When was Heart of Darkness published?
Heart of Darkness
There have been many proposed sources for the character of the antagonist, Kurtz. Georges-Antoine Klein, an agent who became ill and later died aboard Conrad's steamer, by scholars and literary critics as a basis for Kurtz. The principal figures involved in the disastrous "rear column" of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition have also been identified as likely sources, including column leader Edmund Musgrave Barttelot, slave trader Tippu Tip and the expedition leader, Welsh explorer Henry Morton Stanley.[9][10] Conrad's biographer Norman Sherry judged that Arthur Hodister (1847–1892), a Belgian solitary but successful trader, who spoke three Congolese languages and was venerated by the Congolese villagers among whom he worked to the point of deification, served as the main model, while later scholars have refuted this hypothesis.[11][12][13] Adam Hochschild, in King Leopold's Ghost, believes that the Belgian soldier Léon Rom influenced the character.[14] Peter Firchow mentions the possibility that Kurtz is a composite, modelled on various figures present in the Congo Free State at the time as well as on Conrad's imagining of what they might have had in common.[15]