Summary
Mr. Verloc has left his house early in the morning to answers a summons at the Russian embassy, where he is employed as a double agent infiltrating anarchist groups. As he navigates through the labyrinthine streets of London to his destination, we learn that his mission in life is to protect society and to preserve his own indolent way of life.
At the Russian embassy, he meets Privy Councillor Wurmt, who expresses his dissatisfaction with Verloc’s work; Verloc has been sending reports over the past twelve months about potential unrest, but Wurmt is more interested in making this potential an apparent fact. He brings Verloc to meet Mr. Vladimir, the sleek and pretentious First Secretary at the embassy. Mr. Vladimir mocks Verloc for his corpulence and reprimands him for his indolence, threatening to cut him off if his work does not produce results. It is revealed that Verloc has been working for the government for eleven years under a previous ambassador, the late Baron Stott-Wartenheim, alerting them of potential plots.
However, Mr. Vladimir expresses his view that England, and the English middle class especially, has been too complacent about the threat of anarchism and social revolution, and that therefore a uniquely sensationalistic act of terror is necessary to rouse them to restrict individual liberties and maintain societal order. He expounds his idea to Verloc, saying that a bombing of the Greenwich Royal Observatory would represent an attack on science, and therefore the heart of bourgeois consciousness. Such a bombing would be especially effective, Mr. Vladimir argues, because it does not seem to be motivated by any conventionally understood ideologies.
Shocked and dazed by this unusual plan, Mr. Verloc returns to his house and has dinner with his family.
Analysis
Mr. Vladimir’s views on terrorism in this chapter constitute one of the novel’s most important and frighteningly direct statements of anarchist ideology – which, irony of ironies, seems to be most thoroughly comprehended by the representative of a highly repressive government intent on restricting individual liberties. Before examining these ideas, it bears keeping in mind that Mr. Vladimir expounds them in the specific circumstance of lecturing and reprimanding the flaccid and ineffective Mr. Verloc; in fact, the scorn and verbal abuse that he heaps upon the latter gives the whole passage a cruelly comic tone, as one finds so frequently in Conrad’s prose, a horrific sincerity moderated (or in a sense exacerbated) by salon sensibility.
Mr. Vladimir is not himself an anarchist in a full sense of the word; he is, in fact, much more of an aristocrat: “Mr. Vladimir developed his idea from on high, with scorn and condescension, displaying ta the same time an amount of ignorance as to the real aims, thoughts, and methods of the revolutionary world which filled the silent Mr Verloc with inward consternation” (22). Unconcerned with the actual amelioration of society so desired by the socialists, he only utilizes their ideology and explosive tactics out of a shared disdain for the bourgeoisie, which stands in the way of the “universal repressive legislation” he wants to see through in England (23).
When we consider his background as someone who mixes with aristocratic and bourgeois society with great capability, we realize that Mr. Vladimir represents an ironic figure par excellence: “You don’t know the middle classes as well as I do” (27), he tells Mr. Verloc, implying that his intimate knowledge of the enemy and bomb target is more important to effective action against them than Mr. Verloc’s familiarity with the anarchists. The bourgeoisie is best destroyed from the inside; in Conrad’s universe, modern Western society faces its gravest threat not from without, but rather from within.
