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THREE YEARS LATER, in The Secret Agent, something like a new Conrad came into being, an almost invisible narrator of a London recalling the dark agonies of Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend (1865). A generation had greatly altered London. Conrad deeply admired Dickens. On the surface they have little in common, but they dream some of the same metropolitan nightmares. London crime, for Dickens, was violent and sometimes familial. Conrad lived in an age of anarchist outrage against repressive and exploiting regimes.
As with so many political terms, anarchism tended to have a negative aura, as used by its enemies. The Greek anarchos means the absence of authority, which in itself was initially a Roman concept with the meaning, as interpreted by Hannah Arendt, of augmenting the foundations of civil society.