On measuring the nineteenth century

In this chapter John Schad offers a theoretical consideration of the concept of the nineteenth century, paying particular attention to how it might be measured (if it is not to be defined in simple calendrical terms). The essay takes as its primary text Walter Benjamin’s famous work The Arcades Project (1927-40), with its myriad insights into the nineteenth century, not least its claim that Paris is ‘the capital of the nineteenth century.’ Particularly important both to Benjamin and to the essay are the voices of such major nineteenth-century thinkers as Baudelaire, Proudhon, Bakunin, Michelet, Marx and Nietzsche. Schad sets these continental figures alongside various contemporaneous British figures, such as Arnold, Carlyle and Wilde to explore a number of defining themes of the century – in particular: revolution, democracy, realism, bureaucracy, the university, the death of God, the arcade, the exhibition, and the fear of hell. The chapter concludes by bringing together a number of these themes in an exploration of Poe’s seminal story, ‘The Man of the Crowd’ (1840), which, following Benjamin, is read as an allegory of the nineteenth century, seeing in its central figure not only what Baudelaire calls ‘the man of the century’ but also its very face.