Genres of Conspiracy in Nineteenth-Century British Writing

In Dan Brown’s Robert Langdon series, the pretext of the narrative action (of detection and pursuit) is the existence of secret societies that have persisted through history along a timeline that connects the twenty-first century literature to the European Renaissance and begins much earlier. To understand the possibility of a novel of this kind, which engages a modern historian-detective to demystify ancient conspiracy, requires an explanation of the scientific, print and political culture of the nineteenth century, whose narrative formations enabled the transmission of stories that articulated infiltration, detection and anxiety.