Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Man of the Crowd, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Dark Secrets
Curiosity, Obsession, and the Unknown
London, Crowds, and Urban Alienation
Summary
Analysis
The unnamed narrator briefly reflects on the idea of secrets and crimes that are too terrible to ever be revealed. He mentions a German book that “does not permit itself to be read,” comparing it to the dark secrets that die along with the people who keep them, never having told them to another living soul. He guesses that the true heart of human evil will never be fully revealed, simply because people are compelled to keep their most horrifying thoughts and deeds hidden deep within themselves.
The narrator’s opening thoughts set the stage for the story’s focus on dark and unspeakable secrets. They also engage the reader’s curiosity and establish the narrator as an inquisitive figure who is interested in things that he shouldn’t necessarily know about. Setting a mysterious and intriguing tone is the main purpose of this short speech; it lets the audience know what they’re in for, promising more questions than answers.
Themes
Literary Devices
The narrator sits by the window in an unnamed coffee-house in London, as an autumn afternoon comes to an end. He notes his cheerful and inquisitive mood as he’s recently regained his strength of body and mind following a period of sickness. After entertaining himself by glancing at newspaper advertisements and the other patrons of the coffee-house, he turns his curious attention to the seemingly endless crowd of people walking down the busy street just outside the window. He begins by observing and thinking about the masses as a whole, but then he focuses on the more intricate details of the passing individuals, completely absorbed by his sudden interest in people-watching.
Here, the narrator’s curiosity immediately begins to take hold of him, beginning as little more than an idle interest in the people around him. His strange mood following his illness signals that whatever’s about to happen to him is going to be unusual, or at least it might seem that way in his heightened mental state. The narrator’s curiosity is his strongest defining trait, and it manifests itself early here, innocently enough for now.
Themes
Literary Devices
The narrator spends quite a while examining the personal details of the people walking down the street, mentally separating them into groups based on their class, occupation, appearance, social status, and so on. Though he starts by considering groups of people, he soon begins to note the appearance, clothing, and mannerisms of the people of the crowd in great detail, inferring much information about their personalities and ways of life simply by observing them.
This is the point where the narrator’s idle curiosity begins to lean towards obsession. During his people-watching, his almost superhuman level of attention to detail suggests either a highly perceptive mind or an overactive imagination—possibly both. His complete focus on the strangers outside the window also hints at a potential reluctance to examine himself, priming the reader to take his observations and assumptions with a grain of salt. It’s possible that his conclusions about other people could be nothing more than fantasies or even projections.
Themes
Literary Devices
The narrator notices the “business-like demeanor” of those who are mainly concerned with just getting through the crowd, some even talking to themselves as if “feeling in solitude” amidst the throng. When other people in the crowd bump into them or block their way, they either ignore it and continue on their way when possible, or bow and smile to the other people in an absent sort of way, single-mindedly focused on whatever they’re thinking about. Their dress reveals they’re of the “decent” class, including noblemen, merchants, and attorneys. Ultimately, the narrator doesn’t find them very interesting.
Despite being the most comfortable and upper-class people that the narrator observes, this group is haunted by the same sense of alienation that affects seemingly everyone else in London. The men talking and gesturing to themselves appear to feel alone in the crowd because the masses around them don’t emotionally register as people; everyone feels disconnected from everyone else. This sense of isolation manifests itself a bit differently in each social class, and in this case, the tradesmen and lawyers are focused entirely on their own inner monologues and private matters, treating the people around them as minor roadblocks to be politely avoided.
Themes
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Next, the narrator observes members of the “gentry,” such as clerks, pick-pockets, and gamblers. The clerks dress sharply and have an “affectation of respectability,” while the narrator looks more unfavorably on the pick-pockets. He wonders how this class of people could ever be “mistaken for gentlemen,” and mentions that all great cities are “infested” with them. The gamblers wear a variety of outfits, but the narrator still spots them in the crowd easily, noticing their dim eyes and hushed voices when talking to others. All of these people are lumped into a vague middle class by their clothing quality and occupations, but the narrator regards most of them with wry scorn.
At this point, the narrator not only observes the people of the crowd, but also begins to make moral judgements about them. His lack of respect for most of the members of this social class is evident in the way he describes them. He even uses the word “infested,” as if comparing gamblers and pick-pockets to rats or other urban pests. This reinforces the feeling of alienation that defines this depiction of London; the narrator sees a portion of this social class as almost less than human, widening the divisions between his classifications of the city’s people. In his mind, then, the citizens of London are separated not only by their level of wealth, but also by the different roles they’re expected to fulfill.
Themes
Finally, lower down in his classification, the narrator observes peddlers, beggars, and “women of the town.” Everything in the manner of the peddlers seems humble and deferent, except for their flashing, shrewd, hawk-like eyes. Meanwhile, “professional” beggars scowl with resentment at other beggars more genuinely desperate than they are, and the sick search for “some lost hope” in the faces of the crowd. The women of the crowd include young girls returning from work and feeling uncomfortable around “ruffians,” and women who look beautiful on the surface but have an “interior filled with filth.” The narrator watches these and many other kinds of people pass by, his senses almost overwhelmed by the crowd’s mass of noisy activity.
As the narrator’s assessment of strangers continues into the lower classes, the most desperate and isolated people of the city are revealed to be the most alienated, even from others of their class. Even the beggars are divided into sub-categories: the deceptive opportunists and the genuinely needy. The lines between these groups might be blurred or arbitrary in some cases, but there’s never a point of genuine human contact between any two people in the street. There’s a focus on eyes and on false appearances in this passage. The eyes of the peddlers and the invalids search the crowd, watching people just like the narrator is, but they never seem to find what they’re seeking in the eyes of others. Their reluctance to engage with the people around them could stem from the idea that the people of the city are dishonest—like the beautiful women “filled with filth,” they’re assumed to be different from what they appear to be.
Themes
Literary Devices
As night begins to fall, the narrator spots one person in the crowd who defies the easy categorization that he’s been applying to everyone else. This person is an old man wearing a bizarre facial expression that completely bewilders the narrator. The expression seems to contain all sorts of conflicting emotions at once, from malice to merriment to triumph to terror and everything in between, all at the same time. The narrator compares the old man’s appearance to that of the devil himself. He’s surprised and deeply intrigued by the old man’s contradictory expression, and feels a sudden desire to know what kind of history or dark secret could possibly produce such an unusual countenance.
The old man’s expression is what fully turns the narrator’s curiosity into obsession. He’s compelled to learn anything he can about the old man in the same way he’d be forced to scratch an itch; his curiosity sweeps him up, hardly allowing him any free will in the matter. Up to this point, the narrator has “figured out” everyone else in the street (or at least he assumes he has), so the strange old man poses a new and irresistible challenge for him. Comparing the old man to Satan symbolically associates him with dark, forbidden knowledge that’s too tempting to resist, and the narrator reacts accordingly.
Themes
Literary Devices
Consumed by his curiosity, the narrator immediately pulls on his overcoat and steps out into the street, beginning to follow the old man while being careful not to attract his attention. As he gets a closer look, he notices that the old man is very short, gaunt, and feeble-looking, and he wears ragged and dirty clothing that nonetheless seems to be made of a beautiful sort of fabric. Beneath a small opening in the old man’s clothing, the narrator thinks he spots a glinting object, which he guesses to be either a dagger or a diamond. These observations only make the narrator more eager to learn about this strange man, so he continues to follow him through the crowd as night, fog, and rain descend on London.
The image of the unknown object carried by the old man is a perfect representation of the ambiguity at the heart of his character. A dagger could mean that the old man is dangerous, while the diamond could mean that the old man is a thief, or is maybe running some suspicious errand. Or it could be neither, as the narrator’s eyes could be playing tricks on him. Either way, the purpose of the object is to be a constantly shifting contradiction that drives the narrator deeper into his obsessive curiosity. The diamond or the dagger represents the old man himself, reflecting his ever-changing and seemingly unknowable nature. It also hints at the dark secrets he’s assumed to be keeping to himself; whatever he's carrying, it must be something interesting or sinister—at least according to the narrator’s imagination.
Themes
The narrator begins a long and confusing pursuit through the streets of London. For hours, he doggedly follows the strange old man through the main thoroughfare, down several side streets and alleys, and through various locations ranging from a busy bazaar to a thronging theater to the more squalid side of the city and “one of the palaces of the fiend, Gin.”
The sheer length of the narrator’s pursuit of the old man reveals just how obsessive he’s become. This is far from passive curiosity; the narrator is practically stalking the old man all night long, on the mere suspicion that he might be hiding something. This invites the reader to draw parallels between the narrator and the old man. Both of them are participating in this bizarre journey through the streets at night, and both seem compelled by something that they can’t explain or resist. The narrator insists the old man is the strange one, yet both of them are alone and alienated in the crowds.
Themes
Literary Devices
During this pursuit, the old man’s behavior changes occasionally, but it becomes no less bewildering. He passes in and out of his state of agitation throughout the night, completely ignoring the crowds of people around him, and never seeming to notice the narrator following him and watching his every move. The old man travels “without apparent aim,” wandering through the streets and alleys without giving any clear indication of either his past or his future.
The old man’s changes in demeanor are mostly determined by the density of the crowd around him—the fewer people there are, the more uneasy he appears to become. As the narrator declares later on, the old man “refuses to be alone,” and his shifts in behavior illustrate this clearly. He's figuratively alone in the crowd as he buries himself in it, but if he was truly, literally alone, he’d have no way to distract himself from the terrible secrets presumably haunting him. One aspect of alienation is feeling disconnected from oneself. The crowd allows the old man to avoid facing himself, and it’s possible that the old man does the same for the obsessive and outwardly-focused narrator—that is, he provides the narrator with a convenient distraction.
Themes
Eventually, the narrator and the old man reach the main thoroughfare where it all began, and the pursuit continues in the same way all through the following day. As the second night closes in, the narrator is too exhausted to carry on following his quarry. He finally steps right in front of the old man and stares him in the face directly, but the old man takes no notice and continues on his way, just as before.
At this turning point of the story, the narrator is forced to face his own ignorance. What feels like it should be a climactic, revelatory moment is an intentional disappointment, reinforcing the idea that some mysteries will remain unsolved forever. The narrator is an investigator at heart; he believes that he's uniquely qualified to follow this old man and uncover what he’s hiding. But in this moment, the old man treats the narrator like any other stranger he’s passed in the street, dismissing his efforts by refusing to make a connection of any kind.
Themes
The narrator stops following, and remarks to himself that he can learn nothing of this old man or his dark secrets. He concludes that the man is “the type and the genius of deep crime” who “refuses to be alone” and “is the man of the crowd.” He guesses that the old man’s horrible crimes, whatever they are, can never be brought to light. The narrator once again mentions the German book that never allows itself to be read, considering it a blessing that there are some unmentionable secrets that will never be revealed.
The narrator’s final speech to himself mirrors his opening remarks about dark secrets that follow people to their graves. More than anything, this is an attempt by the narrator to satisfy his own curiosity, which has been his driving force throughout the story. His conclusions about the old man might very well be true—the old man’s behavior was strange, as he went out of his way to surround himself with people only to ignore them. But ultimately, the names and designations the narrator applies to the old man are for the narrator’s benefit. The mystery can’t be solved, but the narrator can at least settle the matter in his own mind by categorizing the old man as unknowable. He tells himself that the world’s ignorance of humanity’s darkest crimes is a blessing, but that might just be something he says to comfort himself. Or it could be true. Appropriately, the story ends on this one last ambiguous note.
Themes
