Joseph Conrad Among the Anarchists

Nineteenth Century Terrorism and The Secret Agent

David Mulry

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137495853
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book looks at the inception, composition, and 1907 publication of The Secret Agent, one of Joseph Conrad's most highly regarded political novels and a core text of literary modernism. David Mulry examines the development and revisions of the novel through the stages of the holograph manuscript, first as a short story, then as a serialized sensation fiction in Ridgway's Militant Weekly for the American market, before it was extensively revised and published in novel form. Presciently anticipating the climate of modern terror, Conrad's text responds to the failed Greenwich Bombing, the first anarchist atrocity to occur on English soil. This book charts its historical and cultural milieu via press and anarchist accounts of the bombing, to place Conrad foremost among the dynamite fiction of revolutionary anarchism and terrorism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

© The Author(s) 2016

David MulryJoseph Conrad Among the Anarchists10.1057/978-1-137-49585-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

David Mulry¹

(1)

College of Coastal Georgia, Brunswick, Georgia, USA

End Abstract

IN THE FOLLOWING chapters we will be considering the textual development and the contributing contexts of Joseph Conrad’s remarkable novel, The Secret Agent. In part, our concern is to establish the emerging vision of the novel, its historical milieu, and the climate of ideas in which Conrad wrote and which inevitably shapes his writing, and in part, to examine the emerging text through various stages of composition.

The fiction of the novel pivots upon the historical fact of an attempted dynamite outrage in Greenwich Park, London. It was presumably conceived as a demonstration against the hilltop observatory, though the bomb never got close to that site, and the premature detonation of the bomb resulted in the death of the anarchist who was carrying it. This curious explosion in Greenwich, central to the plot of Conrad’s novel and simultaneously intriguingly absent from it, was a cause célèbre in its day. Its notoriety was understandable, given that it was the first anarchist bombing, or explosive act of anarchist “propaganda by deed,” to take place on British soil during the era of bombs in the latter part of the nineteenth century.

It was not the first terror bombing by any means. It followed an extended Fenian campaign of violence intended to destabilize the British domestic political scene sufficiently to help bring about home rule for Ireland. It also followed bloody anarchist attacks on the continent. The nature of the attack on English soil, and its source, contributed to a heightened anxiety in the domestic response, not only to terror, but to vague and mounting fears that contemporary novelists were quick to capitalize on, that Fenian, anarchist, and revolutionary socialist groups had formed, or were forming, an international alliance which threatened the very fabric of the world of late Victorian and Edwardian England. ¹ In the opening of his novel of nineteenth-century terrorism, The Anarchist (published the same year as the Greenwich bombing, 1894), Colonel Richard Henry Savage announces in his preface, “The story of active anarchism is a chronicle of the present time. The bells ringing out the nineteenth century may ring in a conflict which, in its political and social importance, will dwarf every other issue of the day.” ²

The occasion of the Greenwich bombing, a singular anarchist atrocity, rather than a Fenian demonstration, convinced some commentators that the turn of England had at last come for a sustained campaign of terror. Hitherto, it had largely been free from anarchist threats because it was a (more or less) neutral political home to European dissident voices. It had not so much been ignored by the anarchists, as spared, because England had provided a virtual safe haven for varieties of European and Slav dissent; as Vladimir, in Conrad’s novel is quick to point out when he dictates a series of outrages “executed here in this country; not only planned here” as he goes on to note: “Your friends could set half the Continent on fire without influencing the public opinion here in favour of a universal repressive legislation. They will not look outside their backyard here.” ³ Instead, England was a center of sorts for a variety of European revolutionary dissidents and revolutionaries—a philosophic bulwark against European authoritarianism and autocracy. Peter Kropotkin, in The Conquest of Bread, identifies Britain along with France as one of only two nations which “stood at the head of the industrial movement” which saw modern socialism emerge. ⁴

England’s attitude had a twofold effect, it meant that London could become the philosophical center of the movement with figures like Kropotkin and Malatesta seeking its security, but it also had a dampening effect on domestic anarchism. Instead of domestic dissent among disenfranchised labor, plots abroad were fomented and equipped in England, while the anarchist preserved the tender peace of their valuable adopted refuge. The considerable external efforts to force England to change its policy on political refugees were to no avail. The Russian Nihilists found refuge as the darlings of English Society, the European refugees were less attractive to English taste, but equally, they were less visible, and presumably, they were, after all, much more agreeable than the Fenians—at least until the Greenwich detonation which was to change the character of late Victorian England and its reception of political extremism.

As one might expect, this did not go unnoticed. The more repressive European Governments, along with Russia, brought diplomatic pressure to bear upon England. Prussia, without success, proposed that England join a pact to close doors to the Nihilists, social revolutionaries, and anarchists. The French Newspapers at the height of the dynamite outrages printed bitter condemnations of the lax policing so close to their borders that allowed the inception and development of anarchist plots which came to fruition in France.

So it was no surprise that the Greenwich bombing was welcomed by the French, bringing down in Mr. Asquith and on “‘selfish England’ the jibes of the Parisian Press” as reported at length in The Times:

The République Français says:- “The English have two pairs of spectacles, one for looking at their own affairs, and the other at those of their neighbours.” So long as the Anarchists were content with operating in France, Spain and Belgium, they were free to “demonstrate” on Tower-hill, and to form their abominable plots at the Autonomie Club, but when it was seen in London that people there ran a risk of having their own fingers burnt at the game, and that bombs exploded at Greenwich as well as at the café Terminus and the Licéo, a different tone is taken …. Everybody will benefit by this tardy awakening of conscience, and we cannot but congratulate ourselves on it. M. Bourdin was therefore well-inspired, if not for himself, at least for others, in stumbling with his bottle.

And again in the same article we are offered a response from Prussia:

A Vienna telegram, dated yesterday [18 February 1894] says:- “there is much anxiety here respecting the inaction of the English Government towards the Anarchists. It may be expected that the various powers will shortly communicate their observations to the English Foreign Office.” ⁵

The Greenwich Bombing focused international attention on English domestic policy over the anarchist question. Some contemporary observers were not slow to point out that, what for anarchism in England was a bizarre, untimely, and costly incident, was for its opponents, at home and abroad, of tremendous value in the ongoing war of words, and in toughening attitudes to political dissent in England.

London had a history of openness to philosophical dissent; moreover, it was extensively used for printing and dissemination of anarchist literature. It was the home of the group that organized the first Workers’ Congresses (the London Congress in 1881, a significant turning point in anarchist policy development). The “official” adoption of violent provocation toward revolution left the movement vulnerable to its repressive opponents, but England remained the haven of radical thinkers like Karl Marx, Kropotkin himself, and Errico Malatesta, along with terrorist activists like Sergey Stepniak (who stabbed and killed the chief of the Russian secret police, and later fled to England). During increasingly bloody anarchist campaigns in Europe and America, there had been no serious anarchist outrage in Britain, though that gap had been filled by a persistent and violent (sometimes according to press accounts, a wildly incompetent) Fenian campaign.

Where anarchism occurred, it was often more philosophical or cerebral, and England valued its role as a place for freedom of thought. An interesting example of just such a philosophical terrorist is the case of John E. Barlas, an anarchist, educated at Oxford. He is remembered partly for his poetry—only some of which carries his anarchist convictions of the need for regeneration and rebirth. In a sonnet sequence “Holy of Holies: Confessions of an Anarchist,” he envisages a fiery cloud sweeping across the metropolis:

Slowly it sailed, and came

A sheet of flame,

High o’er that city’s topmost column-peak, —

The Town lay still as Death:

I held my breath:

The blood-red deluge fell. Without a shriek

The town was cleansed of all that made it reek.

Then changed those furial gleams

To mild moon-beams.

And in that city, late those demons’ lair,

Angels went to and fro. ⁶

Aside from any commentary on style or expression, his meaning is clear. Barlas’ vision of society is one of reek and corruption. Only annihilation will bring about a world in which his self-styled “angels” can dwell. It is a standard vision of the need for a clean sweep so that society can rebuild in a more equitable way, and it is invoked as a myth of revolution repeatedly in many of the sensation novels of the period. Significantly, Barlas’ other claim to remembrance is an act of propaganda by deed (or by gesture) in 1891 which speaks to the importance of ideas—even in the manifestation of revolutionary deeds. Conrad was in London for the better part of the year on an enforced recuperation from his Congo venture, and so may have been aware of Barlas’ moment in the spotlight. He voiced his anarchist sympathies and vented his frustrations, not by hurling a bomb at the opera, but by firing a revolver at the building where the Speaker of the House of Commons was. He did not fire at the Speaker, but at the building. When a police constable came to arrest him, Barlas remarked, “I am an Anarchist and intended shooting you, but then I thought it a pity to shoot an honest man. What I have done is to show my contempt for the House of Commons.” ⁷ Possibly it was such dry political “extremism” that made Kropotkin so despair of arousing revolutionary ardor in England that he left its comparative safety (perhaps somewhat stultifying), saying, memorably, “Better a French prison than this grave.” ⁸

In this delicate atmosphere of carefully balanced trusts where anarchists were tolerated and allowed, but still participated within a system they abhorred and sought to undermine, we see the real value of the agent provocateur. Even before the Greenwich bombing, it was a time of police plots, if not actual, then supposed or suspected. Official funds were even channeled into the publication of anarchist journals (how better to survey the intelligence source of a movement?) and toward informant/provocateur figures. Anxiety about political terror in this landscape was such that it contributed shape and context to the popular imagination of a number of novelists, who, responding to the spirit of the times, told their tales of anarchist conspiracies, of new infernal weapons, of social injustices, and political fanaticism in a variety of ways. These fictions were sometimes melodramatic, gothic, earnest, ironic, or indeed comic, each according to their vision of the times and their sense of audience and purpose. In among them, often echoing their particular concerns, and even some of their narrative conventions, Conrad’s novel remains a fascinating artifact, clearly belonging in its context of dynamite and anarchist intrigue, and yet simultaneously a distinctively new political novel that continues to withstand scrutiny as a core text in the Modern canon.

The Greenwich “bombing” in 1894, however, helped to shift the political landscape in England. The English press, which had been largely forgiving of European dissidence (especially Slavic rebellion against Tsarist autocracy), and had espoused the idea of England as a refuge for men of ideas and principled exiles from autocratic cruelties, began to conflate Fenian activities with anarchist, communist, and socialist protest. The political distinctions were increasingly moot for an anxious public. Conrad identifies and ironizes the confusion in Vladimir’s skeptical query of Verloc’s revolutionary identity, but also illuminates the blurring of the edges between the radical groups. ⁹ What was apparent to the general public, however, was the material threat that increasing radicalization was beginning to pose. The apparent mobilization and organization of socialism as a global phenomenon (manifested in the International Congresses of the 1860s–1870s) along with an emergent focus on anarchism, communism, and other dissent and revolutionary prot...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Conrad and the Imaginative Shades
• 3. Popular Accounts of the Greenwich Bombing
• 4. The Dynamite Novel and The Secret Agent
• 5. The Anarchists in the House
• 6. “Verloc”: The Origins of the Text
• 7. Patterns of Revision in The Secret Agent
• 8. The Perfect Detonator
• Backmatter