After surveying England's evolving theories of representative politics and individual and collective secretive practices, Pionke traces the intersection of democracy and secrecy through a series of case histories. Using works by Thomas Carlyle, Wilkie Colins, Charles Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli, John Henry Newman, and others, along with periodicals, histoires, and parliamentary documents of the period, he shows the rhetorical prominence of groups such as the Freemasons, the Thugs, the Carbonari, the Fenians, and the Jesuits in Victorian democratic discourse. --book cover.

Letters to his family relating his mission experience.