Popular Accounts of the Greenwich Bombing and Conrad's The Secret Agent

Some of the contemporary sources of Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent are here examined, adding to the work of Norman Sherry with analyses of newspaper accounts and various anarchist accounts, including a more extensive look at an alternative novel version of the bombing which predates Conrad's, A Girl Among the Anarchists by Isabel Meredith — a pseudonym for Helen and Olive Rossetti. The Rosetti/Meredith novel suggests a likely point of access to contemporary anarchist versions of the incident. More importantly, carefully delineated and documented here is the broader historical mind-set out of which the novel emerged.