ABSTRACT
Called up to illustrate Macaulay’s (slightly qualifi ed) observation that, “We [the public] are, in a sense, always that eager, silly, gaping public of the streets” (30), the vignette seems to offer a denigration of the public typical of its age. This public is literally moved, but not out of the inherent interest or quality of the object, the thing to be seen: it is moved instead by a gathering and irrational consensus, placed in self-reinforcing but objectless motion. Macaulay’s fi guration subtly invokes the ambient fears of crowd behavior, expressed in the much-discussed fi n-de-siècle sociological works of Gustav Le Bon and Georges Simmell, where the crowd emerges as a signifi er for the masses-insurgent, threatening, unpredictable, yet curiously open to manipulation by one who has mastered the rhetorics that can infl uence it-by one, that is, who knows “what the public wants.” Mass movements, wrote LeBon in 1896, were poised to “utterly destroy society as it now exists,” but this could be prevented by careful manipulation of crowd thinking, since the crowd was “powerless … to hold any opinions other than those which are imposed on them” (xvi, xx).1 But Macaulay’s illustration differs in one key particular from the scores of such anxious fi gurations
abroad in the culture at the time: rather than merely observing the public, she joins it. The public in her essay, though “they” to the policeman, is we to Macaulay.
