Clayton and Conrad
One vital player during the Victorian period was
ornament. Extravagance and embellishment emerge in the architecture as well as
literature of the time. Bob Parvin’s biography on Nicholas Clayton shows Clayton’s his taste for adornment as
did Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Conrad’s elaborate architecture
of words in Heart of Darkness express
who he was much like Clayton’s “creations…were his essence”.(Clayton
318)
Nicholas Clayton brought Galveston
to “newer dimensions of lavishness”(Clayton319). “Fancy elements” such as imported “marble…
cut to order in Italy and Africa”(Clayton
320) and “pink granite…handpicked from Texas quarries”(Clayton
320) showed his expensive taste and attention to detail. The recurring high-spires as in “the high-spired Church of
the Annunciation” (Clayton 320) illustrate a common theme during the Victorian period: the search for God. According
to Buckley in his Pattern of Conversion “the soul’s abiding hope [lying]
in its conversion from the tyranny of self to the higher purposes of the ‘eternal processes’”(Buckley 249).
Symbolically represented in the spires, the man of the time, frustrated with the “Infinite in him, which with all his
cunning he cannot quite bury under the finite”(Carlyle 267) reaches for God.
Conrad, too, uses detail to express this search for redemption and self fulfillment. In lieu of granite he uses diction,
instead of limestone, he uses imagery.. For example, Conrad shows one of his character’s taste for extravagance: "silver-mounted dressing-case...native mats covering the clay walls, a collection of spears, assegais,
shields, knives" (Conrad 54). Both Clayton and Conrad are artists within their own element expressing the same message
of the time fusing extravagance, self-interest, and the search for God.
