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Visual Culture and
the Word in Edgar
Allan Poe's "The Man
of the Crowd"
KEVIN J. HAYES
445
446 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE
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
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
Jean Cocteau, Past Tense,ed. Pierre Chanel, trans. Richard Howard, 2 vols.
12 See
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
TAKE NOTICE
Younevertastedbetter
LIQUORS
in your life and
ONLY
3 centsperglass18
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
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:
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
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
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
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.
Universityof CentralOklahoma