powers, participates in fairly common place rhetoric for the era. Yet given how skeptical Conrad tended to be about such matters, this apparent endorsement of a vision of Englishness that borders on jingoism is puzzling. To some extent we can make sense of such pronouncements by recognizing that he wrote the story for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, knowing that its readers were predominantly pro-imperial Tory-Conservatives. It is also possible that, as a naturalized Briton, he felt obliged to affirm publicly the chauvinistic assumptions of his compatriots—that is, to present himself, as the American-turned-Briton T. S. Eliot subsequently would do a generation later, as more English than the English.

These strategic considerations aside, Conrad’s idealistic depiction of English virtue in “Youth” appears to a limited extent to reflect his own convictions, and, insofar as this is the case, it represents only one side of a complex ambivalence toward his adoptive country, the other side of which would be displayed three years later in the poignant short story “Amy Foster” (1901). Actually, Conrad never wrote a more Anglophilic story than “Youth” or a more Anglophobic one than “Amy Foster.” On the one hand, “Youth” is a tale of imaginary belonging written by someone who acutely felt himself to be an outsider in the British merchant marine: as Najder observes, “there is no evidence to suggest that [a] sense of professional solidarity and comradeship in dangerous work was indeed part of Korzeniowski’s personal experience. It seems more probable that he felt lonely and alienated throughout his service” (p. 163). The fact that he was referred to by some of his shipmates, ironically, as “the Russian Count” reinforces this contention. On the other hand, in “Amy Foster” the experiences of the protagonist, an abused immigrant in Britain, clearly reflect Conrad’s own sentiments of being an unwelcome outsider.

The tale is narrated by Kennedy, a doctor whose thoughtful, cosmopolitan outlook sharply differs from that of the story’s provincial, rural Britons. Kennedy befriends the protagonist, Yanko, the sole survivor of a shipwreck off the Kentish coast, and gradually comes to learn the stranger’s story. Having washed ashore after the America-bound ship loaded with European émigrés on which he was a passenger has foundered, the long-haired Slavic stranger who speaks no English is immediately subjected by xenophobic Britons to both verbal and physical abuse. Mistaken for a madman or a criminal, he is treated in a manner comparable to that of the pathetically misunderstood monster in Mary Shel ley’s Frankenstein: he is lashed with a whip, stoned, and hit over the head with an umbrella before finally being locked up in a woodshed. During his imprisonment, Amy Foster, a plain-looking, unintelligent country girl, offers him bread, and they subsequently fall in love and marry. Yet as time progresses the cultural disparity between them becomes increasingly evident. Amy’s growing fear of her passionate, impulsive, and decidedly un-English husband’s strangeness reaches a climax when, during his bout of fever, what she mistakes for ravings (in fact, he is merely requesting water in his own language) frighten her to the point where she takes their infant son and flees their home. The abandoned Yanko dies the next day, Dr. Kennedy determines with evident symbolism, of “heart-failure” (p. 151), and the story concludes with the doctor reflecting on the irony that Yanko has been spared the fate of his drowned companions only to suffer and die for lack of human community in England: he has been “cast out mysteriously by the sea to perish in the supreme disaster of loneliness and despair” (p. 152).

Conrad was careful not to make the parallels between himself and his unfortunate protagonist excessively transparent. Unlike the devout Catholic peasant Yanko, Conrad was descended from Polish nobility and had long since lapsed from the faith. Yet while the tale is only obliquely autobiographical, its personal resonances are unmistakable. It is never explicitly stated that Yanko is Polish, but we are supplied with ample clues to make this determination. For example, we are informed that he has been a mountaineer, the term for which, “in the dialect of his country,” sounds “like Goorall” (p. 146), which bears a close resemblance to the Polish term for mountaineer, góral. And it is no coincidence that he washes up on the Kentish coast, the very part of southeast England where Conrad himself lived at the time he was writing the story. It is also important to recognize that Conrad believed himself to be an object of English xenophobia. For example, in an effort to account for the disappointing sales of his 1907 novel The Secret Agent, he wrote, “I suppose there is something in me that is unsympathetic to the general public....