The working classes colonial subjects European nationalists and Roman Catholicsthese groups generated intense anxiety for Victorian Englands elite public which often responded by accusing them of being dangerous conspirators. Bringing together a wide range of literary and historical evidence Albert D. Pionke argues that the pejorative meanings attached to such opportunistic accusations of conspiracy were undermined by the many valorized versions of secrecy in Victorian society. After surveying Englands 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 Collins Charles Dickens Benjamin Disraeli John Henry Newman and others along with periodicals histories 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. By highlighting the centrality of representations of conspiracy in every case Plots of Opportunity shows for the first time the markedly similar strategies of repression resistance and concealment used by competing agents in the democracy debate.