The language is Dickens, the humanity is Melville…

“Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street”

A short story by Herman Melville (1819-1891)

First published 1853 in Putnam’s Magazine, and later in Melville’s The Piazza Tales in 1856

If you can read “Bartleby” without suspecting, nay, without more or less believing that it was written by Dickens, you can take pride in your mental discipline whilst reading. I wanted to read it again, and I confess that I briefly searched for “Bartleby” in my rumpled collection of Dickens, which of course does not include The Piazza Tales.

None of Melville’s notorious South Sea elements here. This is straightforward, 19th century prose set in 19th century Wall Street with shabby, luridly eccentric antebellum characters including the narrator and his bedeviled scrivener (copyist), Bartleby.

The circumstances of this desiccated short story are curious, even eccentric, incredulous. The withered and aloof Bartleby is presented, examined and disdained, until his very dispirited isolation makes him the object of the narrator’s genuine but increasingly troubled caretaking.

Bartleby’s enervating and apparently desperate ennui keeps him always a step removed from the narrator’s efforts to supply a little humanity in his life.

The scrivener is lonely beyond understanding. He bears almost in silence the emotional poverty that ultimately kills him.

The reader understands that Bartleby longed, in vain, to be able to repel the Reaper with his simple and inscrutable refrain: “I would prefer not to.”

Despite all temptation, I will prefer not to re-read Melville’s tale on a dreary afternoon.

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Book review: To Serve Them All My Days

by R. F. Delderfield

A beloved teacher,

you know this story…

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