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Specializare:Română-Engleză
Brata Bianca Gloria
Anul 3, Sem. I
American Literature

The Man of the Crowd

Edgar Allen Poe

Genre

The Man of the Crowd" is a gothic short story about a nameless narrator following a man
through a crowded London. It was first published in 1840.

Biography

Edgar Allan Poe was an American writer, poet, critic and editor best known for evocative
short stories and poems that captured the imagination and interest of readers around the world.
His imaginative storytelling and tales of mystery and horror gave birth to the modern detective
story.

Early Life and Family

Poe was born on January 19, 1809, in Boston, Massachusetts.

Poe never really knew his parents — Elizabeth Arnold Poe, a British actress, and David
Poe, Jr., an actor who was born in Baltimore. His father left the family early in Poe's life, and his
mother passed away from tuberculosis when he was only three.
Separated from his brother William and sister Rosalie, Poe went to live with John and
Frances Allan, a successful tobacco merchant and his wife, in Richmond, Virginia. Edgar and
Frances seemed to form a bond, but he had a more difficult relationship with John Allan.

By the age of 13, Poe was a prolific poet, but his literary talents were discouraged by his
headmaster and John Allan, who preferred that Poe follow him in the family business. Preferring
poetry over profits, Poe reportedly wrote poems on the back of some of Allan's business papers.
Money was also an issue between Poe and John Allan. Poe went to the University of
Virginia in 1826, where he excelled in his classes. However, he didn't receive enough funds from
Allan to cover all of his costs. Poe turned to gambling to cover the difference, but ended up in
debt. He returned home only to face another personal setback — his neighbor and fiancée Sarah
Elmira Royster had become engaged to someone else. Heartbroken and frustrated, Poe moved to
Boston.

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Facultatea de Litere din Oradea
Specializare:Română-Engleză
Brata Bianca Gloria
Anul 3, Sem. I
American Literature

In 1827, around the time he published his first book, Poe joined the U.S. Army. Two
years later, he learned that Frances Allan was dying of tuberculosis, but by the time he returned
to Richmond she had already passed away.
While in Virginia, Poe and Allan briefly made peace with each other, and Allan helped
Poe get an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point. Poe excelled at his
studies at West Point, but he was kicked out after a year for his poor handling of his duties.

During his time at West Point, Poe had fought with his foster father, who had remarried
without telling him. Some have speculated that Poe intentionally sought to be expelled to spite
Allan, who eventually cut ties with Poe.

After leaving West Point, Poe published his third book and focused on writing full-time.
He traveled around in search of opportunity, living in New York City, Baltimore, Philadelphia
and Richmond. In 1834, John Allan died, leaving Poe out of his will, but providing for an
illegitimate child Allan had never met. Poe, who continued to struggle living in poverty, got a
break when one of his short stories won a contest in the Baltimore Saturday Visiter. He began to
publish more short stories and in 1835 landed an editorial position with the Southern Literary
Messenger in Richmond.

Poe developed a reputation as a cut-throat critic, writing vicious reviews of his

contemporaries. His scathing critiques earned him the nickname the "Tomahawk Man."

His tenure at the magazine proved short. Poe's aggressive-reviewing style and sometimes
combative personality strained his relationship with the publication, and he left the magazine in
1837. His problems with alcohol also played a role in his departure, according to some reports.

Poe went on to brief stints at Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, Graham's Magazine, The
Broadway Journal, and he also sold his work to Alexander’s Weekly Messenger, among other
journals.
In 1844, Poe moved to New York City. There, he published a news story in The New
York Sun about a balloon trip across the Atlantic Ocean that he later revealed to be a hoax. His
stunt grabbed attention, but it was his publication of "The Raven," in 1845, which made Poe a
literary sensation. Despite his success and popularity as a writer, Poe continued to struggle
financially and he advocated for higher wages for writers and an international copyright law.

From 1831 to 1835, Poe lived in Baltimore, where his father was born, with his aunt Maria
Clemm and her daughter, his cousin Virginia. He began to devote his attention to Virginia, who
became his literary inspiration as well as his love interest. The couple married in 1836 when she
was only 13 years old. In 1847, at the age of 24 — the same age when Poe’s mother and brother

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Facultatea de Litere din Oradea
Specializare:Română-Engleză
Brata Bianca Gloria
Anul 3, Sem. I
American Literature

also died — Virginia passed away from tuberculosis. Poe was overcome by grief following her
death, and although he continued to work, he suffered from poor health and struggled financially
until his death in 1849.

Death
Poe died on October 7, 1849. His final days remain somewhat of a mystery. Poe left Richmond
on September 27, 1849, and was supposedly on his way to Philadelphia. On October 3, he was
found in Baltimore in great distress. Poe was taken to Washington College Hospital, where he
died four days later. His last words were "Lord, help my poor soul." At the time, it was said that
Poe died of "congestion of the brain." But his actual cause of death has been the subject of
endless speculation.

Sources, Influences, historical events, connection to other works

The story might be inspired by Poe’s past experiences. The Man of the Crowd has
received relatively little criticism . Patrick Quinn(Poe critic) which autobiographical qualities in
the tale, has called Poe’s most ingenious treatement of the theme of the double, in which the
narrator fails to recognize in the man of the crowd the image of his own future self. Another
critic considers this story strikingly modern in its non-moralistic exploration of urban isolation
and its note of “realism”. The sory involves a mystery that is not solved , having a detective
attitude.

Poe begins The Man of the Crowd with a quote from Jean de Lat Bruyère, “Ce grand Malheur,
de ne pouvoir etre seul,” which translates to “The misery of being unable to be alone.” This idea
relates to the old man who the narrator follows for the night, although the reader is unaware of
this until the end of the story. The quote that we find more relatable to the old man for most of
the story is the German quote, “er lasst sich nicht lesen” which translates to, “it does not permit
itself to be read.” Throughout the story, the narrator stalks the old man, who seemingly has no
aim, and wanders throughout London with no purpose.

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Facultatea de Litere din Oradea
Specializare:Română-Engleză
Brata Bianca Gloria
Anul 3, Sem. I
American Literature

Intertextuality and interlinguistics characterize the unreadability of the Man of the Crowd
insofar as he is compared to a German book. These two phenomena are among the elements that,
according to many theorists, open a given text to an external network of referents and meanings
and make literature inherently antithetical to monolithic or unilateral interpretations. The
intertextual enigmas opened up in the introductory paragraph, however, suggest a kind of
deciphering essential depravity and criminality through acts of self-reflexive detection. These
enigmas articulate an intersection and juxtaposition of references which double the practices of
writing and reading, of criminal originality, of critical revenge and authorial invisibility. A book
of mysteries, or a book of crimes, “does not permit itself to be read”.
Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” illustrates the paranoia afflicting London’s urban
populations in a period of mass immigration and urbanization.
When readers juxtapose the evolutionary history of psychopathy from the nineteenth
century to today, alongside the political and social conditions of the nineteenth-century crowd,
the paranoia and fear embedded in modern city life reveals a breeding ground of mass suspicion
between individuals—beyond the narrator and old man—is a psychopathic crowd structure in
which everyone is “a man of the crowd.” And despite psychology’s rapid evolution in the past
century, the psychopath in our world remains nearly as elusive as in Poe’s.
Because psychopathy did not exist in Poe’s time as a term, disorder, or diagnosis, it risks
a bad application. The psychological phenomenon is not altogether new, however;its conceptual
ancestor is found in nineteenth-century theories on “moral insanity”: the idea that dangerous and
violent people in society demonstrate no signs of illness and therefore present no apparent threat
of danger. This nineteenth-century enigma of mental instability foreshadows the twenty-first-
century understanding of “psychopathy.”

Some of the Poe scholars have noted the affinity between Poe's Man of the Crowd and
the legendary Wandering Jew, but they have stopped short of identifying Poe's character as the
Wandering Jew and have tended to turn away from this connection in the pursuit of an
alternative reading of Poe's tale. In her 1933 study, The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe: A
Psycho‐Analytic Interpretation, Marie Bonaparte interrogates the identity of the Man of the

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Facultatea de Litere din Oradea
Specializare:Română-Engleză
Brata Bianca Gloria
Anul 3, Sem. I
American Literature

Crowd and suggests that the identity of the demonic old man is clearly Poe's stepfather, John
Allan. As she explicates this psychodrama, Bonaparte contends that Poe's punishment of John
Allan takes its form from the mythic archetype of the condemned eternal wanderer, as found in
such figures as Cain, the Flying Dutchman, the Wild Huntsman, the Waltzmann, and the
Wandering Jew.

Physiognomy was the early stereotyping because observations had to be made about a
group of people to find similarities between physical appearance and personality. It became
popular through the 18th and 19 century, influencing novelists and artists such as Balzac and
Joseph Decreux, and influenced the writer in the way he mused at things and developed his
literary representations. In the context of social and cultural millennium, the author presented the
irony of his own culture, a social world based on increased fragmentation, class division, and
human isolation.

Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” is on one level about the mystery of human
existence in a horrifying urban environment; on another, it is a tale about the unreliability of its
narrator, who is unaware that his own illness colors his perceptions.

Setting

The Man of the Crowd is Poe's short story that takes place in an unnamed coffee shop and the
streets of London. As the narrator sits, he is fascinated by the crowd outside the window and
wonders how isolated people think they are even though there is a "very denseness of the
company around." The city is mostly only described at night, and we see almost nothing of the
daylight hours. The audience, therefore, is left with a dark and gloomy image of the city. By
providing this sole nighttime portrait of the city through the narrator, Poe automatically creates a
depressing outlook on city life that pervades the story and provides the backdrop for the entire
commentary.

Plot

Characters

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Facultatea de Litere din Oradea
Specializare:Română-Engleză
Brata Bianca Gloria
Anul 3, Sem. I
American Literature

In this short poem we may say that we deal with complex characters, the narrator being
the main character, of inquisitive nature, and the old man, which is said to be around 65 years
old, and he catches the eye of the narrator because of the peculiar expression on his face.

Conflict

The story has an internal focalization: "As I endeavored, during the brief minute of my
original survey, to form some analysis of the meaning conveyed, there arose confusedly and
paradoxically within my mind the ideas of vast mental power, of caution, of penuriousness of
avarice, of coldness, of malice, of blood-thirstiness, of triumph, of merriment, of excessive
terror, of intense, of supreme despair." This overwhelming clash of multiple sets of emotions
points to the man's instability as a result of an internal conflict. This internal conflict is subjective
and intense. Such unstable emotions allude to madness, which, in the place of the narrative, ends
in an open-ended resolution. The resolution he realizes than man, like secrets “does not permit
itself to be read.” Also, he makes judgments about the internal aspects of the people he observes
by briefly looking at their external appearance and behavior.

Ending

Poe introduces his story "The Man of the Crowd" with two epigrams in three languages: "Ce
grand malheur, de nepouvoir etre seul" [Such a great misfortune, not to be able to be alone] (1)
and "It was well said of a certain German book that 'er lasst sich nicht lesen--it does not permit
itself to be read". The story that follows is a first-person account of the narrator's effort to pursue
and apprehend a man whose "idiosyncrasy of expression" has caught the narrator's attention
from its place within a crowd of Londoners. In the end, the narrator abandons his efforts to
interpret the man, declaring him to be among those texts whose secrets hold "the hideousness of
mysteries which will not suffer themselves to be revealed". (Epiphany)

The concept of a text resistant to interpretation appears in many of Poe's tales via the trope of an
unreadable text; unreadable because it is either missing or has disappeared, is of mysterious
provenance, or is a cryptogram.

=> unreadability of the Man of the Crowd insofar as he is compared to a German book.

=> These are among the elements that, according to many theorists, open a given text to an
external network of referents and meanings and make literature inherently antithetical to
monolithic or unilateral interpretations.

Point of view

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Specializare:Română-Engleză
Brata Bianca Gloria
Anul 3, Sem. I
American Literature

First person limited, so we have a subjective perspective; the narrator is probably

unreliable (he mentions that he has just recovered from a serious illness and that he is in a
peculiar mental state).

Themes

Theme of the double: in which the narrator fails to recognize in the man of the crowd an
image of his own future self.

Loneliness: The second theme of the story is one of loneliness. The narrator sees this old
man and is unable to group him leaving him alone in the crowd of people. As the narrator
follows the old man he seems to be clinging to groups of people possibly trying to fit in. This is
seen when the theater lets out and the old man follows a group of young people. Spending his
days walking around streets and alley ways the old man is constantly looking for someone or
something to be apart of. He is lonely and the only purpose he has left in life is to find a friend.

Symbolism

In the story "The Man Of the Crowd," one of the biggest pieces of symbolism is the old
man the narrator follows. The old man may not even exist to the narrator, but is actually a
representation of a secret side of the narrator. This may explain why the old man never noticed or
saw the narrator following him. There may even be an evil side to the old man represented by the
dagger under his cloak. The old man may just be wandering the crowd in search of a lost friend
or visiting areas of his past as a criminal.

Dramatic irony

The narrator’s discovery of ambiguity is itself ambiguous; the tale, which begins and
ends with a statement about mystery, turns into one itself. This effect is produced partly by the
use of dramatic irony. There is an obvious irony in the narrator’s calling the old man’s
movement aimless while he is himself engaged in the aimless pursuit of the old man (and while
he remains unaware of his own aimlessness). The two are also parallel in their nearness to death.
In the process, Poe’s texts came to embody the complex ironies of his own cultural situation. In
“The Man of the Crowd,” the old man exists in a context of the many in which depth has become

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Specializare:Română-Engleză
Brata Bianca Gloria
Anul 3, Sem. I
American Literature

seemingly impossible; the narrator functions in a context in which the depth that is perceived
exists, perhaps, only for the narrator himself.

I.

Edgar Allan Poe perceived a strong link between a person's internal being and his
physical appearance. This is expressed through a number of his short stories including The Man
of the Crowd. The most noticeable aspect of The Man of the Crowd is the narrator's use of
physiognomical classification of the crowds below. He identifies the Jewish merchants by their
"hawk eyes" and alcoholics by their "lack-luster eyes" as two examples. The narrator believes he
can read a person's history in a mere glance of a person's face as they pass by. The narrator even
goes beyond physical appearance when he makes a connection that the mind takes an active role
in external characteristics such as clothing and accessories. The narrator identifies upper clerks
by their "pantaloons of black or brown, made to fit comfortable" and aging women by their
"bejeweled” appearance. Stereotyping groups of people like the narrator does is simply
deductive reasoning. The narrator takes previously conceived views of people and uses them to
make assumptions of a passerby. One reason the narrator may have stereotyped the people
below is that it is too difficult to individualize people because of all the complexities
(Lippmann). Even stereotyping people into large groups could not describe the old man that
passed by the narrator's window. Intrigued, the narrator had to follow the old man so that the old
man could be classified.

II.

Poe introduces his story "The Man of the Crowd" with two epigrams in three languages: "Ce
grand malheur, de nepouvoir etre seul" [Such a great misfortune, not to be able to be alone] (1)
and "It was well said of a certain German book that 'er lasst sich nicht lesen--it does not permit
itself to be read". The story that follows is a first-person account of the narrator's effort to pursue
and apprehend a man whose "idiosyncrasy of expression" has caught the narrator's attention
from its place within a crowd of Londoners. In the end, the narrator abandons his efforts to
interpret the man, declaring him to be among those texts whose secrets hold "the hideousness of
mysteries which will not suffer themselves to be revealed".

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Facultatea de Litere din Oradea
Specializare:Română-Engleză
Brata Bianca Gloria
Anul 3, Sem. I
American Literature

The concept of a text resistant to interpretation appears in many of Poe's tales via the trope of an
unreadable text; unreadable because it is either missing or has disappeared, is of mysterious
provenance, or is a cryptogram.

=> unreadability of the Man of the Crowd insofar as he is compared to a German book.

=> These are among the elements that, according to many theorists, open a given text to an
external network of referents and meanings and make literature inherently antithetical to
monolithic or unilateral interpretations.

III.

Surrounded by a city full of people, the narrator is indeed not alone in that sense. “Alone,”
though, may be viewed in another light: to be unique, to stand alone against the chaos and
homogeneity of the crowd. The relationships the narrator has with and the observations he makes
about the people of London give insight regarding the nature of urban relationships generally.
Though the narrator does not in reality have any direct communication with the people in this
story, he observes and reports on each of them, and these observations substitute for his lacking
personal relationships. It is his observations of the city of London itself, of the crowd, and of the
old man that reveal Poe’s distaste for the isolation and loss of individuality that city life fosters.

The city is mostly only described at night, and we see almost nothing of the daylight hours. The
audience, therefore, is left with a dark and gloomy image of the city. By providing this sole
nighttime portrait of the city through the narrator, Poe automatically creates a depressing outlook
on city life that pervades the story and provides the backdrop for the entire commentary.
To reinforce the depressing outlook, Poe has the narrator enumerate the features of the “verge of
the city” in more detail than any other part of London (220). He states that this place “[wears] the
worst impress of the most deplorable poverty, and of the most desperate crime” (220). The
poverty and crime reveals that people do not care about each other, in that no one helps the
poorest of the poor and the criminals have no regard for their fellow city dwellers.
People are isolated from, and apathetic towards, their fellow city dwellers. To give a further
impression of the impoverishment and apathetic nature of the city, he describes the beggars, poor
girls returning from their demanding work, and sick people wandering about the streets. From
the descriptions of these people it is evident that the city is a cold, uncaring, and unforgiving
place: the sick were “in search of some chance consolation” and the young girls had to return to
“careless homes” (217). The lack of concern for others in the city highlights Poe’s notions that
the urban environment creates isolation amongst its inhabitants.

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Specializare:Română-Engleză
Brata Bianca Gloria
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American Literature

While describing the crowd, the narrator is seated behind a window, separated from the people.
Putting him behind the glass isolates him from those whom he is so meticulously observing. One
would think that after being sick and inside for months on end, the narrator would want some
kind of personal, human relation, yet he is perfectly content to sit alone indoors and ponder the
pedestrians from afar. His willingness to be alone further contributes to the sense that people are
truly isolated in the city. This isolation is also seen in the pedestrians, who “[talk] and
[gesticulate] to themselves, as if feeling in solitude on account of the very denseness of the
company around” (216). Here the narrator explains that because there are so many people around
and since no one knows each other, these people feel like they are alone.

Poe suggests, through the narrator’s observations, that while one may be in extreme proximity to
others in the city, he is not truly connected with any of them, except in the sense that he may
share some general attributes with a large group of others that causes him to be seen as part of
the whole.

The narrator states that he at first looks at the people “in their aggregate relations” but then
moves into observing the details of which there were “innumerable varieties” (216). Herein lies a
contradiction: he points out there are “innumerable varieties,” yet he does exactly the opposite by
enumerating the types of people that he sees and placing each person into a specific category.
The narrator treats each person within each of his classifications as the same as the whole:
though he calls them “individuals,” he immediately places them into a larger group. Poe here is
trying to say that while you may think that you are a distinct person in the city, you have already
lost your individuality by being part of the “crowd.” The narrator tells himself that everyone is
different, but in pointing out their differences, he makes sweeping generalizations, thus making
many people the same as one another.

Furthermore, when the narrator classifies and describes the “crowd,” he does so in a very
scientific manner, looking at each of them through their “figure, dress, air, gait, visage, and
expression of countenance” (216). While these traits should make each person different at least
in some way from another, they are all treated as exactly the same within each group. The
classification of the people in the crowd makes them lose their individuality by generalizing and
putting each person into a pre-labeled group.

When a person comes along, the “man of the crowd,” that cannot be classified, the narrator is
“startled” (218): he doesn’t know how to think about this man since he cannot put him in a well-
defined category. He is so intrigued by this man that he leaves the coffee shop where he has been

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Facultatea de Litere din Oradea
Specializare:Română-Engleză
Brata Bianca Gloria
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American Literature

meticulously scouring the people of the crowd. He purposefully hides among the pedestrians so
as not to be seen and, in doing so, loses his individuality and becomes just another
undistinguishable face amid a sea of others, suggesting that his quest to classify this man is
futile. If the narrator himself is indistinguishable, how is he able to individualize and ascribe
specific attributes to someone else? Also, the way in which he describes the passages that the old
man takes causes him to become intertwined with the old man’s identity: the narrator says that
“he hurried into the street […] until we emerged” (220). He has to do exactly as the old man does
in order to stay close and observe him. Again, this mixing of identities emphasizes the loss of
individuality in the city that Poe wishes to point out. A person starts to lose his identity when he
starts behaving like other people.

The narrator eventually abandons his pursuit, saying that this man “does not permit [himself] to
be read” (215). He points out that he can learn nothing else about him. The narrator here seems
to just ignore someone that does not fit into he predetermined classifications. This eventual
disregard for the peculiarity of the old man again shows that there is no true individuality in the
city. If other people like this man cannot be classified, they are probably simply ignored; in
effect they do not exist. So, in essence there are no individuals.

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