The Colonial London: A Postcolonial Critique of Joseph Conrad’s ‘The Secret Agent’ Anonymous College

“... on or about December 1910, human character changed” asserts Virginia Woolf in her landmark essay Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown. Along with this metamorphosis in human character, a parallel change was occurring, a change in the Empire. A couple of years prior to Woolf’s famous declaration upon the context of modernity appeared a critique of the supposed superiority of the European imperiality by the name of The Secret Agent (1907). With the age of literary modernism marking its arrival, the tones of literature were shifting, typically seeking refuge under the context of a moral decline and an urge to “make it new.” This moral decline, often argued by Chinua Achebe as being inscribed over colonised spaces (as can be observed in The Heart of Darkness [1899]), found a new geographical location in The Secret Agent, right at the heart of the Empire, London.

It is no secret that Conrad’s colonial spaces act as exemplary illustrations of colonised lands from a postcolonial perspective. In Conrad’s Africa, the surrounding presents an omnipresent danger, and the native individual, if he has been gifted with the ability to speak, has not an iota of agency. The geography of the native land seems to be the primary motivator of every...