Is this what Poe was after, then, the thought that not only is potential for evil at once indeterminate, ubiquitous and isolating, but that there are awful patterns to wrongdoing that can take the shape of vice? This is part of it, but the patterns at issue in Poe's story at once outrun and embed trouble in individual wills.

Remember that opening scene? Remember the anguished dying men? It is natural, at first, to suppose that they are seeking absolution for their own misdeeds. But Poe's way of leading us into London through the view from a café window, and back again, opens onto an even worse possibility: the desperate dying men may be burdened with the realization that their lives had been made to fit social niches which were partly made possible by social ills that no one person caused and that no one person could correct by his own hand.

This scenario haunts our story because of what the narrator saw outside that window initially (it would have been hard to avoid noticing such matters in an early nineteenth-century metropolis like London, after all, and Poe loved cities). Our narrator delighted in the spectacle of the gas-lit London crowds. But there was, actually, no unmixed philanthropy expressed in his initial catalogue of the types of people outside. Here is an example of the narrator's observations:

The tribe of clerks was an obvious one.... There were junior clerks of flash houses--young gentlemen with tight coats, bright boots, well-oiled hair, and supercilious lips. Setting aside a certain dapperness of carriage, which may be termed deskism for want of a better word, the manner of these persons seemed to me an exact facsimile of what had been the perfection of the bon ton about twelve or eighteen months before. They wore the cast-off graces of the gentry;--and this, I believe, involves the best definition of the class.

...There were many individuals of dashing appearance, whom I easily understood as belonging to the race of swell pick-pockets with which all great cities are infested. ("The Man of the Crowd")

Who are those ghostly confessors to whom anguished men turn on their deathbeds? What is the substance of these confessions? It's hard to say. Is one distressed about one's own victims? Those toward whom one was negligent or indifferent? One's own ancestors? The victims of one's own ancestors? Whole great washes of humanity that may have been wasted in the rise of one's city or state? How big does a horror have to get to mount a burden so heavy that it can only be thrown down into a grave? And what is required to inspire nameless remorse of the magnitude that is supposed to be visited upon men nightly such that the sense of awfulness spreads out from individual hearts to take in the heart of the city and the heart of the world?

If the dying men take personally every historical wrong that made possible nineteenth century London in all of its charms, then these evils are too many, too various, and too distant to permit absolution of any of distressed individual man. The subject of such absolution wouldn't be an individual person at all. It would be something more on the order of a mode of social life. No one could soothe an individual overwhelmed by systematic inequity in the enabling conditions of his rapidly departing life.

To see this, imagine something more intimate. Imagine that your parents are dead. Imagine learning that they committed hideous crimes before you were born. They had, say, several murders and mountains of fraud to their credit, and their ill-gotten gains paid for things that made your life rewarding. What could you do with information like that? Visit the victims' graves and apologize? Find their descendants and try to help?If this is a local example of the kind of thing that comes back to haunt Poe's dying men, impersonally, massively, on their deathbeds, small wonder that confessors can't help.

Poe's story lodges itself in individual and city at the same time, and what distinguishes man and town alike, what sets them apart from other men and other towns, isn't pretty. The net result is a human landscape without any moral high ground. No wonder the population moves like water, flows in tides, appears as a sea of human heads. There's no dry land (and, as if to punctuate this point, rain falls, sporadically, all night long as our narrator trails after the old man--both figures are drenched as they move through the city, buoyed up by multitudes). Some such interpretation seems necessary to explain that first paragraph, and why it is that a third of the tale is taken up with accounts of the sordid, unhappy kinds of people rushing past the window. Something like this also seems necessary to make sense of the title. After all, the old man isn't the man of some private nightmare. He is the man of the crowd.