The Secret Agent: A Norton Critical Edition (Norton Critical Editions)

“[A] masterly study of the inner workings of the disordered minds whose aim is destruction, violence, and the overturning of law and order by means of bombs.” ―The (London) Observer (1907)

This Norton Critical Edition includes:
- The first English book edition of the novel (1907), accompanied by explanatory footnotes.
- Four illustrations.
- Contemporary sources that informed Conrad’s writing of the novel, including newspaper accounts of the “Greenwich Bomb Outrage,” articles from the anarchist press, earlier fictional treatments of the Martial Bourdin case (the inspiration for
Adolph Verloc), and important texts related to anarchism and fin-de-siècle culture.
- Seven wide-ranging critical essays by Ian Watt, Terry Eagleton, Martin Ray, Hugh Epstein, Gail Fincham, Peter Lancelot Mallios, and Michael Newton.
- A Chronology and a Selected Bibliography.

JOSEPH CONRAD was born in Polish Ukraine on December 3, 1857, with the name Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski. Orphaned at the age of eleven, Conrad spent the remainder of his youth in Switzerland and Cracow before joining the French marines. In 1878, he enlisted in the British Merchant Navy. Following sixteen years of service, Conrad launched his literary career in England. He published many novels and stories, including Lord Jim (1900), Nostromo (1904), and most famously, The Heart of Darkness (1899), inspired by his steamboat voyage on the Congo River. Although English was his third language (after Polish and French), Conrad’s rich and distinctive prose established him as one of England’s greatest novelists. Conrad died on August 3, 1924, in Kent, England.

Richard Niland is Lecturer in English at the University of Strathclyde. He is the author of Conrad and History and is a contributor to The New Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad. He is the editor of Joseph Conrad, The Contemporary Reviews, Volume 3 (Cambridge University Press).