City Secrets: Chance

Abstract

In the opening chapter of The Secret Agent, Conrad introduces us to the Verloc household, at the heart of the empire on which the sun never sets, ‘hidden in the shades of the sordid street seldom touched by the sun, behind the dim shop with its wares of disreputable rubbish’.² The shop’s double front – with rubber stamps and bottles of marking ink acting as a cover for the more disreputable wares, which are themselves a cover for the political business that goes on in the back of the shop – suggests some of the layers of Verloc’s identity as a double agent, as well as the different kinds of secret life – sexual and political – around which the narrative revolves. The opening pages of the novel both assert and conceal, through coded references, the commercial transactions of the Soho shop. First, there is the behaviour of the customers: the mature men, with ‘the collars of their overcoats turned right up to their moustaches’, who ‘dodged in sideways, one shoulder first’; and the younger men, who ‘hung about the window for a time before slipping in suddenly’ and then, ‘disconcerted at having to deal with Mrs Verloc’ (SA, 5), buy over-priced bottles of marking ink they don’t want – ‘retail value sixpence (price in Verloc’s shop one-and- sixpence)’. Then there are the other commodities on sale: ‘nondescript packages in wrappers like patent medicines’ (SA, 3); the mysterious cardboard boxes ‘with apparently nothing inside’ and the ‘carefully closed yellow flimsy envelopes’ (SA, 5) – in all three cases, containers which signal the secrecy of their contents, containers which are a sign of secrecy, signs which are empty for the uninitiated and full of meaning for those who are ‘in the know’.