First published in December 1840, Poe’s story “The Man of the Crowd” encapsulates the mystery and fear that attended the rapid development of cities and the influx of “strangers.” Though set in London, where Poe had lived as a child and whose density and growth exceeded those of American cities in 1840, the tale reflects the future shock of mid-nineteenth-century urban experience generally. For the first third of the story, the narrator, recuperating from an unnamed illness, sits alone at the “large bow-window” of a coffee house, watching the parade of pedestrians at the workday’s end. A shrewd taxonomist of urban types, he identifies the professions and social stations of passersby. The first group includes “noblemen, merchants, attorneys, tradesmen, stock-jobbers . . . men of leisure and men actively engaged in affairs of their own.” He proceeds down the social ladder, calling attention to visible clues:
“The tribe of clerks was an obvious one and here I discerned two remarkable divisions. There were the junior clerks of flash houses [pubs that engaged in various illicit activities]— young gentlemen with tight coats, bright boots, well-oiled hair, and supercilious lips. Setting aside a certain dapperness of carriage, which may be termed deskism for want of a better word, the manner of these persons seemed to me an exact facsimile of what had been the perfection of bon ton about twelve or eighteen months before. They wore the cast-off graces of the gentry;—and this, I believe, involves the best definition of the class.” (T 1:508)
The “upper clerks” are similarly identifiable from appearance, as are “gamblers,” “Jew peddlars,” “sturdy professional street beggars,” “feeble and ghastly invalids,” “modest young girls,” “women of the town,” “drunkards innumerable and indescribable,” and, finally, “pie-men, porters, coal-heavers, sweeps; organ-grinders, monkey-exhibiters and ballad mongers, those who vended with those who sang; ragged artizans and exhausted laborers of every description, and still all full of a noisy and inordinate vivacity which jarred discordantly upon the ear, and gave an aching sensation to the eye” (T 1:509–10). This extraordinary inventory suggests that the city and its inhabitants, however mysterious to the uninitiated, are decipherable, like a cryptographer’s alphabet of arbitrarily selected symbols.
But the narrator eventually spies an enigmatic old man, and feeling “singularly aroused, startled, fascinated,” he pursues this “man of the crowd” over the course of an entire night. The list of emotions and dispositions the man suggests to the narrator (“ideas of vast mental power, of caution, of penuriousness, of avarice, of coolness, of malice, of blood-thirstiness, of triumph, of merriment, of excessive terror, of intense—of supreme despair”) is so varied, even contradictory, that we might see the man as embodying the crowd, somehow reflecting its very diversity, and for that reason escaping the narrator’s classification. Indeed, the defining feature of the man’s movements throughout the night is his effort to remain within a crowd, as if he could exist nowhere else. Literally, the man of the crowd might simply be trying to avoid a solitary encounter with the narrator— another “man of the crowd”—if he realizes he is being followed, but even that precautionary maneuver suggests that the densely populated city is the water he swims in, that he is perfectly acculturated to his environment. In fact, he becomes less at ease whenever the crowd thins. Entering a street “not quite so much thronged as the main one he had quitted,” he “walked more slowly and with less object than before—more hesitatingly. He crossed and re-crossed the way repeatedly without apparent aim” (T 1:512). When a bazaar closes for the night and he jostles a shopkeeper closing his shutter, he shudders (Poe can’t resist the pun), perhaps in fear of having nowhere to go. But then “he hurried into the street, looked anxiously around him for an instant, and then ran with incredible swiftness” before melting into a crowded thoroughfare. If the man is agitated when not in the crowd, he evinces no joy or contentment upon reuniting with the urban throng; he never smiles, and he speaks to no one.
London, the city that Philadelphia and New York in the 1840s may soon become, never sleeps, but the all-nighter it offers “the crowd” isn’t much fun. The pursuit of a crowd through the small hours leads the man, and his pursuer, to the slums, described in terms similar to those of the Philadelphia Sanitary Commission quoted earlier. Here “every thing wore the worst impress of the most deplorable poverty, and of the most desperate crime. By the dim light of an accidental lamp, tall, antique, worm-eaten, wooden tenements were seen tottering to their fall” (T 1:514). As night turns to day, the narrator can interpret the man only as “the type and genius of deep crime,” although, aside from his possession of a dagger, he exhibits no criminal behavior. His unreadability, ultimately the unreadability of the urban crowd itself, is what terrifies the narrator, who opens the tale with the epigraph “Ce grand Malheur, de ne pouvoir etre seul” and ends it speculating that “it is but one of the great mercies of God that ‘er lasst sich nicht lesen.’” The French and German, at least, are translatable—“The great evil, not to be able to be alone,” and “it does not permit itself to be read”—but, to the narrator, the untranslatable man of the crowd is not only a mystery but also a horror. Poe seems to have recognized that there was something about the modern city that could not be explicated. Treasure maps could be decoded and cryptographs could be solved, but this coded text remained unreadable. In what could reasonably be called Poe’s first detective story, then, the detective fails: if he’s looking for a crime, he doesn’t find one, and if he is trying to decode the appearance of the man of the crowd, he concludes by admitting, gratefully, that it can’t be done.
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