The un-named English narrator, a collector of antiques, is visited, on the recommendation of a friend in Paris, by Mr X – a fellow collector, an anarchist, and a bon viveur. Mr X explains the complicity between anarchists and certain elements of the classes they wish to overthrow. He describes the Hermione Street anarchist headquarters in London set up in the house of a young middle-class woman supporter. The group take over the ground floor restaurant, establish a business exporting tinned soup on the top floor, and set up a printing press in the basement. But despite good organisation, all the actions planned there are foiled by the police. Mr X arrives from Paris to investigate the possibility of there being an informer in the group. He interviews the Lady Amateur patroness of the group, and meets her admirer Severin. A plan emerges to blow up the building next door which houses a government department. Mr X is sure that the police will raid the Hermione Street headquarters, so he organises a fake raid by sham police, hoping to flush out the informer. When the bogus raid takes place the group are ‘arrested’ in the cellar, and then are joined by the Lady Amateur and her lover. Severin gives himself away to the fake inspector by trying to protect her, and when his mistake is exposed he takes poison and dies. Mr X then takes the Lady Amateur home.
Author
Joseph Conrad (born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski ) was a Polish-born English novelist who today is most famous for Heart of Darkness, his fictionalized account of Colonial Africa. Conrad left his native Poland in his middle teens to avoid conscription into the Russian Army. He joined the French Merchant Marine and briefly employed himself as a wartime gunrunner. He then began to work aboard British ships, learning English from his shipmates. He was made a Master Mariner, and served more than sixteen years before an event inspired him to try his hand at writing. He was hired to take a steamship into Africa, and according to Conrad, the experience of seeing firsthand the horrors of colonial rule left him a changed man. Joseph Conrad settled in England in 1894, the year before he published his first novel. He was deeply interested in a small number of writers both in French and English whose work he studied carefully. This was useful when, because a need to come to terms with his experience, lead him to write Heart of Darkness, in 1899, which was followed by other fictionalized explorations of his life. He has been lauded as one of the most powerful, insightful, and disturbing novelists in the English canon despite coming to English later in life, which allowed him to combine it with the sensibilities of French, Russian, and Polish literature.
