Page 52 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

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Edgar Allan Poe: The Man of the Crowd 1840 + engraving by Gustave Dore from London A Pilgrimage (1872).
By 1840, London, with 750 thousand inhabitants, was the largest city in the world. And it’s where Poe sets his proto-crime novel of social observation, both creating a model for his future crime fiction (like Murders on the Rue Morgue (1841), and The Mystery of Marie Roget (1842), and his hyper- observant detective C. Auguste Dupin. Essentially it is the story of a flâneur - an observant and deductive, meditative pedestrian, fascinated by the newly urbanised mass of people who inhabit the old but now rapidly expanding city. As he stops in a coffee-house, he is still studying passers-by, fascinated by trying to deduce (from his observations of their stance, gait, clothes, tonsure, personal accessories, facial expression, ‘presence’ etc) the characters and the situations of these otherwise anonymous individuals who collectively constitute the ‘Crowd’. Poe’s short story is one of the first to notice and to try and analyse the ‘Crowd’, and it becomes the progenitor of the idea of the Crowd - an idea later forming the basis of Gustave le Bon’s study of propaganda (The Crowd - A Study of the Popular Mind 1895). And Poe’s story has been recognised by several writers as an early example of the kind of psycho-geography or ‘deep topography’ described by Guy Debord, the Situationists and later poets, artists and writers, like Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd.
Merlin Coverley writes in his Psychogeography (2016): “Baudelaire was to identify in Poe’s story the inauguration of a new urban type, an isolated and estranged figure who is both a man of the crowd, and a detached observer, and as such, the avatar of the modern city. Describing the ‘man of the crowd’ as a picture, ‘painted - or rather written by the most powerful pen of our age’, Baudelaire sketches the following outline of the plot: ‘In the window of a coffee-house there sits a convalescent, pleasantly absorbed in gazing at the crowd, and mingling, through the medium of thought, in the turmoil of thought that surrounds him. But lately returned from the valley of the shadow of death, he is rapturously breathing in all the odours and essences of life; as he has been on the brink of total oblivion, he remembers, and fervently desires to remember, everything. Finally he hurls himself headlong into the midst of the throng, in pursuit of the unknown, half-glimpsed countenance that has, on an instant, bewitched him. Curiosity has become a fatal, irresistible passion.” (see Merlin Coverley: Psychogeography 2016 p70)
The City itself becomes a medium for self-expression (Baudelaire’s cult de soi-même - or cultivation of one’s own manners and appearance)) as individuals differentiate themselves from the crowd - in tonsure, in fashion, quality of tailoring, accessorisation - in style (etc). This phenomena becomes the central study of Joris Karl Huysmans in his 1884 A Rebours (Against Nature) - the novel that is said to have inspired the book that captivates and slowly currupts Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray (1890). The flâneur of the 1840s thus becomes the idea that inspires style-based sub-cultures - the dandies, later the teddy boys, rockers, hells angels, and especially the Soho modernists or ‘mods’ in the 1960s...