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  1. Need help with Chapter 1 in Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent? Check out our revolutionary side-by-side summary and analysis.

    • Chapter 2

      Verloc is well-dressed because he has business at a foreign...

    • Plot Summary

      Verloc attends a meeting at a foreign embassy with a...

  2. Mr. Verloc, the secret agent, preys upon Stevie's good nature and enlists him to set off a bomb that ends up accidentally killing Stevie. The circles of Stevie's sketches also become a central symbol in the novel. Conrad uses circles to represent the enclosed yet unceasing chaos of the world.

  3. Chapter 1 Summary. Content warning: This section of the guide discusses suicide, abuse, and ableism. Adolf Verloc runs a store in Soho, London, in the 1880s. The neighborhood is run-down and poor, providing a home to many immigrants. Verloc’s store sells pornography, contraceptives, and other illicit material.

  4. Verloc attends a meeting at a foreign embassy with a secretary named Mr. Vladimir. Verloc has been secretly employed by the embassy as an undercover agent for 11 years, but Vladimir believes that Verloc has grown lazy and isn’t earning his keep.

  5. Analysis. The novel appears to begin with the scene of Mr. Verloc on his way to the embassy, but the narrator, in one of Conrad’s characteristic distortions of conventional narrative order, immediately switches to an exposition of the Verloc household and the backgrounds of the characters.

  6. The Secret Agent is a novel by British Polish writer Joseph Conrad, first published in 1907. Set in London in 1886, it portrays Adolf Verloc as the titular secret agent who works for a powerful but unnamed country, likely Russia.

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  8. Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent Chapter Summary. Find summaries for every chapter, including a The Secret Agent Chapter Summary Chart to help you understand the book.