This book on the urban crowd, a fair notion fatally flawed, would have been greatly improved if it had included the essential intellectual background on the meaning of the crowd in politics, psychology, and literature. In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Hannah Arendt describes modern man (like the characters in Poe's prophetic story “The Man of the Crowd” [1840]) as a radically lonely individual who, “without any other social ties to family, friends, comrades or even mere acquaintances, derives his sense of having a place in the world only from his belonging to a movement” (qtd. in Applebaum, 15).The crucial works on this subject include Gustave le Bon's The Crowd (1895), which argues that crowd psychology is based on men's impulsiveness, irrationality, lack of judgment and exaggerated feeling—all qualities portrayed by Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49). Two other crucial works are Elias Canetti's Crowds and Power (1960), which analyzes the dynamics of crowds and why they obey powerful rulers, and José Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses (1930), which describes the power and action of urban crowds.Poe was one of the first writers to see that the individual behaves in disturbing ways when immersed in a crowd. His portrayal of deracinated and alienated modern man and the behavior of the crowd belongs to an influential literary tradition. It includes Nikolai Gogol's “Diary of a Madman” (1833), Ivan Turgenev's “Diary of a Superfluous Man” (1850), Fyodor Dostoyevsky's “Notes from Underground” (1864), and most importantly, Charles Baudelaire's works. In his chapter “Crowds” in Paris Spleen (1862), Baudelaire incisively observes that modern man “does not know how to populate his solitude, does not know either how to be alone in a busy crowd…. But the solitary and thoughtful stroller draws a unique intoxication from this universal communion. He who easily espouses crowds knows feverish delights” (21). In his chapter on Poe in The Painter of Modern Life (1869), he reverently writes, “I am adding a new saint to the martyrology…. For Poe the United States were nought but a vast prison in which he ran about with fevered restlessness” (70).Poe's concept of the lonely modern man, who seeks identity in the pathological crowd, continued in the twentieth century with works such as Wyndham Lewis's “The Crowd Master” (1914), which predicted that, as war approached, the mob would be the victims: “The crowd is the first mobilisation of a country…. Death is only a form of Crowd” (94). In the postwar Waste Land (1922), T. S. Eliot wrote of the Dantean mass of living dead: “A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many” (39). At the end of Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust (1939), amid a rioting crowd, Homer tramples Adore, the child- actor, to death. These mindless crowds need a strong Leader to replace their lost God. As Arendt explains, they can easily be controlled and manipulated into blind obedience, like the robotic performers in the Nazi rallies in Nuremberg.William Wordsworth's “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” (1807) and W. H. Auden's “In Praise of Limestone” (1948) reveal that northern Europeans seek solitude, southern Europeans like crowds. As Eliot wrote of the Alps, “In the mountains, there you feel free” (37). Caspar David Friedrich's painting The Monk by the Sea (1810) shows a proto-Nietzschean hero standing alone on a mountain peak and gazing reflectively into the vast emptiness of sea and sky.Poe's Man of the Crowd, who has followed the great American transition from rural village to industrial city, has lost his traditional identity. Scott Peeples's discussion of this story, the literary core of his book, is disappointing. He begins with a plot summary, says “the city and its inhabitants … are decipherable,” then contradicts himself by stating that “the modern city could not be explicated” (99, 100). He weakly concludes that London “never sleeps, but the all-nighter it offers ‘the crowd’ isn't much fun” (100).Peeples does not mention Denis Donoghue's brilliant chapter on “The Man of the Crowd” in The Old Moderns (1994). Donoghue argues that the disturbing story “is about the power to imagine a life other than one's own, and the limits of that power…. The narrator is shown defeated in the end by the old man's opacity. Whatever he is up to, it cannot be known” (13–14). The lack of meaningful human connection in Poe's story “anticipates the dread induced in many writers … by crowds” (14).I can offer another interpretation. In Romantic literature the isolated hero is opposed to the ravenous mob. In Poe's most underrated story, the isolato joins the mob but gets no pleasure from “the madding crowd's ignoble strife” (Gray 95). The story conveys an astonishingly prescient sense of existential fear in modern life. It portrays the alienation of man in the city, the estrangement of the artist who observes his own double but cannot relate to him, and his distrust of democracy exemplified by the chaotic crowd. For Poe, as for most modern writers, the city does not represent industry, refinement, and civilization, but the restlessness, solitude, and despair of the mass of men with no sense of community.Peeples states that his “book is an attempt to tell the story of that uprooted life with a distinct focus on the American cities where Poe lived for extended periods of time: Richmond, Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York” (4). But his information about these cities is not closely connected to Poe's stories and does not explain them. The stories Poe wrote in New York have the same sensational melodrama and pathological elements as the ones he wrote in Philadelphia. Poe's idiosyncratic obsession with conscience and guilt are the last mad ravings before Emily Dickinson's asthmatic gasps and Walt Whitman's hot-air balloons.Peeples also provides damaging evidence that undermines his own argument. He concedes that “most of Poe's poetry and much of his best-known fiction takes place in unspecified or imaginary locations…. When he does set a story in an actual place, it is likely to be a place he did not know first-hand” (5). In Spain for “The Pit and the Pendulum” (1842) and Paris for “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), “the city itself is not particularly menacing” (101). (Poe mistakenly said that the orang-outang came from Africa, not Borneo. His detective M. Dupin could have found the murderer by examining the ape's droppings.) Peeples also admits that, in “MS. Found in a Bottle” (1833), “Poe wasn't writing directly about Baltimore” (60). When living in Philadelphia, he set “The Gold-Bug” (1843) in South Carolina. In Peeples's reading of “To Helen” (1831), “Poe returns ‘home’ not to Richmond, Virginia … but to an ideal beauty that he associates with ancient Greece and Rome” (27).Peeples's factual accounts of Poe's houses and cities are unilluminating at best and often quite deadly. In Baltimore, Poe and his family “lived in a two-story house, most likely occupying only the second floor, on a block of Wilks Street—now the 1000 block of Eastern Avenue between Exeter Street and Central Avenue—known as Mechanics Row” (51). He writes that in Philadelphia “the metropolitan area (which would become incorporated in 1854) grew dramatically, from 161,410 residents in 1830 to 565,529 in 1860” (77). Since Poe died in 1849 these postmortem statistics are otiose. Peeples's vague comments are virtually meaningless: “Poe's life during these years was deeply enmeshed in the flux and contradictions of mid-century Philadelphia” (79), and the same was true of every sentient being who lived there. Since Poe's heroine Berenice suffers a massive extraction of teeth, it would be more interesting to learn about dentists in Baltimore. Since Poe was obsessed with premature burial, it would be more useful to know more about urban graves and tombs—the ultimate escape from the crowd.This short book is extremely repetitive. There are more than twenty-five reiterations, and in both the introduction and chapter 1, Peeples pointlessly mentions that he plans to discuss “The Man of the Crowd” in chapter 3. A more serious flaw is his desperate speculation, as if he were trying to get a secure foothold in the Great Dismal Swamp. This supposedly fact-based book includes thirty instances of “seems,” “apparently,” “perhaps,” “possibly,” “probably” (ten times), “likely,” “surely,” “almost certainly,” “may have,” “might have,” “might presume,” “would have,” and “must have.” Finally, Peeples abandons secure ground and confesses, “I am merely speculating” and “one can only speculate” (52, 175). The tiny print in the photographs of maps and newspapers is illegible; the old photos of Poe's commonplace houses are dull. Peeples thanks the staff at Princeton University Press for their guidance and editing, which were notably poor.In the last chapter, “In Transit (1848–1849),” Peeples abandons the city and crowd theme. He merely offers a potted summary of Poe's chaotic last years and repeats familiar material: Poe wants to own a magazine but is impoverished, frequently moves to shabby residences, and is a perverse and self-destructive alcoholic. One friend amusingly remarked that the drunken Poe would assume “that over-solemnity in which men in such cases try to convince you of their sobriety” (145). Baudelaire, perceptive as always, connected Poe's alcoholism to his nationality and murderous impulse: “He did not drink like an ordinary toper, but like a savage, with an altogether American energy and fear of wasting a minute, as though he was accomplishing an act of murder, as though there was something inside him that he had to kill” (“Edgar Allan Poe,” 88).