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BY Herman Melville

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Herman Melville | Books, Facts, & Biography

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Herman Melville, (born August 1, 1819, New York City—died September 28, 1891, New York City), American novelist, short-story writer, and poet, best known for his novels of the sea, including his masterpiece, Moby Dick (1851). Melville’s heritage and youthful experiences were perhaps crucial i…

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Prior to writing “Bartleby the Scrivener” Melville had personally experienced economic hardships. He searched for work without success in Illinois and then later in New York City in 1830, before becoming a commercial sailor and a whaler. He lived in NYC from 1844-1850.

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During this time the working classes fight for their labor rights which led them to different confrontations with the police. It should be noted that there were two writers in this era who supported the workers, but with different positions.
They wrote extensively on labor issues. Both defended the rights of the working class, but both had a different perspective on the problem.

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Bennett's argument was that "there was hardly a rich man in this community, who had not come out of poverty through persevering industry." He argued that the system of wage labor was consistent with Christian values.

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Gilded Age New York had more than its fair share of outlandish rich people. Take Evander Berry Wall, whose crazy fashion choices (including thigh-high patent leather boots for him and bespoke collars and ties for his dogs) earned him the nickname "King of the Dudes." Then there's C.K.G. Billings, the industrialist who hosted a dinner party on horseback in a Fifth Avenue ballroom, during which guests drank champagne through rubber tubes. And let's not forget Alva Vanderbilt, who went ahead and founded the Metropolitan Opera when she couldn't secure a private box at the Academy of Music. But there is perhaps no high-society New Yorker who was as consistently and astoundingly eccentric-or as influential-as James Gordon Bennett, Jr.

The son of a fabulously wealthy newspaper magnate, Bennett makes the trust fund kids of today look positively tame by comparison. From epic yacht races and colorful journalism to naked carriage rides and public urination, the man did it all. It's no wonder that "Gordon Bennett!" became a British slang exclamation of shock and awe.

THE BEGINNINGS OF THE HERALD

James Gordon Bennett, Sr., a Scottish immigrant, founded the New York Herald in 1835, building the paper from the ground up. Within 10 years, the Herald had become the most widely read daily in America, thanks to its cheap cover price, up-to-the-minute news, and blatant sensationalism; Bennett Sr. once told a young staffer that "the object of the modern newspaper is not to instruct, but to startle and amuse."

The elder Bennett's fellow New Yorkers didn't take too kindly to all the gossip-mongering; angry crowds regularly gathered outside the Herald's headquarters to the point that Papa Bennett kept a cache of weapons secreted behind the walls of his office-so it's no surprise that he sent his son away to be educated in Paris.

‪Bennett Sr. continued to run the paper throughout the first half of the 19th century, sensationalizing the news while also pioneering the way it was reported. In 1836, he published what many historians believe was the first newspaper interview ever (the subject, naturally, was the madam of a brothel). So by 1886, when Bennett ceded editorial control of the paper to his then-25-year-old son, the Herald was well established.

THE LUCKY OWL

Bennett the younger first arrived on the New York scene as a teenager. Commanding a luxury yacht (courtesy of dad), he distinguished himself in the boating world at an early age and, at 16, became the youngest ever member of the New York Yachting Club. He took his ship to battle during the Civil War, spending a year at sea in the service of the Union. Legend has it that one night on the water, the warning hoot of an owl woke a sleeping Bennett and prevented his ship from running aground.

Whether the story is true or not, it was the catalyst for a lifelong obsession with owls. Bennett could not get enough of the predatory birds: he ran editorials on species preservation in the Herald and collected owls (both live and statuary) throughout his life. When he commissioned renowned architect Stanford White to design a new Herald building in the 1890s, it included plans to have the roof lined with bronze owl effigies-26 of them-whose eyes flashed at regular intervals with electric light.

Though the building was demolished in 1921, two of the owls now flank the Minerva statue (which also began life on the building's roof) that stands in modern-day Herald Square-and their eyes still glow a ghostly shade of green.

YACHT ROCK

There's a reason why Bennett's nickname around the NYYC was "The Mad Commodore." Though he engaged in every rich-boy pastime under the sun-polo, ballooning, tennis-his lifelong passion was yachting. He won the first-ever transatlantic yacht race in 1866, guiding the Henrietta on a two-week voyage from the New Jersey coast to the Isle of Wight. Aboard his next vessel, a steam yacht called the Namouna, he entertained artists, painters, bon vivants, and even a very young Winston Churchill.

But they were all outdone by the Lysistrata, a 300-foot monster with such onboard amenities as a Turkish bath, a milk cow in a fan-cooled stall, a theater troupe, and a luxury automobile-which he drove across Bermuda in 1906, marking the first car ever to touch the island's soil. His joy ride earned him the enmity of two prominent vacationers: Mark Twain and a pre-presidential Woodrow Wilson, who campaigned to have cars banned from Bermuda after they saw Bennett roaring around in his De Dion-Bouton.

It wasn't all fun and boat cows, however. Bennett kept up his publishing duties throughout his life, rising at the crack of dawn to run the Herald via letters and articles cabled to him by his editors.

WHIZZER ABOUT TOWN

To say that Bennett lived it up would be an understatement. His partying ways were infamous, fueled by a seemingly infinite store of funds and a flair for the dramatic. One of his hobbies included driving a coach-and-four at breakneck speed through the streets-often in the wee hours of the night, and often in the buff. (He once ended up in the hospital after driving under a low archway in Paris and clocking himself on the head.)

Bennett was also a cocktail enthusiast, and his boozing landed him in a heap of trouble one notorious evening in 1877. The story goes that on New Year's Day, the publisher got rip-roaring drunk, stumbled into a fete being thrown by the family of his then-fiancée Caroline May, and proceeded to urinate into the fireplace in front of everybody. The engagement was called off, but that wasn't the end of it: Caroline's brother, Frederick, attacked Bennett with a horsewhip the next day, and later challenged him to a duel. Pistols at dawn were considered archaic by the 1870s, but that didn't stop Bennett and May. As luck would have it, both of them were such bad shots that they completely missed each other, and that was the end of that.

Which isn't to say that Bennett wasn't mortified by the whole incident. Shortly afterwards, he left New York in shame and spent most of the rest of his life in France and traveling the world aboard his many, many yachts, and eventually founding the Paris Herald. He also maintained lavish houses in New York, Newport, Paris, the French Riviera, and Versailles-in one of Louis XIV's chateaus, naturally, where he played host to kings and dukes.

PAY DIRT, I PRESUME

Though Bennett lived in the lap of luxury himself, he funded the exploits of adventurers willing to get their boots dirty. Most prominent among them was Henry Morton Stanley, a regular correspondent for the Herald and legendary explorer. In 1871, Bennett bankrolled Stanley's expedition to track down a beloved Scottish missionary, David Livingstone, in the jungles of Tanzania. And naturally, he traveled in style: an armed guard, 150 porters, and 27 pack animals, while a man in front carried the flag of-what else?-the New York Yacht Club.

Stanley tracked down his target after a six-month trek, at which point he allegedly uttered the famous line: "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" Livingstone wasn't actually missing, per se, but it sure made for a good story-and one that sold a lot of newspapers.

So did the next epic journey that Bennett funded, though it proved to be far less successful for the explorers themselves. Bennett backed an 1879 expedition to the as-yet-undiscovered North Pole, led by U.S. Navy vet George Washington De Long. But the trip ended in disaster when De Long's ship was crushed by ice in the Bering Strait, and the surviving crew was forced to trek overland. Only 13 made it back to civilization in Siberia, while 20-De Long included-perished.

THE MAUSOLEUM THAT WASN'T

As Bennett aged, his affinity for the insanely opulent never waned. He went back to Stanford White (who, besides being a prominent architect, was also Bennett's drinking buddy) with an idea for his final resting place: a 200-foot-tall mausoleum built in the shape of an owl, to stand on a promontory in Washington Heights. Inside the owl, a spiral staircase would lead visitors to the bird's eyes, which would be windows offering sweeping views of the city. When Bennett died, his body would be placed in a sarcophagus and suspended from the ceiling on chains, to dangle in the middle of the monument.

But Bennett's ridiculous tomb never came to be. In 1906, White was murdered by his lover Evelyn Nesbit's millionaire husband, resulting in a lengthy court case that the media (the Herald included) dubbed "The Trial of the Century." Bennett scrapped his plans for the giant owl, depriving New York City of what could have been its weirdest landmark.

LAST COMES MARRIAGE

Though Bennett was a notorious playboy, he eventually did settle down-at the ripe old age of 73. His wife was Maud Potter, the widow of George de Reuter (of Reuters news agency). They were married until Bennett's death five years later, when he passed away at his villa in the Riviera in 1918.

Sadly, Bennett's paper followed him to the grave; the Herald was sold off in 1920 and was absorbed into an amalgam that became the now-folded New York Herald-Tribune.

But perhaps Bennett always knew his baby was doomed to die with him. When he moved the Herald building uptown, he only signed a 30-year lease. When an underling questioned this decision, he was quickly told by the mercurial publisher that, "Thirty years from now, the Herald will be in Harlem, and I'll be in Hell!"

Here's hoping Bennett's having an entertaining eternity down there in the inferno; otherwise, after a life like that, he'd get terribly bored.

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The Fabulously Eccentric Life of James Gordon Bennett, Jr.

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Gilded Age New York had more than its fair share of outlandish rich people. Take Evander Berry Wall, whose crazy fashion choices (including thigh-high patent leather boots for him and bespoke collars and ties for his dogs) earned him the nickname "King of the Dudes." Then there's C.K.G.

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Greeley, on the other hand, rebuked the way "Christians harmonized this social injustice" with their faith. He encouraged the workers to resist and fight against this unjust system. These Protestant values ​​legitimized class privilege and inequality.

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Horace Greeley, (born Feb. 3, 1811, Amherst, N.H., U.S.-died Nov. 29, 1872, New York, N.Y.), American newspaper editor who is known especially for his vigorous articulation of the North's antislavery sentiments during the 1850s.

Greeley was a printer's apprentice in East Poultney, Vt., until moving to New York City in 1831, where he eventually became a founding editor of a new literary paper, The New-Yorker (1834). A liberal Whig, Greeley caught the attention of New York political boss Thurlow Weed and was asked to issue political campaign weeklies during the elections of 1838 and 1840. These publications substantially aided the Whig cause and marked the beginning of Greeley's political partnership with Weed and New York Gov. William H. Seward (U.S. secretary of state, 1861-69)-a partnership that lasted until 1854.

Greeley's journalistic success encouraged him to embark on a more ambitious newspaper venture. The New York Tribune, which he founded in 1841 and edited until his death, became a daily Whig paper dedicated to a medley of reforms, economic progress, and the elevation of the masses. The Tribune set a particularly high standard in its news gathering, intellectual interest, and moral fervour. Greeley, who published a prodigious trove of cogent articles and editorials, came to be considered the outstanding newspaper editor of his time; his large and competent staff (which included European correspondence from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who wrote under Marx's name) cooperated to make the paper a political bible for many readers throughout the North. Reflecting his highly moral New England upbringing, Greeley was an unrelenting foe of liquor, tobacco, gambling, prostitution, and capital punishment. He became, in the words of Harper's Weekly (1869), "the most perfect Yankee the country has ever produced." Because of Greeley's eclectic interests, many causes found a voice in the pages of the Tribune. While The New York Times cultivated a sober tone of moderation, and the New York Herald was jingoistic and often pro-business and pro-South, the Tribune defied categorization, promoting a wide variety of interests and causes. Greeley urged a number of educational reforms, especially free common-school education for all; he championed producers' cooperatives but opposed woman suffrage. He also pushed for Western expansion but did not coin, as commonly claimed, the famous phrase "Go West, young man." ( See Researcher's Note.)

In the early 1850s Greeley became increasingly bitter over the failure of his Whig colleagues to support him for high public office-a lifelong ambition. He also grew disenchanted with the party's ambivalence toward slavery, which he opposed on both moral and economic grounds. In 1854 he transferred his allegiance to the newly emerging Republican Party, which he helped organize. Throughout the decade Greeley's newspaper fed the rising antislavery persuasion of the North. His editorial columns consistently opposed any compromise on the slavery issue as he argued against popular sovereignty (local option) in the territories, called for unrestricted free speech and mail privileges for abolitionists, encouraged Free-Soilers (who opposed slavery in the Kansas Territory), and advocated forcible resistance to federal fugitive-slave hunters.

After the onset of the Civil War (1861), Greeley pursued an erratic course, though generally he sided with the Radical Republicans in advocating early emancipation of the slaves and, later, civil rights for freedmen. Greeley lost much public respect by opposing Lincoln's renomination in 1864 and by signing the bail bond of former Confederate president Jefferson Davis in 1867.

Partly out of political pique and partly from disagreement with the corruption apparent in the first administration of Pres. Ulysses S. Grant (1869-73), Greeley joined a group of Republican dissenters, forming the Liberal Republican Party. The party opposed Grant in 1872 and nominated Greeley for president. In the dreary campaign that followed, he was so mercilessly criticized that, as he said, he scarcely knew whether he was running for the presidency or the penitentiary. Despite his party's inexperience, Greeley polled more than 40 percent of the popular vote. Before the electoral college met, however, Greeley was institutionalized (perhaps as a result of the intensity of the attacks he had sustained and his loss of control over his newspaper), and he died before the electoral votes were cast. All but 3 of the 66 electoral votes pledged to him went to four minor candidates.

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Horace Greeley, (born Feb. 3, 1811, Amherst, N.H., U.S.-died Nov. 29, 1872, New York, N.Y.), American newspaper editor who is known especially for his vigorous articulation of the North's antislavery sentiments during the 1850s. Greeley was a printer's apprentice in East Poultney, Vt., until moving to New York City in 1831, where he eventually became a founding editor of a new literary paper, The New-Yorker (1834).

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Relation of the text Bartleby the Scrivener with the time.

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Relation of the text Bartleby the Scrivener with the time.

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This text is really important for some future relationships, from its title Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street to the complete environment that would approximate the literary taste of the 20th century and not the date of its invoice in 1853. This extreme appearance of anticipation contrasts with urban costumbrismo ingredients in the story: a profession of "escribiente" that is in a defined situation, in a work environment and urban quite accurate. Along with that costumbrismo long-range echoes echo, especially Wall Street was an emblematic commercial street of New York, the young city; then turned into the heart of the Stock Exchange and even the symbol of world financial capitalism. That Wall Street is different from the one that resounds to our ears going through the Great Depression and the repeated financial scandals, until becoming a slogan of protest to "occupy it" since it designates the extreme power.

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“An awareness of the many correlations between “Bartleby” and current social conditions and debates does not in itself explain the mysteries of the story, but it does make a strong prima facie case for viewing it as an historicized text more concerned with then-contemporary economic realities than is usually acknowledged”

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* The lawyer constantly attributes the problems of Turkey and Nipper to their nature. Their lives are lamentable because of their vice.
*Turkey’s irritability is result of him drinking too much wine or “red ink.” The lawyer never “asks himself why he drinks” in the first place.
*Nipper’s problems are a result of vice and genetics.
“nature herself seemed to have been his vintner, and at his birth charged him so thoroughly with an irritable, brandy-like disposition, that all subsequent potations were needless”.

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Summary of the Story Bartleby the Scrivener

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Summary of the Story Bartleby the Scrivener

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https://study.com/academy/lesson/bartleby-the-scrivener-summary-characters-themes-analysis.html

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Background on Melville:

For most of his life, Melville struggled financially. He didn't have much support from his family, who were also under financial stress. And prior to writing "Bartleby the Scrivener" Melville had personally experienced economic hardships. He searched for work without success in Illinois and then later in New York City in 1830, before becoming a commercial sailor and a whaler. He lived in NYC from 1844-1850.

New York City in 1850s:

The city was going through political change. There were labor movements springing across neighborhoods. Often these labor groups had contentious and violent contact with the police authority. This led to a mood of mass political turmoil. Two writers in particular, Bennett who wrote for Herald, and Greeley who wrote for the Tribune, wrote extensively on labor issues. Both championed for the rights of the working class, but both had differing perspective on the problem. Bennett's argument was "there was hardly a rich man in this community, who had not risen from poverty through persevering industry." He argued that wage labor system was consistent with Christian values. Greeley on the other hand chastised the way "Christians harmonized this social injustice" with their faith. He encouraged that workers should resist and fight this unjust system. These protestant values legitimated class privilege and inequality.

The conflict in the story, between the lawyer, who represent Protestant entrepreneur who fused his values with the economic system, and Bartelby who refuse to do work because of the impersonal, unequal and exploitive conditions is "like the opposing positions of Bennett and Greeley" (386)

Setting in the Story:

■Wall Street, in Melville's depiction, is, after work hours, as "deserted as Petra ... an emptiness," a space "entirely unhallowed by humanizing domestic association" (385)

Kuebrich describes it as "attention to the Wall Street setting and the sharp class divisions in the workplace clarify the symbolic function of the story's omnipresent physical barriers: the prison walls, the brick structures that surround the law office, and the fold glass doors and portable screen that divide it internally. phrasing Emerson's trope, the walls are natural facts which suggest social and psychological facts: the densely developed urban setting that separates the story's characters from nature; the growing impersonality of not only of the workplace but of the larger society" (386). Furthermore, there are distinct separation of classes. The clients are the rich, the lawyer represents the upper-middle class and the employees are the lower class. Furthermore the prospect of social mobility for the copyist is really slim. This is shown by the fact that Turkey is still doing that job at his old age, and "Nippers is a frustrated would be lawyer." Bartleby is the representation of the worker who refuses to work in these growing impersonal and unequal conditions.

The Lawyers Outlook upon Work:

■The lawyer constantly attributes the problems of Turkey and Nipper to their nature. Their lives are lamentable because of their vice.

■Turkey's irritability is result of him drinking too much wine or "red ink." The lawyer never "asks himself why he drinks" in the first place

■Nipper's problems are a result of vice and genetics

■ "nature herself seemed to have been his vintner, and at his birth charged him so thoroughly with an irritable, brandy-like disposition, that all subsequent potations were needless" (392)

Workers are Servants of the Boss:

■He identifies his authority with natural order

■"Bartleby's refusals strike him not as acts of resistance to an unjust and humiliating subordination but as "violently unreasonable" (p. 22), whereas his own behavior is "perfectly reason- able" (p. 25). He places Bartleby inside his office behind a high screen so that the scrivener may be hidden from view and yet "within easy call, in case any trifling thing was to be done" (p. 19). On the third day of Bartleby's employment, the lawyer relates how he "abruptly called to Bartleby" in "natural expectancy of instant compliance" (p. 20, emphasis added). It is in response to this brusque summons that Bartleby issues his first "I would prefer not to" " (393).

Main Point:

■"An awareness of the many correlations between "Bartleby" and current social conditions and debates does not in itself explain the mysteries of the story, but it does make a strong prima facie case for viewing it as an historicized text more concerned with then-contemporary economic realities than is usually acknowledged" (388).

Secondary Source: Melville's Doctrine of Assumptions: The Hidden Ideology of Capitalist Production in"Bartleby" by David Kuebrich

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Presentation on "Bartleby the Scrivener"

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Background on Melville: For most of his life, Melville struggled financially. He didn't have much support from his family, who were also under financial stress. And prior to writing "Bartleby the Scrivener" Melville had personally experienced economic hardships.