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 Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3176877 Accessed: 11/11/2010 06:32
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Visual Culture and the Word in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Man of the Crowd"
KEVIN J. HAYES

DGAR Allan

Poe's

Crowd" (1840)

"The Man of the 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 experience, he describes how he enjoyed his convalescence seated in the bow window of a coffeehouse, alternately reading a newspaper and observing the surroundings both within and without. 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 denizen and therefore a representative of the modern urban environment. 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
Vol. 56, No. 4, pp. 445-465. ISSN: 0891-9356. Literature, Nineteenth-Century ? 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.

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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 daguerreotypist: "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 number of cultural assumptions. For one, it assumes widespread literacy, 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 recognizing 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: reading 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 AmericanProverbs and I820-I880 (Cambridge, Mass.:Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, ProverbialPhrases, Sayings (Cam1958), p. 37; and Bartlett Jere Whiting, ModernProverbsand Proverbial bridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1989), p. 65. 2 TheHouse theSevenGables, ed. William Charvat and Fredson Bowers, et al., vol. 2 of Editionof the Works NathanielHawthorne(Columbus: Ohio State Univ. of The Centenary of Press, 1965), p. 182.

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termed maxims and popular proverbs,"he wrote in 1842, "ninetenths 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 relationship between reading a book and reading a person's character. Instead of emphasizing the ease with which the two could be read, however, Poe's opening stresses the occasional impossibility 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 sufferthemselves be revealed."4 Like the proverto bial comparison, "The Man of the Crowd"draws an analogy between the act of reading a book and the act of perceiving character, yet unlike the traditional simile, Poe's story suggests that just as there are books that cannot be read, so too there are instances 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 experiences observing the streets of London and following a mysterious 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 autumn" (p. 507). Though recent, this experience has profoundly changed him: before encountering the old man, the narrator
3 Poe, rev. of Ballads and Other Poems,by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, in EdgarAllan 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 Collected Works EdgarAllan Poe,ed. of 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.

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appears to have had complete confidence in his ability to discern character on the basis of external appearance. As he describes 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 observes 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 between 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 knowledge of this once-popular yet by-then-obscure devotional manual 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 technology 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 information 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 London subscribed to papers from major cities and ports throughout the world. For example, the Baltic Coffee House on Threadneedle Street, a London coffeehouse that flourished during Poe's lifetime, subscribed to all of the prominent London dailies as well as to papers from Amsterdam, Hamburg, Liverpool,
5 See Denis Essayson Donoghue, "The Man of the Crowd," in his The Old Moderns: and Theory(New York:Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), p. 12. Literature 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 theoretically offered a way to read personality on the basis of outward appearance.

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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 London branch of his firm, likely patronized the London coffeehouses regularly as a way to keep abreast of the latest news regarding shipping and trade and to establish business connections. Similarly, customers who frequented London coffeehouses in Poe's day often were engaged in the mercantile trade and made it part of their business to be able to process information as quickly as possible. Poe's narrator, possibly an American 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 newspato observe the crowded London street through the coffeeper 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 Houses:A Reference Book of Coffee Houses of the Coffee Seventeenth,Eighteenth,and Nineteenth Centuries (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1963), . ioo. 8 [Anon.], "The City" (1845), quoted in Lillywhite, London Coffee Houses, p. 413. 9 in NonEdgar Allan Poe, "Graham'sMagazine," in Writings "TheBroadwayJournal". fictional Prose,ed. Burton R. Pollin, 2 vols., vols. 3 and 4 of Collected WritingsofEdgarAllan Poe (New York:Gordian Press, 1986), I, 25.

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The quarterlies, he maintained, inadequately suited the increasingly fast pace of modern society, while the daily newspaper had "the imperative necessity of catching, currente calamo,every as it flits before the eye of the public" ("Graham's," 25). p. topic the process of reading a newspaper within the viSituating 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 readers 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 images crowded it from his or her gaze. Poe's narrator offers some details regarding his precise activities 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 advertisements, 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 activities and therefore makes them analogous. For the narrator, reading the paper, scrutinizing the appearance of the coffeehouse patrons, and observing the street through the window are all interchangeable actions. By having his narrator specifically compare watching people with reading advertisements, Poe stresses the idea that people's outward appearances advertise 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 Nature's school, thus becomes a book, or a picture, in which her genius may be studied, handicraft though the canvass be, and
10 See Urban John F. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility:Manners in Nineteenth-Century

America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990), p. 83.

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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 mediate 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 identities of the various types of people outside. Early in the story he attributes his intuitive ability to a keen state of mind resulting from his convalescence. Recovering from a longstanding illness, he feels as if the film from his mental vision has departed or, to paraphrase his quotation from The Iliad, as if a mist has been lifted from his eyes. Since he describes the coffeehouse 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 newspaper suggests that even though a newspaper can be read clearly enough, unknown factors may cloud its meaning. Jean Cocteau, 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.

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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 converges his three activities-reading the advertisements, watching people inside the coffeehouse, and observing the streetinto 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 becoming a matter of reading, for the "word on the street" was becoming much more apparent in terms of both size and quanLiterary tity. Two articles that appeared in the July 1840 Southern four months before "The Man of the Crowd"was first Messenger, Magazine, associate signboards with big published in Graham's 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
12 See Jean Cocteau, Past Tense,ed. Pierre Chanel, trans. Richard Howard, 2 vols. (New York:Harcourt BraceJovanovich, 1987), I, 37. 13 [Anon.], "RamblingSketches.-No. II,"Southern Literary Messenger, 6 (1840), 580.

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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 signboard."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 Sketches Boz (1836) Charles Dickens captures the area by in London known as Scotland Yard immediately before and after 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 Scotland Yard regularly each morning, about five or six o'clock, to fill heavy waggons with coal."15 The local establishments, catering to the needs of these coalheavers, advertised themselves using 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 Lilliputian 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 arJ. 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.
14

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rival of "civilization,"Dickens notes, "one of the eating house keepers began to court public opinion, and to look for customers among a new class of people. He covered his little dining tables with white cloths, and got a painter's apprentice to inscribe something about hot joints from twelve to two, in one of the little panes of his shop window" (p. 68). In order to lure a higherclass patronage, in other words, the tavern keeper let his pictorial 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 consumers 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 American 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 astounded by the words, 'The largest Boot in the World,' written seem that the most enterprising and forward-thinking shoe salesman in Chatham Square elevated his shop and its merchandise 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. (1839), 291.

on it large as life)."16 From Ingraham's description,

it would

IV,"Ladies Companion,lo

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A custom prevails, in the principal streets for shops, of havwooden pillars planted along the outer edge of the paveing 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 advantage 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 modernity, 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 commonplace aspects of everyday visual culture in the time before photography, 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 Philadelphia 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 capi17 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.

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tals, the first two words beckoned passers-by to begin reading the sign before they had come near enough to read the remainder 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 increasingly 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 obvious that the most ignorant churl could not help but notice it. Within the modern urban landscape, however, this proverb became 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 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 1841 Graham's Magazine, in a review of Frederick Marryatt'sJoseph Rushbrook; or The Poacher, Poe invoked the proverb to char-

to pertain specifically to the written word-and even to the tys-by characterizing the pographical style of the title in Graham 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 commonplace to descriptions of the modern urban world. Discussing late-nineteenth-century lodging houses in the Bowery and
19 Poe, "Never Bet the Devil Your Head: A Tale with a Moral," in Collected II, Works,
622. The story first appeared in Graham's Magazine, 19 ( 1841),
124-27.

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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 understand the old man from his comfortable seat inside the coffeehouse, 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 photographic 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 photographic 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 advertisements. The speaker of The Bridge catches the image of Poe's
Julian Ralph, "The Bowery,"Century Illustrated MonthlyMagazine,43 (1892), 233. Hart Crane, TheBridge,in The Complete Poemsand Selected Lettersand 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.
21 20

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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 services 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 together, 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 increasingly prominent sight in Dickens's London as well as Poe's New York. In Sketches Boz Dickens mentions "an animated by 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 byproduct 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 simultaneously.25Signboards were one of many texts available to
23 See Works, 376-92; see also II, Poe, "The Man that Was Used Up," in Collected and Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology, theBody:A CulturalStudy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998), p. 92. 24 See Benjamin, The Arcades Project,trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.:Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1999), p. 451; see also BuckMorss, "The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering," New no. 39 (1986), 107. GermanCritique, 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 FlaA neur" (written 1938, first published 1969), in his CharlesBaudelaire: 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 and the City in (1985), 36-56, which Brand later incorporated as part of The Spectator AmericanLiterature(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991). The NineteenthCentury Flafullest and finest treatment of the flaneur is Anke Gleber, TheArt of Takinga Walk: Culture(Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1999). and nerie,Literature, Film in Weimar

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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 sandwichman, 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 himself, to be seen and read. Poe incorporated the image of the sandwichman into his short story "The Business Man" (1840), which he first published 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 literally be read like a book. Employed as an animated billboard, the sandwichman reduced 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, writers continued to use the sandwichman to reassert such dehumanization. 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(1889) the narrator turns the knights-errant into perambulating billboards, as he explains: "Ihad started a number of these
26 Poe, "The Business Man," in Collected Works, 484. II,
27

man.28 In Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankeein KingArthur's Court

"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," Victorian Studies,42 (1999), 61 and 72, n. 17.

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people out-the bravest knights I could get- each sandwiched between bulletin-boards bearing one device or another."29 Yankee adapted for the cinema in 1922, was (When Connecticut theater owners dressed their sandwichmen in armor and sent them out on horses to promote the film.)30 Early in King Vidor'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," reading the faces in the crowd in much the same way as he reads newspaper advertisements, suggests that virtually all city dwellers 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 bePoe's narrator reiterates the comparison between readgan it, 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 purpose 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 foot29 Mark in Twain, A ConnecticutYankee King Arthur'sCourt, ed. Bernard L. Stein, vol. 9 of The Works Mark Twain (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, of 1979), p. 185. 30 See "Exploitation Men Carry Mark Twain Classic to Youth," ExhibitorsHerald,

18 February 1922,

p. 49.

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note to reinforce the parallel between the story's ending and its beginning. Glossing "Hortulus Animae," he identifies the title as "The 'Hortulus Animae cum Oratiunculis AliquibusSuperadditis' of Grfinninger" (p. 515n). The opening sentence had mentioned "acertain German book," and Poe's added footnote emphasizes 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 specifically 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 para31 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 German Faceof EdgarAllan Poe: A Studyof Literary in (Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1995), p. 52. References His Works 33 Poe, "Preface to Tales the and of Grotesque Arabesque" (1840), in EdgarAllan Poe:Poetryand Tales,ed. Patrick F. Quinn (New York:Library of America, 1984), p. 129.

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confessors, hideous mysteries, horror, and the

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 Magazinein 1849, he Suggestions," first published in Graham's applied the phrase to a work by Cornelius Mathews, and instead 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 impulse in the critical discourse of Poe's time. Two years before "The Man of the Crowd"appeared, a reviewer of Edmund Roberts'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 discourse: for example, Martin Kevorkian applies Poe's phrase to Samuel Beckett's 1953 novel Watt (where Beckett himself describes 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 alludes to may or may not be the HortulusAnimae.In order to determine how well the description fits, we need to understand Poe's knowledge of this work. Scholars cannot be certain how Poe knew about the Hortulus 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), 31-3535 Edgar Allan Poe, "FiftySuggestions," in The Brevities:Pinakidia, Marginalia, Fifty ed. and OtherWorks, Burton R. Pollin, vol. 2 of Collected Writings(New York: Suggestions, 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 Beckett," ELH, 61 (1994), 427; and Waite, "Nietzsche's Baudelaire, or the Sublime Prolepno. tic Spin of His Politico-Economic Thought," Representations, 50 (1995), 15.

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reference from Isaac Disraeli, who in his Curiosities Literature of (first printed 1791) cites a Grininger edition of the Hortulus Animae as an example of tasteless and obscene religious illustration.38Yet Stuart and Susan Levine could not locate an edition 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 either obscene or offensive.39Although the Levines do not refer to Maria Consuelo Oldenbourg's fine bibliography of the German 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 HortulusAnimae was a Latin text printed in Germany and adorned with tasteless or obscene imagery. Scanty though it was, Poe's understanding 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 Hortulus 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 required. For the general public in late-fifteenth-century Germany, then, the HortulusAnimaein its Latin text was an unreadable 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
See Isaac Disraeli, Curiosities Literature, 6th ed., 3 vols. (London: John Murray, of 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. 19. 39 See Short Fiction,p. 284, where the Levines note that all of the editions they examined contain "characteristicreligious engravings of the age." 40 See Hortulus Animae, (I494)-I523: Oldenbourg, Bibliographieund Illustration (Hamburg: Ernst Hauswedell, 1973).
38

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people were able to read them. As Johann Griininger published illustrated Latin editions of the HortulusAnimae, he created 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 Animae represented a time in the history of Western culture when the written word began to take precedence over the visual image. Poe's reference to the work recalls this earlier time of transition, 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, begins by telling how Legs and Hugh Tarpaulin, the story's two unlettered sailors, are attracted to an alehouse bearing "for sign the portraiture of a 'JollyTar.'"41 Being 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 interpreting 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

II, Works, 240. Poe, "KingPest: A Tale Containing an Allegory," in Collected

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With the narrator of "The Man of the Crowd" Poe repeated 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 modern 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 terrifying than encountering the unreadable in a world we thought we could read, the unknown in a world we thought we knew. University CentralOklahoma of