According to the text of the tale, the reason for the narrator's
monomaniacal obsession with the man stems from "the absolute idiosyncrasy of [the man's] expression". He is the only person walking down the street the narrator can't categorize. though the narrator is unable to see this. The old man may be wandering through the crowd in search of a lost friend or to escape the memory of a crime. The possible evil nature of the man is implied by the
dagger that is possibly seen under his cloak Poe purposely presents the story as a sort of mystification, inviting readers to surmise the old man's secret themselves. While viewing these people, the narrator is able to ascertain a great deal of information about them based on their appearance and by noting small details. For example, he notices that a man's ear sticks out a small amount, indicating he must be a clerk who stores his pen behind his ear. Poe would later incorporate this ability to observe small details in his character
C. Auguste Dupin. All of this is a virtuoso performance of the representation of social typicality; it owes something to Dickens’s
Sketches by Boz, but there is also something of the moralizing medieval Vice in its parade of degenerates, of depraved women and of social outcasts. In one sense this is a sideshow, a digression from the main line of the narrative, which is concerned with the crowd only as an abstract force; in another, however, it brings to the fore the sense that it is only through these social clichés that the crowd can be made humanly understandable. In describing the man, the narrator "describes a set of contradictory characteristics: ‘there arose confusedly and paradoxically within my mind, the ideas of vast mental power, of caution, of penuriousness, of avarice, of coolness, of malice, of blood-thirstiness, of triumph, of merriment, of excessive terror, of intense — of supreme despair’. The man’s dress, too, is contradictory: his linen is dirty but ‘of beautiful texture’, and through a tear in his cloak the narrator glimpses a diamond and a dagger". This story is also the beginnings of Poe's detective stories.
Walter Benjamin writes, "[The Man of the Crowd] is something like an X-ray of a detective story. It does away with all the drapery that a crime represents. Only the armature remains: the pursuer, the crowd, and an unknown man who manages to walk through London in such a way that he always remains in the middle of the crowd". In agreeing with Benjamin, William Brevda contributes that “Poe splits the human psyche into pursuer and pursued, self and other, ego and id, “detective” and criminal, past and future…” “Poe also echoes Sophocles in his theme of the guilty knowledge that humans run from and simultaneously toward. In the nightmare Poe dreams for us, the ordinary person, the man in the street is at heart a criminal". The setting of London is one of the few specific details revealed in the tale. By 1840, London was the largest city in the world with a population of 750,000. Poe would have known London from the time he spent there as a boy with his foster family, the Allans, ==Publication history==