Exiled anarchists and political assassinations; Conrad’s The Secret Agent

September 23, 2018 Comments Off

In the next in our special series of Literary Footprints 2018 blog posts, Oonagh Gay dips into the murky world of political intrigue in Victorian London. You can find out more on Oonagh’s walk Conrad’s The Secret Agent: Anarchism in Fitzrovia, dates and booking details on Oonagh’s walks page.

Victorian Britain was a nation which utterly refused to kow-tow to despotic foreign governments. This made it one of the few countries in Europe where you couldn’t be extradited for political crimes. Joseph Conrad used this backdrop to paint a portrait of the community of exiled anarchists subsisting in Soho and Fitzrovia in his London novel The Secret Agent, published in 1907.

Adolf Verloc, the double agent, works in a bookshop which sells pornography ‘out the back’ and his English wife turns a blind eye to the foreigners who hatch plots in her sitting room, until her beloved brother is used in one of her husband’s plots, with devastating effect.

Conrad based the novel on a real-life event in Greenwich in 1894, where a French anarchist, Martial Bourdin, blew himself up in a misguided attempt to blow up the Observatory. In Bourdin’s pocket was a membership card for the main anarchist centre in London, the Autonomie Club, then based at 6 Windmill Street, and the Metropolitan Police, led by inspector Melville immediately raided the club in search of collaborators.

Meanwhile the assassination of the Russian Tsar in 1881 prompted a gradual Home Office rethink on the question of harbouring political exiles, which reached a tipping point with the Sydney Street siege of 1910, where Latvian anarchists held off the Met for several days using automatic machine guns – an embarrassment for the then Home Secretary, Winston Churchill.

This walk gives you an opportunity to visit the site of the club and other anarchists centres in Fitzrovia, as well as discussing the real life anarchists, such as the Italian exile Enrico Malatesta, who longed to create an anarchist new world, and Louise Michel, expelled from France after the Paris commune who set up a school near Fitzroy Square.