The mood of “The Man of the Crowd” is gloomy and tinged with horror. The story paints a terrifying picture of the urban environment of London: scenes are lit by flickering gas-lamps, casting everything in an unsettling and shifting glow; descriptions of the crowd are fearful and grotesque, focusing on the potential danger that lies hidden within everyone the narrator sees; and most of the story takes place in a dark and fog-obscured night. This mood contributes to the story’s theme of the horror of urban environments. London becomes a place of fear and isolation, where anyone could be harboring a dark secret or committing a crime under the cover of night.
While staring out the window of a café, the narrator describes the crowd he sees outside in grotesque, exaggerated terms: “feeble and ghastly invalids,” “wrinkled, bejeweled, and paint-begrimed beldame[s],” young girls “burning with a rabid ambition to be ranked the equal of her elders in vice,” and alcoholics with “lack-lustre eyes” and “thick sensual lips” all press together in the narrow space of the city street, moving with a powerful current that threatens to sweep one away into danger. While the narrator describes the people of the crowd in less-than-flattering terms, his descriptions become noticeably more horrifying as he describes people of lower socioeconomic status, betraying his prejudice against—and fear of—the poor.
This mood of horror, while present throughout the entire story, becomes more pronounced as the sun goes down. As the night grows darker, the horror rises, reinforcing the story’s association of the night with crime, secrecy, and moral corruption:
As the night deepened, so deepened to me the interest of the scene; for not only did the general character of the crowd materially alter (its gentler features retiring in the gradual withdrawal of the more orderly portion of the people, and its harsher ones coming out into bolder relief, as the late hour brought forth every species of infamy from its den,) but the rays of the gas-lamps, feeble at first in their struggle with the dying day, had now at length gained ascendancy, and threw over every thing a fitful and garish lustre. All was dark yet splendid.
Here, the flickering gas-lamps create an impression that the narrator is standing in hell itself, transforming the crowd into a host of terrifying demons. It is at this point in the story that the mysterious old man appears in his dark cloak, and the narrator calls him a “fiend,” or devil, thus associating him with Satan. As the narrator follows him deeper into the city, they encounter a desolate, crumbling neighborhood filled with “tall, antique, worm-eaten tenements” akin to haunted houses, further contributing to the mood of horror.
