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We might imagine that lack of community was a modern malaise (or perceived malaise). But the age of the crowd, of a new perception of the crowd, was the nineteenth century. Bagehot a propos of Dickens, writes:
"London is like a Newspaper. Everything is there and everything is disconnected, there is every kind of person in some houses; but there is no more connection between the houses than between the neighbours in the lists of 'birth, marriages and deaths'…"

The Crowd has been invested with different forms of significance, notably in Canetti's Crowds and Power. The psycho-anthropological character of this book reflects a wariness of the crowd well warranted by a century of crowd-politics. (The surprising thing is that in this book we don't find much concerning the crowd as crowd, sheer concentration of numbers and the effect that this is to supposed to have on both its unconscious components - 'anomie' or whatever- and on its detached observers who might respond to it with horror or excitement.)

In the case of London the perception of the crowd, the way in which observers have responded to it, has its own history. In the eighteenth century the crowd was seen in terms of healthy mercantile bustle, or, especially later in the century and in the early nineteenth century- (the drawings of George Scharf or the description in Pierce Egan's London) with a new feeling for the crowd as circus or fairground, curiosities and grotesques included.

But there were further responses to the crowd to come in the nineteenth century. Intimations of a more fearful image of the crowd; "in the first half of the nineteenth century sketches of the city often depicted features which were later to cause disquiet: crowds, aggressive bustle, sharp division between poverty and affluence." (Victorian Artists and the City). In terms of the crowd the picture got darker, culminating in Dore's image of Ludgate Hill in which the crowd has a sullen abjectness, dangerously on the brink of riot. The crowd could become the mob: "Thousands of the lowest of the London rabble" says Dickens. In a letter of 1849 to the Times in a description of an execution at Horsemonger Lane he talks about the "wickedness and levity of the immense crowd". He describes the hysterical all-night party atmosphere that prevailed. Dickens wrote (again), of another visit to a public hanging outside Newgate Prison: "I should have deemed it impossible that I could have felt any large assemblage of my fellow creatures to be so odious"

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