The Man of the Crowd, by Scott Peeples, has something for everyone. It should be equally attractive to Edgar Allan Poe scholars, aficionados, and those who simply want to read more of Poe’s stories, poems, and essays. The volume is pitched so that it is of value to academics and lesser mortals alike: For scholars, Peeples fills a lacuna in Poe scholarship, much of which is devoted to overinterpreting Poe’s stories and poems by psychoanalysis at a distance. For aficionados and general readers, the text is accessible, informative, and encourages the reader to read more, this time with the discrimination and insight that Peeples provides.
Understanding Edgar
Peeples convincingly supplies an important balance to those who explain Poe as largely unmoored from any meaningful human or physical connections, an imaginer who drew only upon his uneasy interior life. It is true, as Peeples notes, that Poe “relocated approximately thirty-five times in his forty-year life,” but Peeples demonstrates, nonetheless, that contrary to what some assumed, “Poe was not so much uprooted as unrooted.”
In a sense, Peeples’ thesis seems so much common sense: it would be odd if Poe’s literature was vacuum-sealed from his surroundings; and, the fact that Poe moved as much as he did makes it all the more sensible that the cities in which he lived, each with its own sublimity and squalor, should have some connection with his work. How could it not? In pursuing his thesis, Peeples does not downplay Poe’s tendency for “self-sabotage,” which includes his alcoholism and his propensity to turn on his friends and colleagues—not to mention Poe’s plain bad luck. Peeples, though, declines to psychoanalyze Poe and diagnose his work in terms of the abandonment of his father, the early death of his mother, the death of his foster-mother; and, his foster-father’s disinclination to adopt Poe as his own. Others have taken that ball and run with it, at times farther than is necessary or appropriate.
The Man of the Crowd, then, as the author explains, is a “compact biography of Poe that reconsiders his work and career in light of his itinerancy and his relationship to the principle cities where he lived,” namely Richmond, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City. The urban environment of Poe’s time, Peeples explains, lent itself to the mood of many of his stories since “cities were dangerous, mysterious places: they were constantly changing, easy to get lost in, and hard to comprehend”—not unlike Poe’s stories. Where possible, Peeples’ narrative of Poe’s peregrinations is illustrated by photographs of those locales, taken by his colleague Michelle Van Parys. Both Peeples and Parys are faculty at the College of Charleston in which vicinity Poe both briefly lived and set at least one of his stories.