empire. He lived upstream in
Stanford-le-Hope in the
1890s and Heart of Darkness
opens on board the Nellie, a
cruising yawl: ‘The sea-reach
of the Thames stretched
before us like the beginning
of an interminable waterway
. . . leading to the uttermost
ends of the earth.’ Conrad’s
later novel The Mirror of the
Sea, published in 1907, has
much the same theme, with
the estuary promising ‘every