The Man of the Crowd
Encyclopedia
"The Man of the Crowd" is a short story
written by Edgar Allan Poe
about a nameless narrator
following a man through a crowded London
, first published in 1840.
, "Ce grand malheur, de ne pouvoir être seul"—a quote taken from The Characters of Man by Jean de la Bruyère
. It translates to Such a great misfortune, not to be able to be alone. This same quote is used in Poe's earliest tale, "Metzengerstein
".
After an unnamed illness, the unnamed narrator sits in an unnamed coffee shop
in London. Fascinated by the crowd outside the window, he considers how isolated people think they are, despite "the very denseness of the company around". He takes time to categorize the different types of people he sees. As evening falls, the narrator focuses on "a decrepit old man
, some sixty-five or seventy years of age," whose face has a peculiar idiosyncrasy
, and whose body "was short in stature, very thin, and apparently very feeble" wearing filthy, ragged clothes of a "beautiful texture". The narrator dashes out of the coffee shop to follow the man from afar. The man leads the narrator through bazaar
s and shops, buying nothing, and into a poorer part of the city, then back into "the heart of the mighty London". This chase lasts through the evening and into the next day. Finally, exhausted, the narrator stands in front of the man, who still does not notice him. The narrator concludes the man is "the type and genius of deep crime" due to his inscrutability and inability to leave the crowds of London.
cal obsession with the man stems from "the absolute idiosyncrasy of [the man's] expression". He is the only person walking down the street the narrator can't categorize. Why the narrator is so haunted by him is not entirely clear, though it is implied that the two men are two sides of the same person, with the old man representing a secret side of the narrator, though the narrator is unable to see this. The old man may be wandering through the crowd in search of a lost friend or to escape the memory of a crime. The possible evil nature of the man is implied by the dagger
that is possibly seen under his cloak - whatever crime he has committed condemns him to wander. This lack of disclosure has been compared to similar vague motivations in "The Cask of Amontillado
". Poe purposely presents the story as a sort of mystification, inviting readers to surmise the old man's secret themselves.
At the beginning of the tale, the narrator surveys and categorizes the people around him in a similar way as Walt Whitman
in "Song of Myself
". Poe's narrator, however, lacks Whitman's celebratory spirit. While viewing these people, the narrator is able to ascertain a great deal of information about them based on their appearance and by noting small details. For example, he notices that a man's ear sticks out a small amount, indicating he must be a clerk who stores his pen behind his ear. Poe would later incorporate this ability to observe small details in his character C. Auguste Dupin. All of this is a virtuoso performance of the representation of social typicality; it owes something to Dickens’s Sketches by Boz, but there is also something of the moralizing medieval Vice in its parade of degenerates, of depraved women and of social outcasts. In one sense this is a sideshow, a digression from the main line of the narrative, which is concerned with the crowd only as an abstract force; in another, however, it brings to the fore the sense that it is only through these social cliché’s that the crowd can be made humanly understandable.
In describing the man, the narrator “describes a set of contradictory characteristics: ‘there arose confusedly and paradoxically within my mind, the 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’. The man’s dress, too, is contradictory: his linen is dirty but ‘of beautiful texture’, and through a tear in his cloak the narrator glimpses a diamond and a dagger.”
“The Man of the Crowd” stands as a transitional work between the haunting Gothic tales of the late thirties and the ratiocinative fiction of the early forties, possessing obvious qualities of both.
This story is also the beginnings of Poe's detective stories. Walter Benjamin
writes that "[The Man of the Crowd] is something like an X-ray of a detective story. It does away with all the drapery that a crime represents. Only the armature remains: the pursuer, the crowd, and an unknown man who manages to walk through London in such a way that he always remains in the middle of the crowd". In agreeing with Benjamin, William Brevda contributes that “Poe splits the human psyche into pursuer and pursued, self and other, ego and id, “detective” and criminal, past and future…” “Poe also echoes sophocles in his theme of the guilty knowledge that humans run from and the simultaneously toward. In the nightmare Poe dreams for us, the ordinary person, the man in the streetm is at heart a criminal".
The setting of London, one of the few specific details revealed in the tale, is important. By 1840, London was the largest city in the world with a population of 750,000. Poe would have known London from the time he spent there as a boy with his foster family, the Allans, although he may have relied on the writings of Charles Dickens
for details of London's streets. In this story and others, Poe associates modern cities with the growth of impersonal crime.
. The latter was the final issue of that periodical. It was later included in Wiley & Putnam's collection simply titled Tales by Edgar A. Poe.
Short story
A short story is a work of fiction that is usually written in prose, often in narrative format. This format tends to be more pointed than longer works of fiction, such as novellas and novels. Short story definitions based on length differ somewhat, even among professional writers, in part because...
written by Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective...
about a nameless narrator
Narrator
A narrator is, within any story , the fictional or non-fictional, personal or impersonal entity who tells the story to the audience. When the narrator is also a character within the story, he or she is sometimes known as the viewpoint character. The narrator is one of three entities responsible for...
following a man through a crowded London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
, first published in 1840.
Plot summary
The story is introduced with the epigraphEpigraph (literature)
In literature, an epigraph is a phrase, quotation, or poem that is set at the beginning of a document or component. The epigraph may serve as a preface, as a summary, as a counter-example, or to link the work to a wider literary canon, either to invite comparison or to enlist a conventional...
, "Ce grand malheur, de ne pouvoir être seul"—a quote taken from The Characters of Man by Jean de la Bruyère
Jean de La Bruyère
Jean de La Bruyère was a French essayist and moralist.-Ancestry:He was born in Paris, not, as was once thought, at Dourdan in 1645...
. It translates to Such a great misfortune, not to be able to be alone. This same quote is used in Poe's earliest tale, "Metzengerstein
Metzengerstein
"Metzengerstein", also called "Metzengerstein: A Tale In Imitation of the German", was the first short story by American writer and poet Edgar Allan Poe to see print. It was first published in the pages of Philadelphia's Saturday Courier magazine, in 1832...
".
After an unnamed illness, the unnamed narrator sits in an unnamed coffee shop
Coffeehouse
A coffeehouse or coffee shop is an establishment which primarily serves prepared coffee or other hot beverages. It shares some of the characteristics of a bar, and some of the characteristics of a restaurant, but it is different from a cafeteria. As the name suggests, coffeehouses focus on...
in London. Fascinated by the crowd outside the window, he considers how isolated people think they are, despite "the very denseness of the company around". He takes time to categorize the different types of people he sees. As evening falls, the narrator focuses on "a decrepit old man
Old age
Old age consists of ages nearing or surpassing the average life span of human beings, and thus the end of the human life cycle...
, some sixty-five or seventy years of age," whose face has a peculiar idiosyncrasy
Idiosyncrasy
An idiosyncrasy is an unusual feature of a person . The term is often used to express eccentricity or peculiarity. A synonym may be .-Etymology:...
, and whose body "was short in stature, very thin, and apparently very feeble" wearing filthy, ragged clothes of a "beautiful texture". The narrator dashes out of the coffee shop to follow the man from afar. The man leads the narrator through bazaar
Bazaar
A bazaar , Cypriot Greek: pantopoula) is a permanent merchandising area, marketplace, or street of shops where goods and services are exchanged or sold. The term is sometimes also used to refer to the "network of merchants, bankers and craftsmen" who work that area...
s and shops, buying nothing, and into a poorer part of the city, then back into "the heart of the mighty London". This chase lasts through the evening and into the next day. Finally, exhausted, the narrator stands in front of the man, who still does not notice him. The narrator concludes the man is "the type and genius of deep crime" due to his inscrutability and inability to leave the crowds of London.
Analysis
According to the text of the tale, the reason for the narrator's monomaniaMonomania
In 19th century psychiatry, monomania is a single pathological preoccupation in an otherwise sound mind. Emotional monomania is that in which the patient is obsessed with only one emotion or several related to it; intellectual monomania is that which is related to only one kind of delirious idea...
cal obsession with the man stems from "the absolute idiosyncrasy of [the man's] expression". He is the only person walking down the street the narrator can't categorize. Why the narrator is so haunted by him is not entirely clear, though it is implied that the two men are two sides of the same person, with the old man representing a secret side of the narrator, though the narrator is unable to see this. The old man may be wandering through the crowd in search of a lost friend or to escape the memory of a crime. The possible evil nature of the man is implied by the dagger
Dagger
A dagger is a fighting knife with a sharp point designed or capable of being used as a thrusting or stabbing weapon. The design dates to human prehistory, and daggers have been used throughout human experience to the modern day in close combat confrontations...
that is possibly seen under his cloak - whatever crime he has committed condemns him to wander. This lack of disclosure has been compared to similar vague motivations in "The Cask of Amontillado
The Cask of Amontillado
"The Cask of Amontillado" is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, first published in the November 1846 issue of Godey's Lady's Book....
". Poe purposely presents the story as a sort of mystification, inviting readers to surmise the old man's secret themselves.
At the beginning of the tale, the narrator surveys and categorizes the people around him in a similar way as Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman
Walter "Walt" Whitman was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse...
in "Song of Myself
Song of Myself
"Song of Myself" is a poem by Walt Whitman that is included in his work Leaves of Grass. It has been credited as “representing the core of Whitman’s poetic vision.”-Publication history:...
". Poe's narrator, however, lacks Whitman's celebratory spirit. While viewing these people, the narrator is able to ascertain a great deal of information about them based on their appearance and by noting small details. For example, he notices that a man's ear sticks out a small amount, indicating he must be a clerk who stores his pen behind his ear. Poe would later incorporate this ability to observe small details in his character C. Auguste Dupin. All of this is a virtuoso performance of the representation of social typicality; it owes something to Dickens’s Sketches by Boz, but there is also something of the moralizing medieval Vice in its parade of degenerates, of depraved women and of social outcasts. In one sense this is a sideshow, a digression from the main line of the narrative, which is concerned with the crowd only as an abstract force; in another, however, it brings to the fore the sense that it is only through these social cliché’s that the crowd can be made humanly understandable.
In describing the man, the narrator “describes a set of contradictory characteristics: ‘there arose confusedly and paradoxically within my mind, the 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’. The man’s dress, too, is contradictory: his linen is dirty but ‘of beautiful texture’, and through a tear in his cloak the narrator glimpses a diamond and a dagger.”
“The Man of the Crowd” stands as a transitional work between the haunting Gothic tales of the late thirties and the ratiocinative fiction of the early forties, possessing obvious qualities of both.
This story is also the beginnings of Poe's detective stories. Walter Benjamin
Walter Benjamin
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German-Jewish intellectual, who functioned variously as a literary critic, philosopher, sociologist, translator, radio broadcaster and essayist...
writes that "[The Man of the Crowd] is something like an X-ray of a detective story. It does away with all the drapery that a crime represents. Only the armature remains: the pursuer, the crowd, and an unknown man who manages to walk through London in such a way that he always remains in the middle of the crowd". In agreeing with Benjamin, William Brevda contributes that “Poe splits the human psyche into pursuer and pursued, self and other, ego and id, “detective” and criminal, past and future…” “Poe also echoes sophocles in his theme of the guilty knowledge that humans run from and the simultaneously toward. In the nightmare Poe dreams for us, the ordinary person, the man in the streetm is at heart a criminal".
The setting of London, one of the few specific details revealed in the tale, is important. By 1840, London was the largest city in the world with a population of 750,000. Poe would have known London from the time he spent there as a boy with his foster family, the Allans, although he may have relied on the writings of Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens
Charles John Huffam Dickens was an English novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian period. Dickens enjoyed a wider popularity and fame than had any previous author during his lifetime, and he remains popular, having been responsible for some of English literature's most iconic...
for details of London's streets. In this story and others, Poe associates modern cities with the growth of impersonal crime.
Publication history
The story was first published simultaneously in the December 1840 issues of Atkinson's Casket and Burton's Gentleman's MagazineBurton's Gentleman's Magazine
Burton's Gentleman's Magazine or, more simply, Burton's Magazine, was a literary publication published in Philadelphia in 1837-1841. Its founder was William Evans Burton, an English-born immigrant to the United States who also managed a theatre and was a minor actor.-Overview:The magazine included...
. The latter was the final issue of that periodical. It was later included in Wiley & Putnam's collection simply titled Tales by Edgar A. Poe.