The Secret Agent
A Simple Tale
by Joseph Conrad 1857–1924
The book, and the century it came out of.
A shopkeeper in Soho sells stationery, pornography and information, and takes his orders from an embassy that wants an outrage shocking enough to frighten England into repression. Conrad based the plot on a real attempt to blow up the Greenwich Observatory and wrote it in his third language, with a coldness he never matched elsewhere. Nothing in it is simple except the title. Illustrated with 49 full-page plates — paintings by Plaat and Springer among them.
Mr Verloc, going out in the morning, left his shop nominally in charge of his brother-in-law.
The Secret Agent, by Joseph Conrad, complete and unabridged. Spelling and punctuation follow present-day American usage; the sentences, the paragraphs and the voice are the author’s, word for word.
It was written in another era and may carry attitudes a reader today will find dated. They are kept for the sake of the work and do not reflect the views of this house.
- Series
- Mystery & Crime
- Format
- Ebook
- Extent
- about 280 pages
- Reading time
- about 6 hours
- Illustrations
- Full-page plates, credited
- Text
- Complete, unabridged
- Language
- en
- This edition
- 2026
- ISBN
- 9785501726314
49 paintings are bound into this edition
Six of them are shown here, taken from the volume itself. Each is reproduced full page and named with its painter and year.
London, 1907 — from a bombing that made no sense
In 1894 a French anarchist blew himself up in Greenwich Park, apparently on his way to the Observatory. Nobody could explain what he had intended. Conrad took that pointlessness as his subject and built a novel around it in which the plot is instigated, in effect, by a foreign embassy that wants England frightened into repression.
It was written in a decade of real bombings and assassinations across Europe, and it is the coldest thing Conrad wrote: everyone in it is a fool, an informer or a functionary, and the one person destroyed is the only one who never had a political thought.
This book in culture: 4 versions
Most people meet a book like this one on a screen first. Here is what was made of it — and none of these is the book.
The whole afterlife of The Secret Agent — screen, stage and beyond →
- 1937 Sabotage Alfred Hitchcock
- 1992 The Secret Agent TV series
- 1996 The Secret Agent Christopher Hampton
- — The Secret Agent Charles McDougall miniseries
A page from this edition
Not a mock-up: this page is taken from the finished volume. The ornament above the chapter belongs to its shelf and to no other, the opening letter is set as a drop capital, and the plate below carries the name of the painter and the year.
Both photographed from the finished volume.
The Secret Agent, first published 1907, issued in this edition by Aeneas Press in 2026 on the Mystery & Crime shelf. Newly set, with the ornament of its series above each chapter and a drop capital on the opening page. Illustrated with full-page plates, each named with its painter.
Published as an ebook and not issued in print by this house; it carries one ISBN, 9785501726314, and is supplied worldwide. This edition — its setting, its ornament, its cover art, and the selection and attribution of its plates — © 2026 Aeneas Press.
Questions readers ask
- Is this the whole of The Secret Agent?
- Yes — complete and unabridged. Nothing is cut, condensed or paraphrased. This is the book, not a summary of it.
- What exactly did you change?
- The spelling and the punctuation follow present-day American usage. Joseph Conrad's sentences are untouched — same words, same order, same rhythm.
- Are the pictures really in the book?
- Yes. The edition carries full-page plates bound into the text, each one named with its painter and the year it was made. Six of them are shown on this page.
- How long is it?
- About 280 pages, which is roughly about 6 hours of reading.
- What do I actually get?
- An illustrated ebook with its own ISBN, sold worldwide. One file, yours to keep, readable on any device.
