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". 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. Publication history 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. William Evans Burton sold his periodical to George Rex Graham so the inaugural issue was under the name Graham's Magazine. There is some confusion because the December 1840 issue was bound with Burton's Gentleman's Magazine issues ending in November, 1840. It was later included in Wiley & Putnam's collection simply titled Tales by Edgar A. Poe. Reception At the time of the story's publication, Poe's reputation in the United States was mixed, but his reception among many French modernists, including Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Valéry, was enthusiastic. Charles Baudelaire discusses "The Man of the Crowd" in The Painter of Modern Life; it would go on to become a key example in Walter Benjamin's essay "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire", which theorizes the role of the crowd in modernity. Notes External links Visual Culture and the Word in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Man of the Crowd" Short stories adapted into films Short stories by Edgar Allan Poe Short stories set in London 1840 short stories Works originally published in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine