Creativity Quote by Walter Crane

Crowd control here reads less like civic order and more like a grim choreography: “charge,” recoil, return. Crane’s sentence moves in the same looping rhythm it describes, trapping the reader in a cycle of state force that fails on its own terms. The authorities “exasperated” the people - a verb that lands like an indictment. Not merely angered, but provoked into a sustained, sharpening frustration. The supposedly corrective action creates the very problem it claims to solve.

The vivid aside about the Strand does more than supply local color. Those “shutters in the shops” are a class marker: commerce literally boarded up, property bracing for impact, the street turned into a corridor where bodies are pushed until they meet wood and metal. It’s a small, brutal image of how public space gets redesigned in moments of unrest - not by democratic negotiation, but by the physics of batons and panic. Crane’s eye, trained as an artist, frames the scene like a print: a famous London thoroughfare, private storefronts, and the human mass compressed between them.

Subtextually, the line rejects the fantasy that crowds are easily “dispersed.” The people are not a weather system to be cleared; they are agents with memory and motive. The repetition - “after every charge... they returned again” - hints at political stamina. If this is meant as reportage, it doubles as argument: coercion produces spectacle and bruises, not compliance. The crowd keeps coming back because something underneath the street-level clash hasn’t been addressed.