"Hang ideas! They are tramps, vagabonds, knocking at the back-door of your mind, each taking a little of your substance, each carrying away some crumb of that belief in a few simple notions you must cling to if you want to live decently and would like to die easy!" -from Lord Jim
Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, the first of his major novels and typically emerging from events to take on a life of its own, appeared in 1900 when the Victorian Age was disappearing, from whose earlier tradition Lord Jim presses away to express the limits of language, and the modern era was emerging.
Joseph Conrad, with his visionary yet dark and distinctively poetic narrative style, by insisting on the frequent inability of language to communicate straightforwardly, opens itself to new ways of using words and brings economic and racial dynamics into use in this novel.
