ABSTRACT
On February 18, 1894, a little over a month after Captain Korzeniowski had returned to London and installed himself once more in his rooms at 17 Gillingham Street, near Victoria Station, he received a telegram with a message which completely overwhelmed him. A literary career is obviously the last thing he has in mind, and his own came quite close to beginning—or ending—in this secret, devious fashion, in a French periodical. The manuscript had fallen into the hands of a very young man who had recently been working as a reader for the publisher Fisher Unwin. His name was Edward Garnett and he was the son of the erudite Dr. Garnett, Keeper of Printed Books at the British Museum. The publisher did his best to start a general conversation and tried to interest his guest in political personalities and third-class novelists such as John Oliver Hobbes and S. R. Crockett.
