The Secret Agent

320 Pages·2009·1.78 MB·English

by  Joseph Conrad

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This electronic material is under
copyright protection and is
provided to a single recipient
for review purposes only.
THE SECRET AGENT
A First Modern English Edition of
Les Évangiles des Quenouilles
broadview editions
series editor: L.W. Conolly
THEDISTAFFGOSPELS 1
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Joseph Conrad.Courtesy of George Eastman House,International
Museum of Photography and Film.
2 THEDISTAFFGOSPELS
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THE SECRET AGENT
Joseph Conrad
Les Évangiles des Quenouilles
translated by Thomas K.Abbott
with revisions by Lara Denis
edited by Tanya Agathocleous
broadview editions
THEDISTAFFGOSPELS 3
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©2009 Tanya Agathocleous
All rights reserved.The use of any part of this publication reproduced,transmitted in
any form or by any means,electronic,mechanical,photocopying,recording,or other-
wise,or stored in a retrieval system,without prior written consent of the publisher—
or in the case of photocopying,a licence from Access Copyright (Canadian Copyright
Licensing Agency),One Yonge Street,Suite 1900,Toronto,Ontario M5E 1E5—is an
infringement of the copyright law.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Conrad,Joseph,1857-1924
The secret agent / Joseph Conrad ;edited by Tanya Agathocleous.
(Broadview editions)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-55111-784-3
I.Agathocleous,Tanya,1970- II.Title. III.Series:Broadview
editions
PR6005.O4S4 2009 823'.912 C2009-903816-1
Broadview Editions
The Broadview Editions series represents the ever-changing canon of literature in
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Advisory editor for this volume:Michel Pharand
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Contents
Acknowledgements (cid:127) 7
Introduction (cid:127) 9
Joseph Conrad:A Brief Chronology (cid:127) 27
A Note on the Text (cid:127) 30
Author’s Note (cid:127) 31
The Secret Agent (cid:127) 37
Appendix A:London (cid:127) 255
1. From Charles Dickens,Bleak House(1853) (cid:127) 255
2. From Ford Madox Hueffer,The Soul of London:
A Survey of a Modern City(1905) (cid:127) 256
Appendix B:Anarchism and Terrorism (cid:127) 259
1. From The Times(16 February 1894) (cid:127) 259
2. From Isabel Meredith,A Girl Among the Anarchists
(1903) (cid:127) 262
3. From Joseph Conrad,a letter to R.B.Cunninghame
Graham (20 December 1897) (cid:127) 263
4. From Joseph Conrad,a letter to R.B.Cunninghame
Graham (7 October 1907) (cid:127) 264
5. From Peter Kropotkin,“Anarchism,”Encyclopaedia
Britannica(1910) (cid:127) 265
6. Peter Kropotkin,“The Scientific Bases of
Anarchy”(1887) (cid:127) 266
7. From Report of the Royal Commission on Alien
Immigration(1903) (cid:127) 271
8. From The Saturday Review(9 June 1906) (cid:127) 273
Appendix C:Degeneration (cid:127) 276
1. From Charles Darwin,Expression of the Emotions in
Man and Animal(1872) (cid:127) 276
2. From E.Ray Lankester,Degeneration:A Chapter in
Darwinism(1880) (cid:127) 278
3. From Cesare Lombroso,“Illustrative Studies in
Criminal Anthropology:The Physiognomy of the
Anarchists”(1890) (cid:127) 280
4. From Max Nordau,Degeneration(1892) (cid:127) 283
Appendix D:Heat Death,Entropy,and Time (cid:127) 288
1. From William Thomson,“On a Universal Tendency
in Nature to the Dissipation of Mechanical Energy”
(1852) (cid:127) 288
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2. From William Thomson,“On the Age of the Sun’s
Heat”(1862) (cid:127) 289
3. From Algernon Charles Swinburne,“The Garden of
Proserpine”(1866) (cid:127) 289
4. From Balfour Stewart and J.Norman Lockyer,“The
Sun as a Type of the Material Universe”(1868) (cid:127) 290
Appendix E:Marriage and Feminism (cid:127) 293
1. From Coventry Patmore,“The Angel in the House”
(1863) (cid:127) 293
2. From John Ruskin,Sesame and Lilies(1865) (cid:127) 294
3. From Mona Caird,“Marriage”(1888) (cid:127) 296
4. From Sarah Grand,“The New Aspect of the
Woman Question”(1894) (cid:127) 299
5. From Hugh E.M.Stutfield,“The Psychology of
Feminism”(1897) (cid:127) 302
Appendix F:Contemporary Reviews (cid:127) 304
1. Country Life (21 September 1907) (cid:127) 304
2. E.V.Lucas,Times Literary Supplement (20 September
1907) (cid:127) 307
3. New York Times Book Review (21 September 1907) (cid:127) 308
4. Edward Garnett,The Nation (26 September 1907) (cid:127) 309
5. William Morton Payne,The Dial (16 October 1907) (cid:127) 311
6. Glasgow News (3 October 1907) (cid:127) 312
7. John Galsworthy,Fortnightly Review (1 April 1908) (cid:127) 313
Select Bibliography (cid:127) 317
6 CONTENTS
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Acknowledgements
My greatest debt is to Patrick Redding for his invaluable research
assistance, acuity, and general good will. I also thank Christina
Nicodemou for her patience and conscientiousness with the text;
Elizabeth C.Miller for her expertise on the anarchist context of
the novel;Nicole Rice and Shameem Black for their careful and
incisive feedback;and all previous editors of The Secret Agent (in
particular Bruce Harkness and S.W. Reid, and John Lyon) for
their research and insight.
I am grateful to Leonard Conolly,Julia Gaunce,Anna del Col,
Marjorie Mather,and Craig Lawson at Broadview Press for their
early and ongoing support of this project,and to Michel Pharand
for his careful copyediting.
Thanks are also due to the members of my senior seminar
class on The Victorian Fin de Siècle at Yale University (Fall 2005)
who shared my enthusiasm for this book and its bearing on con-
temporary events.
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8 PREFACE
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Introduction
[This Introduction gives away details of the plot. First-time
readers of The Secret Agentmight wish to come back to it after fin-
ishing the novel.]
When it appeared in 1906,The Secret Agentgave form to many of
the fears and doubts that accompanied the new century.A dark
tale of espionage in which a terrorist plot to blow up the Green-
wich Meridian is fatally connected to the machinations of inter-
national diplomacy and the sordid drama of an individual family,
the novel demonstrates the unavoidable intersection of local and
global interests in a rapidly modernizing world. As a result,
Conrad’s work still seems timely in the twenty-first century,when
globalization and international terrorism are inextricable facts of
everyday life. Appropriately, the New York Times has called The
Secret Agent“the classic novel for the post-9/11 age.”1
The Secret Agent is also one of Joseph Conrad’s most fascinat-
ing novels because of its engagement with the pressing concerns
of its own time:anarchism,women’s rights,the potential death of
the sun, and fears of national degeneration. In grappling with
these issues,the novel experiments with nonlinear and subjective
experiences of time, creates a haunting portrait of urban alien-
ation in its depiction of London,and definitively dismantles the
marriage plot.It therefore serves as an important bridge between
the Victorian and modern novel.Though it continues to stand in
the shadow of Heart of Darkness,Conrad’s “detective”novel is as
bracing and radical in its own way as the anarchism that inspired
its plot.
Conrad and Anarchism
In 1906, when Conrad began work on “Verloc,” the story that
would morph into The Secret Agent,he was living with his family
in Montpellier in the south of France and his domestic life was
under great stress. He was plagued by financial difficulties, and
he,his wife Jessie,and his son Borys were suffering from a range
of debilitating illnesses. Burdened on top of these woes with a
severe case of depression (a condition that plagued him through-
1 Tom Reiss,“The True Classic of Terrorism,”New York Times Book
Review,11 September 2005:35.
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out his life),Conrad struggled with self-doubt about his writing.
Yet this time of despair was also one of his most creative.He had
recently completed the novel Nostromo and was making progress
on The Mirror of the Sea.He had also written two short stories—
“An Anarchist”and “The Informer”—that shared with “Verloc”
a fascination with the world of anarchy and espionage.As well as
finishing The Mirror of the Sea that year,he turned “Verloc”into
a full-length novel that would eventually take its place amongst
the highest achievements of his career.
As was the case with most of Conrad’s fiction,The Secret Agent
was first published in a periodical.Because of his desperate finan-
cial straits,Conrad had pressured his agent H.B.Pinker to find it
a venue as quickly as possible. Pinker was able to find only one
taker on short notice: an ill-fated American magazine named
Ridgway’s:A Militant Weekly for God and Country, in which the
novel was published in eleven weekly installments,beginning on
6 October 1906.Conrad soon felt chagrined about this serialized
version,however,for he had been unable to finish it to his satis-
faction before the pressure to sell it overrode other concerns.He
therefore arranged to deliver a revised and expanded manuscript
to the English publisher Methuen. The Methuen version, still
used for reprints today, was published in London in September
1907. An American edition appeared shortly afterwards from
Harper & Bros in New York.
The title change from “Verloc” to The Secret Agent reflected
the enlarged scope of the narrative.Though Verloc remains the
primary “secret agent” of the story, the title leaves its referent
open to interpretation: almost all the main characters have a
secret,and the question of their agency—of who and what moti-
vates their actions—is at the forefront of the narrative. Like
Conrad’s anarchist short stories, The Secret Agent also bears a
descriptive subtitle. “An Anarchist” is subtitled “A Desperate
Tale”;“The Informer”is “An Ironic Tale”;and The Secret Agent
bears the legend “A Simple Tale.” This subtitle is the most
complex and ironic of the three, for The Secret Agent’s intricate
plot and nihilistic outlook make it anything but simple.Yet the
subtitle reminds us that the solution to the novel’s main
mystery—who bombed the Greenwich observatory?—is simpler
than many of the characters imagine.Both the anarchists and the
police are caught out by the crime because Verloc’s domestic life
is beneath their notice: neither Stevie nor Winnie is seen as an
“agent”with the ability to transform public life.Though each of
these characters is depicted as being somewhat simple as well,in
10 INTRODUCTION