Joseph Conrad: 'The Secret Agent'

by Cedric Watts

This critical and contextual study guide sheds new light on Conrad’s topical novel of espionage and terrorism. A biographical chapter relates The Secret Agent to Conrad’s career. Next, the work’s process of composition is discussed, and differences between the serial, the book version and the stage version are explained. An analysis of the plot gives particular attention to its ironic strategies and to the character of the narrator. Various themes and contexts are conceptions of time and topography; anarchistic and Fenian politics; anti-Semitism; evolution, Lombroso and criminology. Literary influences and analogues are Dickens, Zola, Ibsen, terrorist fiction. The characters are considered from various viewpoints. A critical survey summarises the work’s reception since its first publication. The bibliography provides a guide to further reading.Cedric Watts, Research Professor at Sussex University, has written six books on Conrad (including A Preface to Conrad and The Deceptive Text) and has edited ten volumes of Conrad’s fiction (among them Nostromo and Heart of Darkness).

83 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Cedric Watts (1937 - 2022) was an English literary scholar. He served in the Royal Navy, took a B.A. at Cambridge University, and was an Emeritus Professor of English at Sussex University. He published twenty-six critical and scholarly books, including The Deceptive Test (1984) and Literature and Money (1990), and edited twenty-one plays by Shakespeare. His Final Exam: A Novel earned Ian McEwan's praise.

An internationally renowned and prolific scholar of the writings of Joseph Conrad, he played a leading role in Conrad studies as editor, critic and biographer.

Watts' biography of the Scottish writer, adventurer and friend of Conrad, R.B. Cunninghame Graham, rancher in South America, co-founder of the Scottish Labour Party and of the Scottish National Party, drew attention to an important but hitherto neglected figure, while his full-length study Literature and Money revived a largely neglected topic.

Reviews

[Jack Hrkach · Rating 4 out of 5]

Years and years ago I read Conrad's Lord Jim and The Heart of Darkness (the latter I actually recorded for Talking Books at the Library of Congress in the late 70s or early 80s). I loved them both, but for some reason have waited until now, retired at age 74, to read The Secret Agent. I must confess I almost put it down before I began the texts itself, because I began with the Introduction, which goes on and on featuring information that I had no context to, as I'd not yet read it. I like some Introductions to classics, but this would have much better placed at the end, as an Afterword.. Net came the author's note, which I found tedious and which again would have served me better after I'd completed the novel.

Fortunately I read on. The book is very short, and its plot is so complicated that I won't even begin to try to set it down for you. I got hooked almost immediately. It may not alway be so but when I find myself in the hands of a great author I usually find myself easily sucked in. Much of it was very very good, but there were a few sections that were simply dazzling.

If you've not read Conrad it might be a place to start, as it is short, and very intense. But you can't go wrong with either Lord Jim or especially The Heart of Darkness, passages of which still ring in my ears after many and many a long long day. I certainly recommend it, but if you read the Kindle version just skip right to chapter one.

[Luke · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Secret Agent is hysterically humorous at times and seriously satirical at others, but for the most part it's a slow, boring, confusing trudge around gloomy Greenwich. It's certainly not Conrad's best work - he's much more at home sailing the African seas than the political oceans of Europe - but the hints of brilliance make it (almost) worth taking time to swallow the whole novel.
Or maybe the whole thing went over my head.