Reading Order
The Secret Agent Reading Order
The Secret Agent (1907) by Joseph Conrad is the darkest comedy in the English novel and one of Conrad's most formally perfect books — the story of Mr. Verloc, a lazy double agent who runs a pornography shop in London as his cover while feeding information to an unnamed European power's embassy. When the embassy grows impatient and demands a provocation — the bombing of the Greenwich Observatory — Verloc's attempt to delegate the task to his wife's simple-minded younger brother Stevie triggers a catastrophe that destroys everyone around him. Conrad set the novel in 1886 London and based it partly on a real anarchist bombing attempt near Greenwich in 1894; he described it as 'a simple tale of the XIX century' and 'a tale of darkness.' Its London is a city of fog, sewers, and moral nullity — the anarchists and police equally corrupt, equally hollow, equally devoted to their own self-preservation.
Where to start
The Secret Agent (1907) — the complete novel; no prequel required
Complete The Secret Agent Book List
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The Secret Agent
Joseph Conrad·1907
The Secret Agent — Frequently Asked Questions
What is The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad about?
The Secret Agent is about Adolphe Verloc, a double agent and pornography shopkeeper in London, who is pressured by the Russian embassy to carry out a bombing of the Greenwich Observatory to provoke anti-anarchist crackdowns across Europe. Too lazy and cowardly to do it himself, Verloc uses his wife Winnie's simple-minded younger brother Stevie to carry the bomb. The plan goes catastrophically wrong; Stevie is destroyed by the bomb he was carrying. The novel then traces the consequences: Winnie Verloc's discovery of what her husband has done, and the cascade of violence and tragedy that follows. Conrad presents the entire anarchist milieu — the bombers, the police, the embassy — as equally hollow and self-serving, united by their inability to see other people as fully real.
What is the tone of The Secret Agent?
The tone is one of Conrad's most unusual achievements — a kind of cold, ironic darkness that combines tragedy and dark comedy in a way that makes readers unsure how to feel. Conrad described it as having 'an ironic method' and said he aimed to treat anarchism not with the romanticized sympathy it often received but as a social pathology. The result is a novel in which no character is particularly admirable, most are deluded about their own motives, and the catastrophe unfolds with a grim inevitability that is partly tragic and partly farcical. The most sympathetic figure in the novel — Stevie, the intellectual disability of whom makes him incapable of the self-deception that corrupts the other characters — is the one Conrad destroys first.
Is The Secret Agent based on real events?
Partly. Conrad based the Greenwich bombing plot on a real incident: in February 1894, a French anarchist named Martial Bourdin was killed when a bomb he was carrying exploded near the Greenwich Observatory. The circumstances of his death were never fully explained — he was alone, he had approached the Observatory from the park rather than from any obvious direction, and he died without explaining his intention. Conrad read about the case in 1894 and held it in his memory for over a decade before writing The Secret Agent in 1906–1907. He relocated the story to 1886 (before the real bombing) and invented the Russian embassy conspiracy; the Bourdin case gave him the basic situation — a bomb, Greenwich, an unexplained intention — that he then built into a fully imagined narrative.
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