The Secret Agent is set in London in 1886 and deals with Mr. Adolf Verloc and his work as a spy against Britain. Verloc is also a businessman who owns a shop which sells pornographic material, contraceptives and bric-a-brac. His friends are a group of anarchists of which Comrade Ossipon, Michaelis, and "The Professor" are the most prominent. The group produces anarchist literature in the form of pamphlets entitled F.P. – The Future of the Proletariat. Although a member of an anarchist cell, Verloc is also secretly employed by the embassy of a foreign country, but Mr. Vladimir, the new First Secretary in the Embassy is not satisfied with Verloc's contribution. In order to redeem himself, Verloc must carry out an operation – the destruction of Greenwich Observatory by a bomb.

Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) was a Polish-British writer regarded as one of the greatest novelists to write in the English language. He wrote stories and novels, many with a nautical setting, that depict trials of the human spirit in the midst of an impassive, inscrutable universe. Though he did not speak English fluently until his twenties, he was a master prose stylist who brought a non-English sensibility into English literature. Conrad is considered an early modernist, though his works still contain elements of 19th-century realism.