The Dangerous Classes: Victorian Moral Rhetoric in Poe's "The Man of the Crowd"

Edgar Allan Poe's enigmatic story "The Man of the Crowd," featuring its voyeuristic narrator who pursues a mysterious old man through the streets of London, has proven to be one of his most critically challenging tales. Like the old man, the story resists easy classification. This ambiguity has resulted in much criticism from different schools. However, one significant element of the story that has not been greatly examined is the shift in the tone of the rhetoric used by the narrator between his descriptions of the genteel classes and the poorer classes of the crowd. Critics have not addressed the sociohistorical origins of the narrator's darker rhetoric or its contextual purpose. I argue in this essay, first, that Poe's choice of London is intentional and that the narrator's moralist rhetoric is based on the stereotypes then used by moral reformers, physicians, and periodical editors in England and Scotland to demonize the poor of the slums as the dangerous classes; second, that Poe uses these stereotypes ironically to reveal to the reader the restricted limits of the narrator's perception and understanding, unknown to the narrator, which make it impossible for him to comprehend the individual psyche of the old man; and third, that Poe in this story creates a new hybrid protagonist situated on the scale of ratiocination halfway between the irrational narrators of the tales of conscience and the supremely rational C. Auguste Dupin.