Conrad's Popular Fictions: Secret Histories and Sensational Novels

Andrew Glazzard is a Senior Research Fellow and Director of the National Security and Resilience Studies research group at the Royal United Services Institute, where, as he says on LinkedIn, his team "tries to work out what can really mess things up for countries and societies, and what we can do to prepare or respond." Besides their correspondence and Ford's own personal documents, Glazzard also reckons with Conrad's assumed private library when making references to contemporary popular fiction. [...]he takes into account the presumed readings of the entire Conrad family with such precision and elaborateness that one could reconstruct the family's bookshelf and subscription list. No doubt, Conrad was thoroughly interested in this figure, partly due to his personal connection with The Torch, "the most noted British anarchist newspaper of this period" (Donghaile 145). Besides the five subtypes, the figure of the millionaire, who represented the "true anarchist" for Conrad, also deserves an honorable mention at the end of chapter four, even though it never appears in any of Conrad's works, because, as the writer himself put it, he did not have the "necessary talent" for the task (143). [...]he uses it in reference to "any work or author that we can confidently identify as achieving a high degree of commercial success relative to the average," and secondly, the word is employed as shorthand for popular genre (22-23). [...]if one really has to name a popular novel by Conrad, it is probably Chance or The Secret Agent.