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Charles Mackay: Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds 1841
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds is an early study of crowd psychology by Scottish journalist Charles Mackay, first published in 1841 under the title Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions. While mostly concerned with financial delusions like Tulip-Mania, Mackay also covers popular fads, fashions, habits. The idea of the ‘Crowd’ as a mass of people was really a 19th century phenomenon: “This ‘modern’ urban culture perceived that they were living in a new and different age. They witnessed marvellous new inventions and experienced life in new ways. The population, now living in densely packed, industrialized cities, such as Milan and Paris, witnessed the development of the light bulb, radio, photography, moving-picture shows, the telegraph, the bicycle, the telephone, and the railroad system. They experienced a faster pace of life and viewed human life as segmented, so they designated each of these phases of life with a new name. They created new concepts like "the adolescent", "kindergarten", "the vacation", "camping in nature", "the 5-minute segment", and "travel for the sake of pleasure" as a leisure class to describe these new ways of
life.” (wikipedia).
The understanding of the mass psychology of the newly urbanised individual began to crystallise in the late 129th century with studies by Le Bon, Freud and others. See Gustave le Bon: The Crowd - A Study of the Popular Mind (1895) - a handbook for propagandists.