The crowd is definitely a significant constituent of the streetscape, one that
gives off a tidal, engulfing collectivity whose impact has been ambivalently explored by a wide spectrum of critical observers since the nineteenth century. On the one hand, studies of the urban crowd by theorists like Gustave, Le Bon and Gabriel Tarde
represent a bourgeois conception or construction of the public walking masses as threatening presences.119 The anonymity of the masses embodies a liable, chaotic, undifferentiated force that threatens to disrupt the boundaries of autonomous individuality. Their theories often associate the crowd with the working-class poor, savages, and the insane. Theories as such might arise out of an urgent need to explain the conditions of chaos and anomie commonly perceived in the fin de siècle city.120 Assuming a male, bourgeois, and rational perspective, Le Bon and Gabriel Tarde thus address the features of the crowd emerging in the nineteenth-century city:
It will be remarked that among the special characteristics of crowds there are several—such as impulsiveness, irritability, incapacity to reason, the absence of judgment and of the critical spirit, the exaggeration of the sentiments, and others beside—which are almost always observed in beings belonging to inferior form of evolution—in women, savages, and children for instance. (LeBon [1895] 1995: 35-36)
On the other hand, the crowd might present itself as intoxicating and forming an integral part of the cityscape. The crowd as such has figured significantly as object of contemplation in urban sketches by the nineteenth-century writers like Edgar Allan
119 Gabriel Tarde, On Communication and Social Influence, ed. Terry Clark (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1969). Le Bon’s Psychologie des foules was translated into English as The Crowd in 1897 and into thirteen other languages by 1913. That it achieved such great popularity indicates exactly the widespread interest in the crowd throughout Europe.
120 See Susanna Barrows, Distorting Mirrors: Visions of the Crowd in Late Nineteenth-Century France (New Heaven: Yale UP, 1981) for an excellent discussion of social anxiety as manifested in studies of sociology, psychiatry, criminal anthropology, and crowd psychology in fin de siècle France.
Poe and Charles Baudelaire. For instance, the flâneur, the rambler in the street of the nineteenth-century city, is represented as delighting in observing and seeking
anonymity amidst the jostling crowd:
For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the center of the world, yet to remain hidden from the world—such are a few of the slightest pleasures of those independent, passionate, impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. (Baudelaire 90) Departing from the above-mentioned bourgeois observers of the city who treat the urban crowd as an engulfing, threatening, and degenerate presence, the flâneur, who makes home “in the heart of the multitude,” is a man of the crowd, which not only offers a shelter-like protection but also registers aesthetically the ephemerality of modernity by producing “the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite.”
Despite its implicitly gendered viewing position, which has been recently debunked by feminist scholars, the flâneur, “the man of the crowd,” to whom Baudelaire himself and those numerous candidates he indicates throughout his sketches, essays, and poetry on urban public life give a lively form, is nevertheless entitled to the anonymous and intoxicating experience when he places himself amongst the jostling pedestrians in the cityscape of the mid-nineteenth century. This experience, largely pleasurable and based upon a plebeian spectatorship, is shared by
many female ramblers increasingly visible in the street since the later half of the nineteenth century. As is indicated in the previous chapters, women have revealed themselves as capable users of the fin de siècle city’s public spaces, and the swarming crowd provides the very camouflage, protection and anonymity they need when entering the conventionally male-dominated public spaces of the city. A similarity is thus perceived between Woolf’s delight in the anonymity of the crowd and Levy’s and Richardson’s celebrations of the freedom emblematic of the jostling pedestrians they encounter in the public walking in the street of late-Victorian London.
It is obvious that when writing her series of London essays, Woolf engages in a dialogue with these discourses prior to or contemporary with her observations of the urban crowd. Writing about London in the early decades of the twentieth century, Woolf is attracted also by the walking public masses that have previously engaged much critical attention from a wide spectrum of urban observers. Her observations of the urban crowd are, however, more confident and assured about a conglomerate of urban population which is becoming increasingly democraticized. Viewed in this light, Woolf obviously departs from the late-Victorian male observers of London
manifesting cityphobia or assuming more or less a bourgeois perspective upon the urban crowd as the mob or the unruly and contaminating force.
In “Street Haunting” the urban crowd is recognized as aesthetically constituting the spectacle of the bustling city. At the end of her one-hour sauntering in the street, Woolf observes the passing of those getting off from their work:
But the main stream of walkers at this hour sweeps too fast to let us ask such questions. They are wrapt, in this short passage from work to home,
in some narcotic dream, now that they are free from the desk, and have the fresh air on their cheeks. They put on those bright clothes which they must hang up and lock the key upon all the rest of the day, and are great cricketers, famous actresses, soldiers who have saved their country at the hour of need. Dreaming, gesticulating, often muttering a few words aloud, they sweep over the Strand and across Waterloo Bridge . . . . (32)
Woolf’s representation of the commuters as a dreaming collectivity thus highlights the aesthetical manifestation of the urban crowd, which makes up an intoxicating
presence indigenous to the cityscape.
As well as presenting itself to be the object of aesthetical contemplation, the urban crowd as observed by Woolf constitutes significantly the masses of a
democratic era that increasingly takes shape in the early decades of the twentieth century. Enamored with the massive presence of her fellow citizens, Woolf represents them as the modern crowd, whose humble existence serves to indicate exactly the advancement of the political regime from an aristocratic era into a democratic one. In
“Abbeys and Cathedrals,” for instance, the eras of aristocracy and democracy find their contrast in the nobles of the past and the masses of nowadays respectively. The essay begins with a description of the undistinguishable crowd of modern London before embarking on the tours around those ancient, prestigious churches like St.
Paul’s and Westminster Abbey, where those of the highest ranks were buried. In contrast with the “Kings and Queens, poets and statements” who still seem to “act their parts and are not suffered to turn quietly to dust,” (49) these men and women walking in the street seem to “shrank and become multitudinous and minute instead of
single and substantial” (43-44). Taking the form of “a million Mr. Smiths and Miss Browns,” they seem “too many, too minute, too like each other to have each a name, a character, a separate life of their own (44).
A crowd as such might appear to be outweighed by the greatness and splendor of those lying quietly inside the cathedrals and abbeys, whose “high-pitched voices,”
“emphatic gestures,” and “characteristic attitudes” dominate even those spaces nowadays (49). Yet for all its humbleness and obscurity, this crowd nevertheless constitutes the democratized city pageant, which, despite its seemingly chaotic manifestation, embraces people indiscriminately. The significance of the city and its swarming crowd registering an egalitarian space is particularly unfolded through the contrasting images Woolf discerns when entering Westminster Abbey, a resting place for those of the noblest:
One feels as if one had stepped from the democratic helter skelter, the hubbub and hum-drum of the street, into a brilliant assembly, a select society of men and women of the highest distinction. (47)
These men and women from “a brilliant assembly, a select society,” of which only a few are chosen as representatives contrast sharply with those anonymous, obscure urban masses of “the democratic helter skelter,” accommodating to “the hubbub and hum-drum of the street.”