THE TRANSFORMATION OF URBAN space from what Friedrich Engels termed ‘the great towns’ in the middle decades of the nineteenth century to the ‘metropolis’ of the twentieth century coincides with an elevation in the short story's status as a literary genre. This is not, perhaps, an obvious connection: why would a writer choose to address the city – evoking as it does ideas of architectural and spatial largeness, sociocultural diversity and openness – in a form that is commonly associated with aesthetic principles of brevity and strict economies of scale? The history of modern literature is full of examples of novels that seek to represent the vastness of cities, from Honoré de Balzac's Ferragus: Chief of the Devorants (1833) – which captures what Italo Calvino called ‘the monster that is Paris’ – to the ‘Hibernian Metropolis’ of Dublin in James Joyce's Ulysses (1922). It is not difficult to appreciate why Balzac, Joyce and others felt that the novel was an appropriate form to contend with the magnitude and multifariousness of the metropolis; as we will see, however, the short story has had its own distinctive relationship to the city, and has made a contribution, quite different from the novel's, to the literature of urban modernity.

In The Painter of Modern Life (1863), Charles Baudelaire offered the following analysis of Edgar Allan Poe's ‘The Man of the Crowd’, a story which for the French author captured the quality of ‘life in the capital cities’: