It is London in 1886, Mr Verloc owns a bookstore but finds it hard to earn enough to keep his extended family. The London underworld is populated with anarchists, communists and other extremists all suspicious of each other. Mr Verloc pretends to be a spy and is paid by each group to spy on the others. All is going well for Mr Verloc until he is forced to play a key role in a terrorist attack.
Conrad got the idea for the the central incident from an actual event in 1894 when anarchist terrorists attempted to blow up the Greenwich Observatory in London.
