The nineteenth century inherited all these propensities but, in the enormous Oven or Wen, the crowd became increasingly impersonalised. Engels, the great observer of imperial London, remarked that “the brutal indifference, the unfeeling isolation of each … is nowhere so shamelessly barefaced … as just here in the crowding of the great city.” By which he meant not only the crowding in the thoroughfares, as the indifferent mass of people moved in preordained directions, but the general overpopulation within the capital; it had become dense to blackness with the number of human lives within it. Engels recorded again that “The very turmoil of the streets has something repulsive, something against which human nature rebels. The hundreds and thousands of all classes and ranks crowding past each other …” He noticed, too, how “each keeps to his own side of the pavement, so as not to delay the opposing streams of the crowd, while it occurs to no man to honour another with so much as a glance.” The nineteenth-century London crowd was a new phenomenon in human history, which is why so many social and political reformers chose to observe it. In Engels’s account, for example, it became a mechanism imitating the financial and industrial processes of the city, representing an almost inhuman force. Lenin rode on the top of an omnibus the better to observe the movement and nature of this strange creature; he reported upon “groups of bloated and bedraggled lumpen proletarians, in whose midst might be observed some drunken woman with a black eye and a torn and trailing velvet dress of the same colour … The pavements were thronged with crowds of working men and women, who were noisily purchasing all kinds of things and assuaging their hunger on the spot.” In his account the London crowd became the fierce embodiment of energy and appetite, with the forces of its dark life intimated by the black eye and black dress of the drunken woman.
When Dostoevsky lost his way, among the crowds, “what I had seen tormented me for three days afterwards … those millions of people, abandoned and driven away from the feast of humanity, push and crush each other in the underground darkness … The mob has not enough room on the pavements and swamps the whole street … A drunken tramp shuffling along in this terrible crowd is jostled by the rich and titled. You hear curses, quarrels, solicitations.” He sensed all the chaos of collective experience, in a city which was itself a curse, a quarrel and a solicitation. The whole mass of nameless and un-differentiated citizens, this vast concourse of unknown souls, was a token both of the city’s energy and of its meaninglessness. It was also an emblem of the endless forgetfulness involved in urban living. “The children of the poor, while still very young, often go out into the streets, merge with the crowd and in the end fail to return to their parents.” They achieved, in other words, the final destiny of city dwellers-to become part of the crowd.
There is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, set in London in the 1840s, entitled “The Man of the Crowd.” The narrator is to be found in a coffee house beside one of the principal thoroughfares, studying the nature and composition of the “two dense and continuous populations” passing the door. Many had “a satisfied business-like demeanour … their brows were knit and their eyes rolled quickly; when pushed against by fellow-wayfarers they evinced no impatience.” But there also emerged a “numerous class” who “were restless in their movements, had flushed faces, and talked and gesticulated to themselves … if jostled, they bowed profusely to the jostlers, and appeared overwhelmed with confusion.” Here then are two types of the London crowd. There are the satisfied travellers in the stream of life and time, and the awkward or confused who cannot join its steady progress. They apologise for their confusion, but only by talking to themselves can they manage any communication.
The narrator notices junior clerks, wearing the fashions of last year, and upper clerks or “steady old fellows”; he looks upon pickpockets, dandies, pedlars, gamblers, “feeble and ghastly invalids upon whom death had placed a sure hand,” modest young girls, ragged artisans, exhausted labourers, piemen, porters, sweeps, “drunkards innumerable and indescribable-some in shreds and patches, reeling, inarticulate.” The London crowd of the midnineteenth century is revealed here, “all full of noisy and inordinate vivacity which jarred discordantly upon the ear and gave an aching sensation to the eye.”
