I stood looking down on them, while my soul swelled within me and I asked myself, What right had any body in the wide world to smile and be glad, when sights like this were to be seen? (Melville, Redburn 210) At that moment I never thought of relieving them for death was so stamped into their glazed and unimploring eyes, that I almost regarded them as already no more. How they had crawled into that den, I could not tell but there they had crawled to die. They were dumb and next to dead with want. 5As Melville himself did, Redburn travels to Liverpool, where he witnesses some forgotten members of this capitalist-industrial society who lie homeless and dying on the streets as the city goes about its indifferent daily rhythms: He would later transform these early life experiences into his semi-autobiographical novel Redburn (1849), which tells the story of a young gentleman from a formerly affluent but now bankrupt New York family who confronts the cruel nature of a Hobbesian world from which he was formerly sheltered when he joins the roughhewn crew of a merchant ship. In the wake of his reduced socioeconomic circumstances, Melville would in 1839 sign up as a lowly cabin boy on a merchant ship bound on a four-month trip from New York to Liverpool.
#Bartleby the scrivener i would prefer not to series#
Born into privileged circumstances, Melville gradually fell from grace as his father made a series of poor business decisions that would reduce the family to a state of genteel poverty by the time of his father’s death in 1832 when Melville was just thirteen years old.
A good deal of this interest was undoubtedly sparked by his own life history. 4While there is little evidence that Melville was familiar with the writings of Karl Marx, issues of labor and class alienation had always been of interest to him as a writer. Informed by a keen interest in soliciting material that “treated social, political, and literary themes from a perspective markedly different from the non-partisan, non-analytical stance of its competitor,” Putnam’s addressed the key social issues of its time, with many of its commissioned short stories drawing attention to “the plight of employees” (197). Catering to an audience that ranged from 2,000 to 20,000 subscribers, Putnam’s readers were generally “more intellectual, politically liberal” than those who read Harper’s, which at the time had over 100,000 readers (Post-Lauria 197). As Sheila Post-Lauria notes in her immensely informative essay, “Canonical Texts and Context: The Example of Herman Melville’s ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” (1993), Putnam’s was founded in 1853 as a monthly magazine oriented towards providing “a critical commentary upon the times” by operating in contrast to “the political conservatism and the sentimental rhetoric of Harper’s Magazine” (197). Preliminary Sociohistorical Context 3Written by a financially compromised Melville, “Bartleby” was published anonymously in two installments in the November and December 1853 issues of Putnam’s. Richly documenting the psychologically alienating effects of living in the increasingly impersonal, class-divided urban metropolis of mid-nineteenth century New York City, the story foreshadows key stylistic developments that would come to define later works of modernist, existential, and-perhaps most notably-postmodern literature.
2As I contend in this paper, the enduring appeal of “Bartleby” resides in its status as a prophetic, visionary work. Interestingly enough, it is with contemporary literary critics and theorists that “Bartleby” has most resonated, for as Sharon Talley notes, of all Melville’s short stories it has “received the most widespread critical attention” (86) since the Melville revival of the 1920s. Although enjoyed by readers of its era, “Bartleby” was scantly reviewed, for the short story was at this point in history generally viewed as an apprentice genre that was of relatively minor importance in comparison to the novel. 1First published in Putnam’s Magazine in 1853, “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” was among the later prose works published by Melville before he turned his attention to writing poetry.
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