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(Can one twice, or more often, attend public executions and twice tut-tut at the ghoulishness of your fellow attenders? To accuse Dickens of hypocrisy here would be naïve; but clearly there was a conflict between his moral concerns and his fervid imagination. Indeed half his art lies within the space between the two.)

Shortly after reading the Newgate account I found a print from the 1850s of a public execution outside Newgate and there is the very scene Dickens describes; but the most chilling detail? (really only discernible through a magnifying glass): A vendor pulls a little handcart through the crowd; on its
side is painted: (B)aglioni's Bang Up Ginger Pop.

The crowd has always frightened the establishment. Under Napoleon III Haussmann's plan for the rationalisation of Paris was largely conceived with civil war and hence crowd control in mind. Napoleon himself, as early as 1793, had already considered new straight streets for the same reason.
If from one political point of view (the conservative and reactionary one) the crowd was a rabble, from another it could embody a corporate heroism that goes back to Peterloo or to the Peasants' Revolt. This form of crowd has a central role in the amphitheatre of totalitarianism. The crowd was not the 'mob' or the 'rabble' but The People. And If the People do not rally in sufficient numbers then numbers can be created. I recall standing in a Naples square at a political rally of some sort in which attendance was conspicuously sparse. But for the man with the microphone it was a different matter: as groups trickled in he was proclaiming: "Migliaia e migliaia di lavoratori, di operai, di intellettuali stanno scendendo in piazza.! Milgliaia…"…Thousands and thousands of workers, intellectuals are coming out onto the streets…)

The old crowd, the Dickensian crowd, was scary because it was unwashed and potentially criminal, even worse: radical. In the twentieth century the new crowd offers a new threat: it is common.

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