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Visual Culture and the Word in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Man of the Crowd"

Author(s): Kevin J. Hayes


Source: Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 56, No. 4 (Mar., 2002), pp. 445-465
Published by: University of California Press
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Visual Culture and
the Word in Edgar
Allan Poe's "The Man
of the Crowd"
KEVIN J. HAYES

i DGAR Allan Poe's "The Man of the


Crowd" (1840) is about seeing and
reading. The tale is about much else as well, of course, but
nothing dominates the action more than seeing and reading.
As Poe's narrator begins relating the story of his London expe-
rience, he describes how he enjoyed his convalescence seated
in the bow window of a coffeehouse, alternately reading a news-
paper and observing the surroundings both within and with-
out. Before long the newspaper yields completely to the street,
yet not before the act of observing has become analogous to
reading a written text. In general terms, Poe's story describes
one man's effort to read another man, who happens to be a den-
izen and therefore a representative of the modern urban envi-
ronment. Read in conjunction with scattered comments that
Poe made regarding the city in numerous other writings, "The
Man of the Crowd" indicates the importance of observing the
urban landscape and reading its signs. In this tale Poe implicitly

Nineteenth-CenturyLiterature,Vol. 56, No. 4, pp. 445-465. ISSN: 0891-9356.


? 2002 by The Regents of the University of California/Society. All rights reserved.
Send requests for permission to reprint to: Rights and Permissions, University of California
Press,Journals Division, 2000 Center Street, Suite 303, Berkeley, CA 94704-1223.

445
446 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE

challenges all readers to broaden their definition of reading and


to recognize its relationship to seeing.

The common proverbial expression "Iread


you like a book," which was also current in Poe's time, has been
articulated in a variety of ways: "Youwill read any man's heart,
as plain as a book"; "Iread your black heart like an open book";
"I could read his in'ards like a book"; and "I could read his
thoughts as if they were an open book." In TheHouseof theSeven
Gables(1851) Nathaniel Hawthorne writes of Holgrave, the da-
guerreotypist: "Withthe insight on which he prided himself, he
fancied that he could look through Phoebe, and all around
her, and could read her off like a page of a child's story-book."2
No matter how it has been phrased, the simile embodies a num-
ber of cultural assumptions. For one, it assumes widespread lit-
eracy, implying that reading a written text is a relatively simple
task that most everyone can do. Further, it assumes that the
process of reading a person's character is analogous to reading
a book. Just as reading written language is a matter of recogniz-
ing what its words signify, so also reading someone's character
is a matter of interpreting a set of personal and cultural signs
akin to language-signs such as clothing, facial expression,
gesture, demeanor, and voice. This proverbial comparison also
establishes a hierarchy of cognitive and perceptual tasks: read-
ing a person's character is a more difficult task than reading a
book; not everyone can read others like books, and not all can
be read like books; and those who can be read are those whose
external signs render their psychological motives obvious.
With his obsessive emphasis on originality, Poe generally
disliked proverbs. Concerning "the whole race of what are

1 See Archer Taylor and BartlettJere Whiting, A Dictionaryof AmericanProverbsand


ProverbialPhrases,I820-I880 (Cambridge, Mass.:Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press,
1958), p. 37; and Bartlett Jere Whiting, ModernProverbsand ProverbialSayings (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1989), p. 65.
2 TheHouse theSevenGables,ed. William Charvat and Fredson Bowers, et al., vol. 2
of
of The CentenaryEditionof the Worksof NathanielHawthorne(Columbus: Ohio State Univ.
Press, 1965), p. 182.
POE'S "THE MAN OF THE CROWD" 447
termed maxims and popular proverbs,"he wrote in 1842, "nine-
tenths of [them] are the quintessence of folly."3Nevertheless,
Poe did occasionally use proverbs in his writings, for he was
amenable to incorporating traditional sayings provided that he
could apply them in original ways. The beginning paragraph of
"The Man of the Crowd" echoes the proverbial expression
about reading someone like a book, for it assumes a similar re-
lationship between reading a book and reading a person's char-
acter. Instead of emphasizing the ease with which the two could
be read, however, Poe's opening stresses the occasional impos-
sibility of reading either a book or someone's personality. The
story itself implies that the process of reading a book or seeing
into a man's heart is by no means as simple as traditional wisdom
would have it. After noting that "it was well said of a certain
German book that 'er lasst sich nicht lesen'-it does not permit
itself to be read," Poe presents an analogy to the unreadable
book: "There are some secrets which do not permit themselves
to be told"-or, in stronger terms, there are hideous "mysteries
which will not sufferthemselvesto be revealed."4 Like the prover-
bial comparison, "The Man of the Crowd"draws an analogy be-
tween the act of reading a book and the act of perceiving char-
acter, yet unlike the traditional simile, Poe's story suggests that
just as there are books that cannot be read, so too there are in-
stances when character cannot be understood.
The opening remarks occur in the voice of Poe's nameless
narrator, who makes them prior to recalling his personal expe-
riences observing the streets of London and following a myste-
rious old man over them for a night and a day. Little time has
passed since then, for the experience with the old man took
place "not long ago, about the closing in of an evening in au-
tumn" (p. 507). Though recent, this experience has profoundly
changed him: before encountering the old man, the narrator

3 Poe, rev. of Ballads and OtherPoems,


by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, in EdgarAl-
lan Poe:Essaysand Reviews,ed. G. R. Thompson (New York:Library of America, 1984),
p. 679.
4 Edgar Allan Poe, "The Man of the Crowd,"in CollectedWorks
of EdgarAllan Poe,ed.
Thomas Ollive Mabbott, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ.
Press, 1969-1978), II, 506-7. Further references are to this edition and are included
by page number in the text.
448 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE

appears to have had complete confidence in his ability to dis-


cern character on the basis of external appearance. As he de-
scribes his own thought processes and personal behavior inside
the "D- Coffee House," he seems capable of reading anyone
like a book. The physical appearance of almost everyone he ob-
serves offers him easy access to their identities.
The narrator is doubly equipped for reading the street, for
not only is he a shrewd observer but he is also well educated,
as his numerous literary and historical allusions indicate.5 His
wide-ranging literary knowledge reinforces the similarity be-
tween reading written texts and reading the street: he can glibly
toss off references to Lucian and Tertullian and recall lines of
TheIliad in the original Greek to suit his mood. Supplementing
his knowledge of Greek poetry and history and the Latin fathers,
the narrator takes an interest in books as material objects, as his
later reference to the Hortulus Animae indicates-his knowl-
edge of this once-popular yet by-then-obscure devotional man-
ual marks him as an antiquarian. Despite his classical erudition
and his antiquarian interests, however, the narrator also accepts
the advances of modern science: he has a fondness for new tech-
nology such as rubber overshoes, and in an early version of the
story he mentions the phrenologist George Combe.6 Trained
in reading literary texts and cognizant of modern scientific and
technological advances, the narrator appears well prepared for
reading the streets of the modern city.
By placing him inside a London coffeehouse, Poe further
emphasizes the narrator's role as both a reader and an infor-
mation seeker. The coffeehouse had traditionally been a place
where people could both read local and distant papers and
catch up on the latest news, and the best coffeehouses in Lon-
don subscribed to papers from major cities and ports through-
out the world. For example, the Baltic Coffee House on Thread-
needle Street, a London coffeehouse that flourished during
Poe's lifetime, subscribed to all of the prominent London dai-
lies as well as to papers from Amsterdam, Hamburg, Liverpool,

5 See Denis
Donoghue, "The Man of the Crowd," in his The Old Moderns:Essayson
Literatureand Theory(New York:Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), p. 12.
6 For Poe's deletion of Combe from the
story, see Mabbott's note, p. 516, n. 4.
Combe (1788-1848) was a leading phrenologist, who advocated a science that theo-
retically offered a way to read personality on the basis of outward appearance.
POE S "THE MAN OF THE CROWD" 449
New York, and Paris. In addition, the Baltic offered its patrons
a shelf of reference works useful for conducting commercial
business.7 Two doors down from the Baltic, the North and South
American Coffee House also flourished in Poe's day. According
to an 1845 account, this coffeehouse was "the complete centre
for American intelligence" and kept on file newspapers "from
every quarter of the globe."James Davies, the proprietor of the
North and South American, the account continues, deserved
"great credit ... for the perseverance and industry he displayed
in making the necessary arrangements with the American press
for the regular transmission of their journals."8 Commercial
travelers from overseas frequented London coffeehouses, often
staying at adjoining hotels and using the coffeehouse for their
local business address. Poe's foster father, John Allan, after
bringing his family to Great Britain while he established a Lon-
don branch of his firm, likely patronized the London coffee-
houses regularly as a way to keep abreast of the latest news
regarding shipping and trade and to establish business con-
nections. Similarly, customers who frequented London coffee-
houses in Poe's day often were engaged in the mercantile trade
and made it part of their business to be able to process infor-
mation as quickly as possible. Poe's narrator, possibly an Ameri-
can merchant stranded in London by his recent illness, is just
beginning to recover his capacity to read the urban terrain.
By having his narrator frequently look up from his newspa-
to
per observe the crowded London street through the coffee-
house window, Poe emphasizes the visual nature of reading a
modern newspaper, a notion that he reinforced in his critical
writings. Comparing British quarterlies with daily newspapers
in an 1845 discussion of the contemporary periodical press,
Poe suggested that the quarterlies examined "only topics which
are caviareto the many... In a word, their ponderosity is quite
out of keeping with the movement-with the rush of the age."9

7 See Bryant Lillywhite, London


CoffeeHouses:A ReferenceBook of CoffeeHouses of the
Seventeenth,Eighteenth,and Nineteenth Centuries (London: George Allen and Unwin,
1963), . ioo.
8
[Anon.], "The City" (1845), quoted in Lillywhite, London CoffeeHouses, p. 413.
9
Edgar Allan Poe, "Graham'sMagazine," in Writingsin "TheBroadwayJournal". Non-
fictional Prose,ed. Burton R. Pollin, 2 vols., vols. 3 and 4 of CollectedWritingsofEdgarAl-
lan Poe (New York:Gordian Press, 1986), I, 25.
450 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE

The quarterlies, he maintained, inadequately suited the increas-


ingly fast pace of modern society, while the daily newspaper
had "the imperative necessity of catching, currentecalamo,every
topic as it flits before the eye of the public" ("Graham's,"p. 25).
Situating the process of reading a newspaper within the vi-
sual culture, Poe implied that a newspaper article differed
from other contemporary printed texts because, unlike more
ponderous writings, it was not a static thing upon which read-
ers could fix their gaze. Amid the great variety of articles and
advertisements, any single item in a newspaper more nearly
resembled a moving image passing before the eyes, one that
scarcely caught the reader's attention before subsequent im-
ages crowded it from his or her gaze.
Poe's narrator offers some details regarding his precise ac-
tivities inside the D- Coffee House: "Witha cigar in my mouth
and a newspaper in my lap, I had been amusing myself for
the greater part of the afternoon, now in poring over adver-
tisements, now in observing the promiscuous company in the
room, and now in peering through the smoky panes into the
street" (p. 507). Poe's diction and use of alliteration ("poring"
and "peering") reinforces the visual nature of reading the
newspaper, while his syntax parallels the narrator's three activi-
ties and therefore makes them analogous. For the narrator,
reading the paper, scrutinizing the appearance of the coffee-
house patrons, and observing the street through the window
are all interchangeable actions. By having his narrator specifi-
cally compare watching people with reading advertisements,
Poe stresses the idea that people's outward appearances adver-
tise who they are.10
The comparison that Poe makes between gazing through
a window and reading a written text was not unprecedented.
The previous year, in "Windows,Considered from Withinside,"
an anonymous contributor to the Southern Literary Messenger
had observed: "Awindow, to those who have read a little in Na-
ture's school, thus becomes a book, or a picture, in which her
genius may be studied, handicraft though the canvass be, and

10 See
John F. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility:Manners in Nineteenth-CenturyUrban
America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990), p. 83.
POE'S "THE MAN OF THE CROWD" 451
little as the glazier may have thought of it.""1While this writer
is more concerned with observing the natural world than the
urban world, his words nevertheless are similar to the idea in
"The Man of the Crowd":he parallels gazing through a window
with reading a book, for both the window and the book medi-
ate the information they present. In Poe's tale the newspaper
functions as the printed medium through which the narrator
reads advertisements, and the coffeehouse window, through its
smokiness, mediates his vision and influences how he reads the
street.
Given the physical condition of the coffeehouse window, it
seems remarkable that Poe's narrator is able to discern the iden-
tities of the various types of people outside. Early in the story
he attributes his intuitive ability to a keen state of mind result-
ing from his convalescence. Recovering from a longstanding
illness, he feels as if the film from his mental vision has de-
parted or, to paraphrase his quotation from The Iliad, as if a
mist has been lifted from his eyes. Since he describes the cof-
feehouse window as an assembly of "smokypanes," the narrator
has apparently exchanged an internal mist for an external one.
In Poe's time a London coffeehouse window must have been
speckled with road grime, rain spots, and smudgy fingerprints
from the outside, as well as thickly coated with condensation
and obscured by cigar smoke from the inside.
Recognizing Poe's analogy between the window and the
newspaper, however, one cannot help but wonder what kind of
smoke, figuratively speaking, obscures the newspaper. In Poe's
day (as in our own), in order to verify the clarity of an idea it
was common to make proverbial reference to the written word,
as in the saying "It'sall there in black and white." The process
of reading a printed text, however, may not be as clear as it
seems: Poe's analogy between the smoky window and the news-
paper suggests that even though a newspaper can be read clearly
enough, unknown factors may cloud its meaning. Jean Coc-
teau, in an extraordinary assertion, names Poe as the inventor
of mass journalism, citing as proof Poe's 1836 essay "Maelzel's

11 [Anon.], "Windows, Considered from


Withinside," SouthernLiteraryMessenger,5
(1839), 528.
452 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE

Chess-Player."'2 In essence, Cocteau means that what we see


and read in our daily newspapers is controlled by invisible and
unknown forces. The unseen controls the seen.
As the narrator gazes through the window into the street,
the passers-by ultimately take his attention away from both his
newspaper and the people inside the coffeehouse. He con-
verges his three activities-reading the advertisements, watch-
ing people inside the coffeehouse, and observing the street-
into one. Every face in the crowd becomes another text for him
to read: "although the rapidity with which the world of light
flitted before the window, prevented me from casting more than
a glance upon each visage, still it seemed that, in my peculiar
mental state, I could frequently read, even in that brief interval
of a glance, the history of long years" (p. 51 i). The narrator's
reaction to the startling appearance of the old man reinforces
the links between reading a written text, perceiving character,
and observing the street, for the narrator makes a figurative
comparison to describe what he thinks: "'How wild a history,' I
said to myself, 'is written within that bosom!'" (p. 51 1).

In the modern city that was emerging in


Poe's time, the activity of reading the street was literally becom-
ing a matter of reading, for the "word on the street" was be-
coming much more apparent in terms of both size and quan-
tity. Two articles that appeared in the July 1840 SouthernLiterary
Messenger,four months before "The Man of the Crowd"was first
published in Graham'sMagazine, associate signboards with big
cities, and one of them emphasizes how large these signboards
were becoming. The author of "Rambling Sketches"-who
calls himself "a Rustic"-expresses sympathy for city dwellers,
specifically those who live along "the dry and dusty streets of
the great Metropolis," cannot escape the "rattling of coaches"
and "ringing of bells," and "have never been out of sight of a
signboard, or a barber's-pole."'3Just as the harsh dust irritates

Jean Cocteau, Past Tense,ed. Pierre Chanel, trans. Richard Howard, 2 vols.
12 See

(New York:Harcourt BraceJovanovich, 1987), I, 37.


13
[Anon.], "RamblingSketches.-No. II,"Southern Literary Messenger, 6 (1840), 580.
POE'S "THE MAN OF THE CROWD" 453
the skin and the raucous street noise irritates the ears, so too
obnoxious urban sights like signboards irritate the eyes. The
other Messengerarticle, "Autobiography of an Irritable Man,"
describes the title character's arrival in Philadelphia, where his
uncle, a merchant whom he has never met, lives. Although the
nephew has never visited his uncle, he is able to locate him by
reading his name written in large letters on the sign outside his
warehouse, the sight of which prompts the nephew to read it as
an emblem of his uncle's personality-upon seeing the sign,
he begins to hope that his uncle's heart is "as big as his sign-
board."14Poe's multiple associations between reading and visual
perception in "The Man of the Crowd"reinforce the increasing
importance of the written word to visual culture. Language was
becoming more and more visible, and cities were starting to be
covered with writing.
In SketchesbyBoz (1836) Charles Dickens captures the area
in London known as Scotland Yard immediately before and af-
ter its gentrification (which occurred around the same time that
the police established themselves there). Formerly, Dickens
writes, the place was inhabited mainly by the unlettered, "arace
of strong and bulky men, who repaired to the wharfs in Scot-
land Yard regularly each morning, about five or six o'clock, to
fill heavy waggons with coal."15 The local establishments, cater-
ing to the needs of these coalheavers, advertised themselves us-
ing the traditional iconography common to London streets for
centuries, the representative icons that, as Dickens describes,
let the illiterate clientele know what goods and services were
available, and where: "The tailor displayed in his window a Lil-
liputian pair of leather gaiters, and a diminutive round frock,
while each doorpost was appropriately garnished with a model
of a coal sack. The two eating-house keepers exhibited joints
[of beef] of a magnitude, and puddings of a solidity, which
coalheavers could appreciate" (p. 65). In other words, when
the coalheavers needed a good, hearty meal, they went to the
eating house at the sign of joint and pudding. But with the ar-

14
J. T., "Autobiography of an Irritable Man," Southern Literary Messenger, 6
(1840), 526.
15 Charles Dickens, Sketches Boz and Other ed. Michael
by EarlyPapers, i833-I839,
Slater (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1994), p. 65.
454 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE

rival of "civilization,"Dickens notes, "one of the eating house


keepers began to court public opinion, and to look for custom-
ers among a new class of people. He covered his little dining ta-
bles with white cloths, and got a painter's apprentice to inscribe
something about hot joints from twelve to two, in one of the lit-
tle panes of his shop window" (p. 68). In order to lure a higher-
class patronage, in other words, the tavern keeper let his pic-
torial icon of a joint of beef give way to a written description
lettered onto the window. This written message would have
puzzled and dismayed the illiterate coalheavers and, therefore,
would have discouraged their patronage; at the same time,
however, the written text would have encouraged literate con-
sumers to patronize the tavern. To the literate the written word
could be more instantly recognizable and comprehensible than
a visual image.
In Sketchesby Boz Dickens suggests that on the London
streets the written word was starting to become a part of the
modern urban landscape. Yet the shift from image to written
text had advanced even further on the streets of major Ameri-
can cities than in London. In "Glimpses at Gotham," a series of
sketches published in The Ladies Companionin 1839, Joseph
Holt Ingraham describes the "numerous shops for the sale of
ready-made clothing, and boots and shoes" in Chatham Square.
Most of the shoe shops, Ingraham observes, used "mammoth
boots for signs, (on one of which, the gaping passer-by is as-
tounded by the words, 'The largest Boot in the World,' written
on it large as life)."16 From Ingraham's description, it would
seem that the most enterprising and forward-thinking shoe
salesman in Chatham Square elevated his shop and its mer-
chandise above those of his competitors through the use of the
written word.
Foreign travelers to the United States were quick to notice
that the written word had become much more prominent in
New York City than in contemporary European cities. British
traveler J. S. Buckingham, for example (who visited New York
in late 1837, a time coinciding with Poe's first sojourn there),
observed:

16 [Joseph Holt] Ingraham, "Glimpses at Gotham.-No. IV,"Ladies Companion,lo


(1839), 291.
POE'S "THE MAN OF THE CROWD" 455
A custom prevails, in the principal streets for shops, of hav-
ing wooden pillars planted along the outer edge of the pave-
ment, with horizontal beams reaching from pillar to pillar, not
unlike the stanchions and cross pieces of a rope-walk. On these
pillars, usually painted white, are pasted large printed placards,
announcing the articles sold in the shop before which they stand;
and from the under side of the horizontal beam are suspended,
by hooks or rings, show-boards with printed bills of every colour.
This is especially the case opposite the bookstores.17

Such advertisements verify the impulse of retailers to take ad-


vantage of the literacy of passers-by. The growing number of
written signs advertising products and services for sale, besides
indicating the burgeoning consumerism associated with mo-
dernity, also reveals that, among the nation's free population,
the United States was approaching near-universal literacy. In
the decades to come, as the populations of other major cities
throughout the world also approached near-universal literacy,
these cities too contained more and more written signs.
Of course most street advertisements, like other common-
place aspects of everyday visual culture in the time before pho-
tography, have escaped historical record; yet the contemporary
press occasionally recorded some of these ads, preserving them
for posterity. In New York City during the 183os, for example,
one grogshop posted the following sign, recorded in the New
YorkConstellation and reprinted as column filler in the Philadel-
phia Ariel:

TAKE NOTICE
Younevertastedbetter
LIQUORS
in your life and
ONLY
3 centsperglass18

Apparently the newspaper's typesetters preserved the physical


appearance of the sign's lettering. Written in roman block capi-

17 J. S.
Buckingham, America,Historical, Statistic, and Descriptive,3 vols. (London:
Fisher, Son, and Co., [1841]), I, 49-50.
18
["Signs in New York"],Ariel, 3 (1830), 158.
456 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE

tals, the first two words beckoned passers-by to begin reading


the sign before they had come near enough to read the remain-
der of it and discern its precise nature. For those in a hurry, the
two words in uppercase italics supplied key information: booze
available here. Using the cheapness of his liquor as its prime
selling point, the proprietor of this grogshop both appealed to
a fairly low socioeconomic clientele and, incidentally, offered
an indication of the widespread literacy in Poe's New York.
The growing number of written signs also indicated the in-
creasingly fast pace of modern society-or the "rush of the
age," as Poe called it. Such signs gave new currency to an old
proverb: "He who runs may read." For centuries this proverb
had been used figuratively to indicate any idea that was so obvi-
ous that the most ignorant churl could not help but notice it.
Within the modern urban landscape, however, this proverb be-
came literalized, in terms of both running and reading: like the
motto on Ingraham's mammoth boot, the lettering on many
street-facing signs was so large that passers-by, moving rapidly
through the city, could still read them.
In his own writings Poe used the proverb "He who runs
may read" both figuratively and literally. In the September
1841 Graham's Magazine, in a review of Frederick Marryatt'sJo-
seph Rushbrook; or The Poacher, Poe invoked the proverb to char-
acterize the novel's over-obvious plot: "ThatJoseph should, in
the end, be brought to trial for the peddler's murder is so clearly
the author's design, that he who runs may read it" (Essaysand
Reviews, p. 326). In "Never Bet the Devil Your Head: A Tale
with a Moral" (1841), however, Poe's narrator uses the proverb
to pertain specifically to the written word-and even to the ty-
pographical style of the title in Grahams-by characterizing the
tale as "a history about whose obvious moral there can be no
question whatever, since he who runs may read it in the large
capitals which form the title of the tale."19By the end of the
nineteenth century this proverb would become absolutely com-
monplace to descriptions of the modern urban world. Discuss-
ing late-nineteenth-century lodging houses in the Bowery and

19 Poe, "Never Bet the Devil Your Head: A Tale with a Moral," in CollectedWorks,II,
622. The story first appeared in Graham's Magazine, 19 ( 1841), 124-27.
POE'S "THE MAN OF THE CROWD" 457
the signs that advertised them, for example, in 1892 journalist
Julian Ralph observed: "Within recent years these [lodging
houses] have multiplied to such an extent as to bring about a
keen competition, and he who runs may read the force of this
in single lines that have been added to many of the signs."20
Poe's narrator in "The Man of the Crowd," unable to under-
stand the old man from his comfortable seat inside the coffee-
house, feels compelled to run after him in order to read his
character.
Hart Crane recognized Poe's affinity to the billboard-rich,
modern urban landscape. In The Bridge (1930) Crane locates
Poe in a particular place where crowds gather in large cities,
the subway:

And whydo I often meet yourvisagehere,


Youreyes like agate lanterns-on and on
Belowthe toothpasteand the dandruffads?21

Associating Poe's face with billboard advertising, the speaker of


the poem not only indicates the influence of Poe's writings but
also reveals the importance of his personal image. Poe himself
deserves credit for anticipating the possibility that his photo-
graphic portrait could achieve iconographic status. Motivated
in part by his belief in the importance of physiognomy and in
part by his desire for notoriety, Poe had several daguerreotypes
of himself taken during the course of his career, and photo-
graphic images of him were commonly used to interpret his life
and works.22Crane's simile, which alludes to Poe's poem "To
Helen" (1843), plays upon the prevailing critical impulse to
use Poe's personal image to interpret his writings. Thus Crane
makes explicit what "The Man of the Crowd" implies: in this
story the narrator reads the faces in the crowd like advertise-
ments. The speaker of The Bridge catches the image of Poe's

20
Julian Ralph, "The Bowery,"CenturyIllustratedMonthlyMagazine,43 (1892), 233.
21 Hart Crane, TheBridge,in The CompletePoemsand SelectedLettersand Proseof Hart
Crane,ed. Brom Weber (New York:Liveright, 1966), p. 1io.
22 See William A.
Pannapacker, "AQuestion of 'Character': Visual Images and the
Nineteenth-Century Construction of Edgar Allan Poe," Harvard LibraryBulletin, n.s. 7,
no. 3 (1996), 22.
458 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE

face and the billboards in one glance and thus conveys Crane's
analogy between the two.
Architectural structures were not the only places where
printed placards were used to advertise which goods and ser-
vices were available in the city. In Poe's day the body and the
signboard were starting to converge. In "The Man that WasUsed
Up" (1839), for example, each of GeneralJohn A.B.C. Smith's
prosthetics is identified with a specific brand name; put to-
gether, they virtually turn him into a walking advertisement.23
Though the term "sandwichman"postdates "The Man of
the Crowd," the figure of a man traipsing through the streets
sandwiched between advertising placards was becoming an in-
creasingly prominent sight in Dickens's London as well as Poe's
New York. In Sketchesby Boz Dickens mentions "an animated
sandwich composed of a boy between two boards" (p. 255).
Walter Benjamin, in his research notes collected as TheArcades
Project (written 1927-1940), characterizes the sandwichman as
"the last incarnation of the flaneur," yet, as Susan Buck-Morss
observes, Benjamin assumed that the sandwichman was a by-
product of the twentieth century and was apparently unaware
of its origins in the nineteenth.24 Still, Benjamin's association
of the flaneur and the sandwichman is not without merit: the
flaneur, often a man of independent means, took to the city
streets for his leisure, as a way to exercise his legs and eyes si-
multaneously.25Signboards were one of many texts available to
23 See
Poe, "The Man that Was Used Up," in CollectedWorks,II, 376-92; see also
Tim Armstrong, Modernism,Technology, and theBody:A CulturalStudy (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge Univ. Press, 1998), p. 92.
24 See Benjamin, The ArcadesProject,trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin

(Cambridge, Mass.:Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1999), p. 451; see also Buck-
Morss, "The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering," New
GermanCritique,no. 39 (1986), 107.
25 The
relationship between "The Man of the Crowd"and the flaneur has received
considerable attention. The classic essay on the flaneur is Walter Benjamin, "The Fla-
neur" (written 1938, first published 1969), in his CharlesBaudelaire:A LyricPoetin the
Era of High Capitalism,trans. Harry Zohn (London: Verso, 1976), pp. 35-66. The best
recent essay elaborating the relationship between Poe's story and the flaneur is Dana
Brand, "Reconstructing the 'Flaneur': Poe's Invention of the Detective Story,"Genre,18
(1985), 36-56, which Brand later incorporated as part of The Spectatorand the City in
Nineteenth-CenturyAmericanLiterature(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991). The
fullest and finest treatment of the flaneur is Anke Gleber, TheArt of Takinga Walk:Fla-
nerie,Literature,and Film in WeimarCulture(Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1999).
POE'S "THE MAN OF THE CROWD" 459
the flaneur to read and interpret. Benjamin observes that to the
flaneur, "the shiny, enamelled signs of businesses are at least as
good a wall ornament as an oil painting is to a bourgeois in his
salon" ("The Flaneur," p. 37). Like the flaneur, the sandwich-
man, too, walked the city streets, yet he did so out of necessity,
as a way to gain a meager income when he could find no other,
more respectable way to earn a living. Whereas the flaneur's
primary purpose in walking the streets was to see and read the
urban terrain, the sandwichman sought to call attention to him-
self, to be seen and read.
Poe incorporated the image of the sandwichman into his
short story "The Business Man" (1840), which he first pub-
lished a few months prior to "The Man of the Crowd."In this
tale the title character, Peter Proffit, situates himself "in some
fashionable promenade or other place of public amusement"
and does "an extensive and profitable business in the Tailor's
Walking-Advertisementline."26 Exemplified by Peter Proffit, the
figure of the sandwichman verifies the ease with which a man
on the street could be read: dressed in signboards, he could lit-
erally be read like a book.
Employed as an animated billboard, the sandwichman re-
duced himself to scarcely more than a handful of words in the
service of commercial enterprise. In his fine discussion of "The
Business Man,"J.A. Leo Lemay calls Poe's walking advertiser "a
splendid symbol for the dehumanization of modern man."27
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, writ-
ers continued to use the sandwichman to reassert such dehu-
manization. Dion Boucicault's sensational melodrama After
Dark (1868), which Nicholas Daly compares to "The Man of
the Crowd,"opens at a railwaystation complete with a bustling
crowd containing various urban types, including a sandwich-
man.28 In Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankeein KingArthur's Court
(1889) the narrator turns the knights-errant into perambulat-
ing billboards, as he explains: "Ihad started a number of these
26 Poe, "The Business
Man," in CollectedWorks,II, 484.
27 "Poe's 'The Business Man':Its Contexts and Satire of Franklin'sAutobiography,"
Poe
Studies, 15 (1982), 32.
28
See Daly, "Blood on the Tracks:Sensation Drama, the Railway,and the Dark Face
of Modernity," VictorianStudies,42 (1999), 61 and 72, n. 17.
460 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE

people out-the bravest knights I could get- each sandwiched


between bulletin-boards bearing one device or another."29
(When ConnecticutYankeewas adapted for the cinema in 1922,
theater owners dressed their sandwichmen in armor and sent
them out on horses to promote the film.)30 Early in King Vi-
dor's 1928 film The Crowd,John (James Murray) entertains his
sweetheart Mary (Eleanor Boardman) from the upper level of
a double-decker bus by poking fun at a sandwichman, even
though dire straits would eventually reduce him to the same
line of work. Poe's narrator in "The Man of the Crowd," read-
ing the faces in the crowd in much the same way as he reads
newspaper advertisements, suggests that virtually all city dwell-
ers are walking advertisers, sandwichmen and sandwichwomen
who sell whatever they have to sell to their fellow members of
the urban public.

Closing "The Man of the Crowd"as he be-


gan it, Poe's narrator reiterates the comparison between read-
ing a man's heart and reading a book. He realizes that he will
learn no more about the old man whom he has been following
through the streets of London, and concludes: "The worst heart
of the world is a grosser book than the 'Hortulus Animae,' and
perhaps it is but one of the great mercies of God that 'er lasst
sich nicht lesen"' (p. 515). Using the same German phrase in
both the first sentence of the tale and at its end, the narrator
neatly encloses a story that otherwise lacks closure. The pur-
pose of his arduous pursuit, after all, was to discern the old
man's identity; failing to accomplish that purpose, the narrator
alternatively seeks rhetorical closure.
In revising "The Man of the Crowd" for inclusion in the
1845 Wiley and Putnam edition of his Tales,Poe added a foot-

29 Mark
Twain, A ConnecticutYankeein King Arthur'sCourt, ed. Bernard L. Stein,
vol. 9 of The Worksof Mark Twain (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press,
1979), p. 185.
"Exploitation Men Carry Mark Twain Classic to Youth," ExhibitorsHerald,
30 See

18 February 1922, p. 49.


POE'S "THE MAN OF THE CROWD" 461
note to reinforce the parallel between the story's ending and its
beginning. Glossing "Hortulus Animae," he identifies the title
as "The 'HortulusAnimae cum OratiunculisAliquibusSuperadditis'
of Grfinninger" (p. 515n). The opening sentence had men-
tioned "acertain German book," and Poe's added footnote em-
phasizes the fact that although he is referring to a work written
in Latin, the book itself originated from a German printer. By
"Grfinninger"Poe meant Johann Gruninger, who had printed
multiple illustrated editions of the HortulusAnimaeat Strassburg
in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.
Criticswho have discussed the story have generally assumed
that the "certain German book" that the narrator alludes to at
the beginning is the HortulusAnimae. In their edition of Poe's
short stories, for example, Stuart Levine and Susan Levine spe-
cifically identify the HortulusAnimaeas "the book that 'does not
permit itself to be read,"' and they even print illustrations from
an early edition.31Yet in Poe's second use of the German phrase,
the pronoun er (or, properly, es),32refers not to the book but to
the heart, "the worst heart of the world" (p. 515)-or the heart
of darkness, as Joseph Conrad would later term it. Although
the footnote that Poe added in 1845 reinforces the fact that he
considered the Hortulus Animae to be a German book, in his
reference at the tale's beginning he might have had any of a
number of different German books in mind. Indeed, he might
not even have been referring specifically to a book of German
origin, for in the literary parlance of the time, "German"often
simply meant "Gothic." In 1840, for example, countering
charges that his works displayed excessive Germanism, Poe
wrote: "I maintain that terror is not of Germany, but of the
soul."33The narrator's reference to "a certain German book"
jibes with other Gothic elements in the story's opening para-

31 See the editorial notes to TheShortFiction


of EdgarAllan Poe:An AnnotatedEdition,
ed. Stuart Levine and Susan Levine (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1976), p. 284. The
Levines print four illustrations from a 1518 edition of the HortulusAnimae printed for
Johann Koberger in Nuremberg.
32 See Thomas S. Hansen with Burton R. Pollin, The GermanFace
of EdgarAllan Poe:
A Studyof LiteraryReferencesin His Works(Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1995), p. 52.
33 Poe, "Preface to Tales the and Arabesque"(1840), in EdgarAllan Poe:Po-
of Grotesque
etryand Tales,ed. Patrick F. Quinn (New York:Library of America, 1984), p. 129.
462 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE

graph-ghostly confessors, hideous mysteries, horror, and the


grave.34
Further mitigating the association between the Hortulus
Animae and the unreadable book, Poe later used basically the
same German phrase in reference to a different book. In "Fifty
Suggestions," first published in Graham'sMagazinein 1849, he
applied the phrase to a work by Cornelius Mathews, and in-
stead of blaming its author, he blamed the book itself: "The
book alone is in fault, after all. The fact is, that 'esldsstsich nicht
lesen'-it will not permititself to be read."35Accusing someone
of having written an unreadable book was not an unknown im-
pulse in the critical discourse of Poe's time. Two years before
"The Man of the Crowd"appeared, a reviewer of Edmund Rob-
erts's Embassyto the Eastern Courts of Cochin China, Siam, and
Muscat (1837) criticized the author's use of lengthy quotations
from other sources, supposedly for the reader's benefit: "It is
this benevolent disposition which on the part of our travellers
produces unreadable books."36But through "The Man of the
Crowd," Poe's description has entered modern critical dis-
course: for example, Martin Kevorkian applies Poe's phrase to
Samuel Beckett's 1953 novel Watt (where Beckett himself de-
scribes a character moving "slowlyalone, like something out of
Poe"), and Geoff Waite applies it to the works of Friedrich
Nietzsche.37 Still, the unreadable book that Poe's narrator al-
ludes to may or may not be the HortulusAnimae.In order to de-
termine how well the description fits, we need to understand
Poe's knowledge of this work.
Scholars cannot be certain how Poe knew about the Hortu-
lus Animae,but they generally agree that he most likely took the

34 The best discussion of Gothic elements in "The Man of the Crowd" is PamelaJ.

Shelden, "Poe'sUrban Nightmare: 'The Man of the Crowd' and the Gothic Tradition,"
Studiesin theHumanities,4, no. 2 (1975), 31-35-
35
Edgar Allan Poe, "FiftySuggestions," in The Brevities:Pinakidia, Marginalia, Fifty
Suggestions,and OtherWorks,ed. Burton R. Pollin, vol. 2 of CollectedWritings(New York:
Gordian Press, 1985), p. 505.
36 [Anon.], "American Embassy to Asiatic Courts" (rev. of Embassyto the Eastern
Courtsof Cochin China, Siam, and Muscat, by Edmund Roberts), PrincetonReview, 10
(1838), 194.
37 See Kevorkian, "Misreading Watt:The Scottish Psychoanalysis of Samuel Beck-
ett," ELH, 61 (1994), 427; and Waite, "Nietzsche's Baudelaire, or the Sublime Prolep-
no. 50 (1995), 15.
tic Spin of His Politico-Economic Thought," Representations,
POE'S "THE MAN OF THE CROWD" 463
reference from Isaac Disraeli, who in his Curiositiesof Literature
(first printed 1791) cites a Grininger edition of the Hortulus
Animae as an example of tasteless and obscene religious illus-
tration.38Yet Stuart and Susan Levine could not locate an edi-
tion of the HortulusAnimaeprinted by Griininger- or, for that
matter, by any other late-fifteenth- or early-sixteenth-century
German printers-with illustrations that could be taken as ei-
ther obscene or offensive.39Although the Levines do not refer
to Maria Consuelo Oldenbourg's fine bibliography of the Ger-
man editions of the HortulusAnimae,which reproduces several
dozen woodcuts from numerous editions, none of the editions
that Oldenbourg located contain illustrations that can be taken
as particularly offensive, either.40 In any case, it seems unlikely
that Poe actually saw the edition that Disraeli refers to; rather,
he took Disraeli's description on faith.
Following Disraeli, Poe understood that the HortulusAni-
mae was a Latin text printed in Germany and adorned with
tasteless or obscene imagery. Scanty though it was, Poe's under-
standing gave him sufficient information to recognize the work
as a paradox: a Latin picture-book. In the late fifteenth and
early sixteenth centuries, when most of the editions of the Hor-
tulus Animae appeared, a reading knowledge of Latin was a
fairly elite skill; yet anyone can view the images in an illustrated
book and form their own opinions of them: no literacy is re-
quired. For the general public in late-fifteenth-century Ger-
many, then, the HortulusAnimaein its Latin text was an unread-
able book, and it would not become readable for them until it
was translated into the vernacular. Thus the HortulusAninae, as
Poe understood it, represented a crucial time of transition in
terms of Western intellectual and cultural history. In contrast to
Catholic practice, for Protestants reading became essential to
the practice of piety. With the Reformation, German devotional
manuals were published in the vernacular, and many more
38
See Isaac Disraeli, Curiositiesof Literature,6th ed., 3 vols. (London:
John Murray,
1817), II, 119-21. See also Levine and Levine, ShortFiction, pp. 284, and 293, n. 16;
and Mabbott, note to "The Man of the Crowd,"p. 518, n.
39 See Short
19.
Fiction,p. 284, where the Levines note that all of the editions they ex-
amined contain "characteristicreligious engravings of the
age."
40 See Hortulus Animae, (I494)-I523:
Oldenbourg, Bibliographieund Illustration
(Hamburg: Ernst Hauswedell, 1973).
464 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE

people were able to read them. As Johann Griininger pub-


lished illustrated Latin editions of the HortulusAnimae, he cre-
ated books that marked a transition between the image and the
written word-books whose images were readable yet whose
texts were not.
The early-sixteenth-century editions of the Hortulus Ani-
mae represented a time in the history of Western culture when
the written word began to take precedence over the visual im-
age. Poe's reference to the work recalls this earlier time of tran-
sition, and thus serves as an analog for "The Man of the Crowd."
As the United States achieved widespread literacy in Poe's day,
the written word became as understandable as the visual image.
Just as the Hortulus Animae marked the transition from image
to text, so too "The Man of the Crowd"marks a new period of
transition, a time when the word was entering the everyday
visual culture and, in so doing, was gaining the qualities of an
image.
The idea that "The Man of the Crowd"repeats a pattern in
a literate world that had occurred earlier in a largely illiterate
one becomes clearer in comparison. For example, Poe's early
tale "KingPest" (1835), set in fourteenth-century England, be-
gins by telling how Legs and Hugh Tarpaulin, the story's two un-
lettered sailors, are attracted to an alehouse bearing "for sign
the portraiture of a 'JollyTar.'"41Being sailors, the two men are
accustomed to visiting strange lands, and they have confidence
in their ability to negotiate the streets of foreign cities by in-
terpreting the typical iconic signs. Once inside the alehouse,
however, they are faced with a written sign stating "No Chalk"
(which, to those who could read, meant no credit allowed).
Unable to read the written message, the two sailors cannot, so
to speak, tell chalk from cheese. Instead they see the writing as
some kind of sorcery, a cabalistic text warning of great danger.
Finding what they cannot read to be threatening, Legs and
Hugh Tarpaulin flee from the alehouse as quickly as they can.
Their reaction, therefore, anticipates the narrator's reaction in
"The Man of the Crowd."

41
Poe, "KingPest: A Tale Containing an Allegory," in CollectedWorks,II, 240.
POE'S "THE MAN OF THE CROWD" 465
With the narrator of "The Man of the Crowd" Poe re-
peated the experience of Legs and Hugh Tarpaulin, yet he
changed it to reflect his own time, a period during which the
United States was approaching near-universal literacy. Being
well read and cognizant of physiognomy, phrenology, and mod-
ern technology, the narrator can read people on the basis of
external signs, and, like the flaneur, he has great confidence in
his ability to read the urban terrain. Yet, like Legs and Hugh
Tarpaulin before him, the narrator encounters something that
he cannot read, and he, too, finds the unreadable threatening.
He reacts by concluding that the old man is "the type and the
genius of deep crime" (p. 515). This interpretation of the old
man differs little from the way that Legs and Hugh Tarpaulin
interpret the written tavern sign: in both cases, the unknown
seems to portend danger. In both "KingPest" and "The Man of
the Crowd,"Poe suggests that few experiences are more terrify-
ing than encountering the unreadable in a world we thought
we could read, the unknown in a world we thought we knew.

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