This chapter provides an overview of the figures and conventions in nineteenth-century literature
that gave rise to what can be glossed as ‘conspiracy fiction’. Networks, invasion and detection
are the tropes to which conspiracy narratives attached themselves, and from which conspiracy
fiction developed into genres that are recognisable today. My discussion of these narrative modes
also emphasises the importance of the print context of popular fiction and the ‘new journalism’
where ideas of enemies within and without became familiar.