Max Havelaar was #first translated in English by Alphonse Nahuijs in 1868. Because of its strong political message against the system of colonial oppression in the East Indies, it was positively received by a liberal and radical public, like the British Fabian Socialists, and also by writer Joseph Conrad, whose narrator Marlow in @Lord Jim [Electronic text version of Conrad's Lord Jim at the English-language website of Bibliomania] (1900) is of the same moral fibre as Max Havelaar. #A second translation, by W. Siebenhaar, appeared in 1927, and a #third by Roy Edwards in 1967. In England, Max Havelaar is generally known as the “one Dutch classic”. It is the only Dutch novel in the Penguin Classics series. The “Story of Saïdjah and Adinda” has been translated separately, several times (for example by Clark & Lieber in 1926).
To give you an impression of the variety of reactions on Max Havelaar in English, we have selected a few fragments and quotations from various writers and critics throughout the years.
In 1886, Multatuli’s novel was one of the sources of information for the Hobson-Jobson, who comments:
(Hobson-Jobson. The Anglo-Indian Dictionary, 1996, xxix)
Earlier, in 1869, Alfred Russel Wallace wrote in his The Malay Archipelago:
(A.R. Wallace, The Malay Archipelago. The Land of the Orang-Utan and the Bird of Paradise. A Narrative of Travel with studies of Man and Nature, 1962, p. 74)
Similar to Wallace’s reaction are J.S. Furnivall’s remarks in his Netherlands India. A Study of Plural Economy (1939):
(J.S. Furnivall, Netherlands India. A Study of Plural Economy, 1939, p. 161).
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