The Secret Agent. A Simple Tale

Mr Verloc, the secret agent, keeps a shop in Londons Soho where he lives with his wife Winnie, her infirm mother, and her idiot brother, Stevie. Verloc is part of a group of anarchists who believe in overthrowing the government and who also function as somewhat ineffective terrorists.

• The group mainly produces anarchist pamphlets called F.P.
• (The Future of the Proletariat) and hold private meetings among themselves.

The agent is secretly employed by a foreign embassy, probably Russia, to blow up the Greenwich Observatory. The Secret Agent is a a story set earlier (1886) telling an allegory of terrorists and anarchists based in Edwardian England.

• The death of an innocent is heartrending.
• Joseph Conrad is often considered the best writer of the 19th century.

The complicated plot is masterful, the prose sophisticated, and the characterizations full and engrossing.