Set against the grimy backdrop of 1880s London, The Secret Agent immerses readers into a labyrinthine world of shadowy shops and murky streets, all shrouded in a soupy, suffocating mist. Conrad doesn’t merely employ this setting for its atmospheric effect. The physical murkiness of London life reflects the psychological fog that is constantly ensnaring his characters. Everything is dark, misty, and damp. It rains a great deal, and the interior and exterior worlds of Conrad’s London pubs, houses, and shops are universally dingy and gloomy.
The streets that Verloc, Inspector Heat, and Michaelis walk are not just cobblestone pathways, but winding trails leading to deeper intrigues and unresolved emotions. Shops—especially Verloc’s shop—hide more than they reveal. London in this novel is a place where lines are constantly blurred between morality and immorality, right and wrong, clarity and confusion. This reflects Conrad’s own political agenda, as the novel engages with the difficult territory of critiquing anarchism while also criticizing the governmental systems anarchy tries to disrupt.
The novel is set in the late 1880s, a period marked by political unrest worldwide. The events of the novel mirror the rising tide of anarchy that was starting to concern lawmakers in England and the broader European continent. The socio-political atmosphere of the time was rife with conspiracies, bombings, assassinations, and underground revolutionary movements. Anarchy was a focus more than it had ever been before for governments and secret agencies. For example, the Aliens Act of 1905—which was the first official immigration law enacted in Britain— was supposed, in part, to try and prevent an influx of European anarchists from Russia, Poland, Italy, and France from destabilizing life in England.
The real-life Greenwich Park bombing of 1894 also anchors the narrative in a specific historical moment. This was an event that caused national outrage and terror. A French anarchist named Martial Bourdin was accidentally killed when the bomb he was carrying prematurely exploded near the Royal Observatory in Greenwich Park, London. It has been suggested by historians that Bourdin intended to target the observatory as a symbolic act against Greenwich Mean Time, which many believed represented global order and standardization. This is reflected in Mr. Vladimir's desire to attack "science" itself with terrorism in Chapter 2.
