The Crowd: British Literature and Public Politics

by John Plotz

Between 1800 and 1850, political demonstrations and the tumult of a ballooning street life not only brought novel kinds of crowds onto the streets of London, but also fundamentally changed British ideas about public and private space. The Crowd sets out to demonstrate the influence of these new crowds, riots, and demonstrations on the period's literature. John Plotz offers compelling readings of works by Thomas De Quincey, Thomas Carlyle, William Wordsworth, Maria Edgeworth, and Charlotte Bronte, arguing that new "representative" crowds became a potent rival for the representational claims of literary texts themselves. As rivals in representation, these crowds triggered important changes not simply in how these authors depicted crowds, but in their notions of public life and privacy in general.

The Crowd is the first book devoted to an analysis of crowds in British literature. In addition to this being a noteworthy and innovative contribution to literary criticism, it addresses ongoing debates in political theory on the nature of the public-political realm and offers a new reading of the contested public discourses of class, nation, and gender. In the end, it provides a sophisticated and rich analysis of an important facet of the beginning of the modern age.

332 pages, Paperback

First published November 3, 2000

Reviews

[Carla · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am surprised at myself for actually finishing The Crowd: British Literature and Public Politics as I had not read any of the works covered - a section from Wordsworth's The Prelude, a couple of essays by Thomas De Quincey, Thomas Carlyle' "Chartism", and Charlotte Bronte's Shirley. Plotz argues quite convincingly that the crowd as an identifiable presence in British Literature is constitutive of the changing public sphere in Britain as middle-class bourgeoise society becomes ascendant during the early 19th century.

The book was published in 2000 and remains relevant because it describes the emergence of a new sort of society with a new sort of politics, the society which at the time was the British Empire that spread around the globe and determined so much of the history that has been my inheritance as a middle-class Euro-American living in the first decades of the 21st century.

Specifically, how did my culture sink such strong, steel-like roots in our imperious past and how are we going to uproot them for the sake of our future? Plotz's intense look at one question - how did the Edwardian and then Victorian imagination "contain" the newly emergent industrial crowd - is part of that larger question.

[Benjamin]

A friend once observed that many books of criticism have one large argument that gets articulated in the introduction, but that then gets dropped to make way for the individual chapters on particular authors. Plotz's book doesn't exactly fall into that pit (as did Esteve's book -- oops, I haven't put that one up yet): he keeps his eye on the major argument (crowds change in Britain 1800-1850, the public sphere is site of contest), but a lot of the book does get into the minutiae of particular authors, and while it's interesting to see what one critic does with the concept of the crowd, it's not really all that interesting in itself. (It doesn't help that he's talking about British authors I'm uninterested in, though it is very smart, which is what I'd expect for the guy who wrote my favorite essay from the Tiews-edited Crowds.)