On 6 January 1908, a dejected Conrad reported to Galsworthy the ‘honourable failure’ of The Secret Agent, adding wryly: ‘I suppose there is something in me that is unsympathetic to the general public […]. Foreignness, I suppose’ (LL>II, p. 65). And because of that foreignness he was viewed for many decades as an isolated phenomenon on the English literary scene. Fifty years after his death, at the 1974 International Conference, Edward Said could still deplore the fact that he had been ‘treated as everything except a novelist with links to a cultural and intellectual context’. Since then his relationship to the Polish, Russian, English and French traditions, as well as to a number of novelists and philosophers from other cultures, has been extensively explored; yet there is still considerable disagreement about the respective importance of the traditions behind his literary cosmopolitanism. Gustav Morf was the first to attempt to link Conrad inextricably to his Polish background, an idea which, as Frederick Karl notes, has become ‘increasingly influential’. Although in 1947 F. R. Leavis saw him as a ‘cosmopolitan of French culture’, ever since the 1960s Conrad has been presented as having a ‘double image’ and ‘dual identity’ - Polish (or even Slav) and English.