Delarivier Manley's Secret Manners and Memoirs of Several Persons of Quality, of Both Sexes. From the New Atalantis, an Island in the Mediterranean (1709), more commonly known as The New Atalantis, is arguably the most notorious exposé of corruption in high places to be published during the early decades of the eighteenth century. The narrative opens with a meeting between two allegorical figures: Virtue and her daughter Astrea, the personification of justice who, according to classical mythology, lived on earth during the Golden Age but withdrew to the sky when the mortals around her grew wicked and corrupt. In The New Atalantis Astrea returns to earth ‘to see if Humankind were still as defective, as when she in Disgust forsook it’, and lands on ‘an Island, named Atalantis, situated in the Mediterranean Sea’ – a thinly disguised representation of Britain. Accompanied by Virtue, Astrea resolves to ‘go to the Courts, where Justice is profess'd, to view the Magistrate, who presumes to hold the Scales in my Name, to see how remote their profession is from their Practice; thence to the Courts and Cabinets of Princes, to mark their Cabal and disingenuity; to the Assemblies and Alcoves of the Young and Fair to discover their Disorders and the height of their Temptations’. Astrea's intention to peer into the secret spaces (cabinets and alcoves) of powerful figures in order to reveal the discrepancy between public profession and private practice effectively promises readers a secret history of contemporary Britain.

The connections between The New Atalantis and earlier secret histories are affirmed by a third allegorical figure – Intelligence – who acts as a guide to Astrea and Virtue on their tour of the vices of Atalantis. As ‘first Lady of the Bedchamber to the Princess Fame’, Intelligence is Manley's reworking of the popular motif of the spy narrator who reveals secrets from inside a Court setting.