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Setting
Style
Explanation and Analysis:
“The Man of the Crowd” is written in a characteristically Gothic style. The ruinous city buildings, the foggy and lamp-lit night, the focus on madness, secrets, and mystery, the grotesque descriptions of people, and the fascination with the dark side of human nature are all elements common in Gothic literature and are present in “The Man of the Crowd.”
As in most Gothic literature, the sentences are long, flowing, and lushly descriptive, and they focus heavily on the emotions and subjective state of the narrator. This style is present throughout the story, but the following description of a poverty-stricken neighborhood is particularly Gothic, evoking the desolation of a ruined castle or haunted mansion:
By the dim light of an accidental lamp, tall, antique, worm-eaten, wooden tenements were seen tottering to their fall, in directions so many and capricious that scarce the semblance of a passage was discernible between them. The paving-stones lay at random, displaced from their beds by the rankly-growing grass […] The whole atmosphere teemed with desolation.
A notable stylistic feature of the story is the way that Poe uses long, listing sentences to emulate a crowded city street. The longest of these lists occurs at the beginning of the story, when the narrator is staring out the window of a café observing the press of the crowd. The sentence is so long that it takes up an entire page-and-a-half long paragraph, but here is an excerpt:
I saw Jew peddlers, with hawk eyes flashing from countenances whose every other feature wore only an expression of abject humility; sturdy professional street beggars scowling upon mendicants of a better stamp […] modest young girls returning from long and late labor to a cheerless home, […] women of the town of all kinds of ages […] drunkards innumerable and indescribable […] pie-men, porters, coal-heavers, sweeps, organ-grinders, monkey-exhibiters and ballad-mongers […] of every description, [...]
By cramming so many different kinds of people into a single sentence, Poe emulates the way that they are packed into a single city street, pressing against one another in a cramped space and mingling in a way that would not have happened prior to the rapid urbanization of the 19th century. During the Industrial Revolution, people flocked to cities to take new jobs at factories, leading to a population boom in urban spaces. It also led to people being in close quarters with strangers in a way that would not have happened previously. In this sentence, Poe’s focus is not just on the crowdedness of the street, but also on the potential danger lying within each person. This focus on fear and danger reflects rising anxieties about urban crime that many people felt in the 19th century.
