Full Description
The Secret Agent is set in the seedy world of Adolf Verloc, a storekeeper and double agent in late-Victorian London who pretends to sympathize with a group of international anarchists but reports on their activities to both the Russian embassy and the British government. As he is drawn further into a terrorist bombing plot, his family also becomes involved, with devastating consequences. Based on a real-life failed anarchist plot, The Secret Agent is both intimately engaged with its historical moment and profoundly relevant today.
This new Broadview Edition helps to recreate the historical context that informed Conrad's preoccupations with global terrorism, human degeneration, the relativity of time, and the position of women.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Joseph Conrad: A Brief Chronology
A Note on the Text
Author's Note
The Secret Agent
Appendix A: London
From Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1853)
From Ford Madox Hueffer, The Soul of London: A Survey of a Modern City (1905)
Appendix B: Anarchism and Terrorism
From The Times (16 February 1894)
From Isabel Meredith, A Girl Among the Anarchists (1903)
From Joseph Conrad, a letter to R.B. Cunninghame Graham (20 December 1897)
From Joseph Conrad, a letter to R.B. Cunninghame Graham (7 October 1907)
From Peter Kropotkin, "Anarchism," Encyclopaedia Britannica (1910)
Peter Kropotkin, "The Scientific Bases of Anarchy" (1887)
From Report of the Royal Commission on Alien Immigration (1903)
From The Saturday Review (9 June 1906)
Appendix C: Degeneration
From Charles Darwin, Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animal (1872)
From E. Ray Lankester, Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism (1880)
From Cesare Lombroso, "Illustrative Studies in Criminal Anthropology: The Physiognomy of the Anarchists" (1890)
From Max Nordau, Degeneration (1892)
Appendix D: Heat Death, Entropy, and Time
From William Thomson, "On a Universal Tendency in Nature to the Dissipation of Mechanical Energy" (1852)
From William Thomson, "On the Age of the Sun's Heat" (1862)
From Algernon Charles Swinburne, "The Garden of Proserpine" (1866)
From Balfour Stewart and J. Norman Lockyer, "The Sun as a Type of the Material Universe" (1868)
Appendix E: Marriage and Feminism
From Coventry Patmore, "The Angel in the House" (1863)
From John Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies (1865)
From Mona Caird, "Marriage" (1888)
From Sarah Grand, "The New Aspect of the Woman Question" (1894)
From Hugh E.M. Stutfield, "The Psychology of Feminism" (1897)
Appendix F: Contemporary Reviews
Country Life (21 September 1907)
E.V. Lucas, Times Literary Supplement (20 September 1907)
New York Times Book Review (21 September 1907)
Edward Garnett, The Nation (26 September 1907)
William Morton Payne, The Dial (16 October 1907)
Glasgow News (3 October 1907)
John Galsworthy, Fortnightly Review (1 April 1908)
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