28 Mullin, “Cities in Modernist Literature”
There is something distasteful about the very bustle of the streets, something that is abhorrent to human nature itself. Hundreds of thousands of people of all classes and ranks of society jostle past one another; are they not all human beings with the same characteristics and potentialities…? And yet they rush past one another as if they had nothing in common or were in no way associated with one another…The greater the number of people that are packed into a tiny space, the more repulsive and offensive becomes the brutal indifference, the unfeeling concentration of each person on his private affairs.
Frederick Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845).
The city is a key motif in modernist literature. Numerous novels and poems reflect the ways in which cities generate states of shock, exhilaration, alienation, anonymity, confusion or thrill. The idea of the isolated, questioning self belongs to the modern urban centre, not the provincial margins, a subject famously explored by the 19th-century French poet Charles Baudelaire. Baudelaire celebrated the flâneur, a leisured wanderer who was able inconspicuously to observe the vivid modern city. Far from being repelled by the crowd as in the passage by Engels above, the flâneur revels in the sense of anonymity he experiences while drifting through a stream of people. In his 1863 essay ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ Baudelaire offered a profile of ‘The Man of the Crowd’:
The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the 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 infinite.[1]
Loitering, lingering, strolling and looking, the flâneur indulged in this modern hobby: ‘botanising on the asphalt’, as Walter Benjamin later put it.[2] The flâneur was no mere tourist or gawker, but a sophisticated native, practising ‘gastronomy of the eye’. Selective, intelligent, scrutinising to infer, he was a detective, reading the urban landscape for clues. As Benjamin wrote: ‘Baudelaire speaks of a man who plunges into the crowd as into a reservoir of electric energy…he calls this man “a kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness”.[3]
London’s fogs
For Baudelaire, the flâneur‘s talents were fascinatingly distilled in Edgar Allen Poe’s 1840 short story ‘The Man of the Crowd’. The tale concerns a nameless narrator, sitting in a London coffee shop and watching the crowds, until he is drawn to pursue a stranger, an oddly dressed old man with a compelling face suggestive of ‘the type and genius of deep crime’. Poe’s narrator is a prototype of his later detectives, and the detective became a new version of the flâneur and a widely used literary motif. Between 1831 and 1925, London was the largest city in the world, and its labyrinth