Tomorrow – Class 12 English Chapter 4 Notes & NCERT PDF

About the Author

Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) was born to Polish parents in the Russian Ukraine and went to sea in 1874. He learnt English at 21 and became a British citizen in 1886. His famous works include The Nigger of the Narcissus (1898), Lord Jim (1900) and Nostromo (1904). The book notes that his greatest skill is to "evoke an atmosphere through careful attention to detail". He often uses "story within a story", and "all Conrad's characters suffer from a sense of isolation." "Tomorrow" is one of the two long stories in this section.

Summary

Captain Hagberd in Colebrook. In the little seaport of Colebrook, Captain Hagberd, a retired coasting-skipper, is thought "morbid and unreasonable". He has built two ugly yellow brick cottages. He lives in one and rents the other to "blind Carvil, the retired boat-builder", a "domestic tyrant", and his daughter Bessie. Hagberd dresses in "No.1 sailcloth from head to foot", has a "great white beard flowing to his waist", and is always digging his front plot.

The barber's version. We learn his past through the town barber's mocking talk in the New Inn tap-room, which is the "story within a story". Hagberd lost his wife and then received a letter, "a hoax probably", saying a sailor named Hagberd was hanging about some girl in Colebrook. He advertised in the London papers for his son Harry, who had run away to sea, and searched the countryside, though he described only "a boy of fourteen or so". He sold his home in Colchester and settled in Colebrook to wait. The barber jokes that the date keeps moving: "next week", then "next month". The town expects him to give up. Only Bessie knows that "it was no longer 'next week', 'next month', or even 'next year'. It was 'tomorrow'."

Hagberd and Bessie. Across the fence, Hagberd talks to Bessie "paternally, reasonably, and dogmatically". Harry "would be one-and-thirty next July", the "proper age to get married with a nice, sensible girl". He has filled the other cottage with new furniture for the couple and will plant nothing "Not till our Harry comes home tomorrow." He winks and she blushes. Strangely for a sailor, he hates the sea ("I have never been further than eighty fathoms from the land"). Once Bessie hinted that Harry might be drowned, and he looked "as though he had seen a crack open out in the firmament". She never tried again. Her own life is one of drudgery: she nurses her father, "gross and unwieldy like a hippopotamus", who roars "Bessie!" for his hat, his pipe or his tea, and "had made himself helpless beyond his affliction, to enslave her better." The two old men are alike: Hagberd's delusion "blinded his mind to truth and probability, just as the other old man in the other cottage had been made blind, by another disease, to the light and beauty of the world."

The stranger. One evening a man leans over the gate: "You must be Captain Hagberd." He mocks the canvas suit ("Storm canvas, by George!"). Hagberd calls him "a grinning information fellow", retreats inside and bolts the door. The man tells Bessie: "Well, I am his son." It is Harry, who has come because his chum saw the advertisement: "That's five quid sure." He knocks ("Hey, dad! Let me in... Come back home a day too soon.") and old Hagberd throws a shovel at him from the window.

Harry and Bessie. Harry is a restless adventurer who has been a boundary rider, sheared sheep, harpooned a whale and prospected for gold. He compares himself to the Gambusinos of Mexico, wanderers whom "no woman yet born could hold... for more than a week". He says he would kick down any home his father set up for him. He flirts with Bessie ("You seem a fine girl, Miss Bessie dear"), and for the first time someone has paid her attention. When she tells him that his father means him to marry and settle, and that she is the chosen girl, he explodes: his father wants to make him "a blamed tame rabbit in a cage". Hagberd shouts from the window that Harry "shall marry you", or he will "cut him off with a shilling" and leave everything to Bessie. Harry asks her for money. She gives him a half-sovereign, and he says, "You can't buy me in, and you can't buy yourself out." He kisses her with overwhelming force, "as if the sea... had sent a wave over her head", and walks away. She runs after him crying "Harry!", but there is only silence, as if she were lost in "that stony country... where madmen go looking for gold and spurn the find."

The ending. Hagberd, pleased, calls down: "You frightened him away. Good girl... Don't you be impatient, my dear. One day more." Carvil yells for her, and Bessie totters back to her "stuffy little inferno of a cottage", haunted by "the voice of that old man shouting of his trust in an everlasting tomorrow."

Characters

Themes

Literary Devices and Style

Word Power

Board Exam Focus

The questions cover the consistency in the old man's madness, how he prepares for Harry's homecoming, how Bessie begins to share the insanity, Harry's reasons for coming, and why Harry's return disappoints Bessie. The Appreciation section asks about the technique used to unfold Hagberd's past and about insanity in other characters. Talking: compare this story with "Eveline".

Outline 1: Consistency in the madness. He is rational in all other matters. His hope is fixed and unchanging: always "tomorrow". Every action (buying furniture, digging, saving money, the canvas suit "for the present") serves that one belief. Any doubt disturbs his "equilibrium".

Outline 2: Bessie's disappointment. She has built a secret hope of marriage and escape on the old man's dream. Harry flirts with her, takes her money, kisses her and leaves, and says no woman can hold him. She is left with her tyrant father and the madman's "One day more".

Outline 3: Comparison with "Eveline". Both women are trapped by a demanding father and both glimpse escape through a sailor. Eveline refuses to go, while Bessie is left behind. The sea is the image of freedom and fear in both stories.

Language Work covers allusion and stress shift from verb to noun (inform, information).

Common Mistakes