<P> "The Man of the Crowd" stands as a transitional work between the haunting Gothic tales of the late 1830s and the ratiocinative fiction of the early forties, possessing obvious qualities of both . </P> <P> This story is also the beginnings of Poe's detective stories . Walter Benjamin writes that "(The Man of the Crowd) is something like an X-ray of a detective story . It does away with all the drapery that a crime represents . Only the armature remains: the pursuer, the crowd, and an unknown man who manages to walk through London in such a way that he always remains in the middle of the crowd". In agreeing with Benjamin, William Brevda contributes that "Poe splits the human psyche into pursuer and pursued, self and other, ego and id, "detective" and criminal, past and future ..." "Poe also echoes Sophocles in his theme of the guilty knowledge that humans run from and simultaneously toward . In the nightmare Poe dreams for us, the ordinary person, the man in the street is at heart a criminal". </P> <P> The setting of London is one of the few specific details revealed in the tale . By 1840, London was the largest city in the world with a population of 750,000 . Poe would have known London from the time he spent there as a boy with his foster family, the Allans, although he may have relied on the writings of Charles Dickens for details of London's streets . In this story and others, Poe associates modern cities with the growth of impersonal crime . </P> <P> The story was first published simultaneously in the December 1840 issues of Atkinson's Casket and Burton's Gentleman's Magazine . The latter was the final issue of that periodical . It was later included in Wiley & Putnam's collection simply titled Tales by Edgar A. Poe . </P>

Critical analysis of the man of the crowd