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"Bartleby the Scrivener" and
Melville's Contemporary Reputation
by
George Monteiro
After the publication of Moby-Dick and Pierre in the early 1850's, it became clear that Melville's popularity was in sharp decline. That decline was accelerated rather than checked by the appearance of The Confidence-Man in 1857. By 1863, then, when it was noted that Melville had published nothing for several years, the conclusion seemed inevitable: Melville has "forgotten the ambition of authorship." This was not quite true. But in the course of this piece the author made passing reference to Melville's "remarkable sketch of a wall street scrivener."[1]
When "Bartleby" first appeared in Putnam's Monthly Magazine (November and December, 1853), it had attracted attention, but not much. When Melville included the story, three years later, in The Piazza Tales, however, it turned out to be the collection's most highly regarded piece (judging from reviews), outdistancing all other selections, including "Benito Cereno."[2] But this incidental remark in 1863, seven years after book publication, was the very last public mention of "Bartleby," it has been assumed, until the revival of interest in Melville's work in the 1920's.
It is surprising, then, to run across a reference to "Bartleby" dated 1880, nearly a quarter of a century after The Piazza Tales and a full forty years before the Melville revival. It is even more surprising to discover such a reference in the pages of the Atlantic Monthly, a journal which down
There is a reward of literary labor which seems to me so great that I must mention it. Let me give an illustration: A boy was at work in a lumber mill in the backwoods. Two other boys were his comrades. At night it was their amusement, in the shanty where they had their rations, to read the magazines. "A Moosehead Journal," "Have we a Bourbon among us?" and "Bartleby the Scrivener" were just out then. These and other articles were read with that interest, curiosity, and wonder which they are calculated to inspire in youthful minds. The men who could write such articles were regarded with a degree of respect which belongs properly to beings who are above our common humanity.
The inspiration of these readings and the influence of the articles were felt by others who borrowed the magazines. The history of the various writers and their peculiarities were inquired into by the boys. It came to be the prevailing ambition to excel in literature.[4]
In its first year of publication Putnam's Monthly presented all three pieces that, individually and in combination, fired the literary ambition of boys laboring in a backwoods lumber mill.
Further identifications are pertinent. "Have we a Bourbon among us?" is an essay by the Reverend John H. Hanson, now cleanly forgotten. "A Moosehead Journal," an account of a pre-Thoreauvian journey into the wilderness of northern New England, may evoke response as the spirited product of James Russell Lowell, a founder of the Atlantic Monthly and that journal's first editor. Of the author of "One Reward of Literary Labor," however, we know nothing. His name remains a secret. Given the ironic fact that "Bartleby," sometimes read as a parable of the writer's fate in a hostile society,[5] should actually buoy the spirits and foster the ambition of a would-be author, it is intriguing to believe that that specific piece of information would prove significant.
Notes
See Leonard Lutwack, "Herman Melville and Atlantic Monthly Critics," Huntington Library Quarterly, XIII (1950), 414-416.
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