After being neglected by critics for almost a century, Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" has for the past two decades commanded a considerable degree of scholarly attention.¹ Interest has been focused mainly upon the tale's many shades of meaning, suggestion, and application. Little concern has been shown for the contemporaneous allusions to be found in the story. Several have been briefly noted, but little more than casual interest in them has been expressed. One of these allusions, however, that to the Colt-Adams murder case, is particularly interesting. A careful look at Melville's use of this notorious event is rewarding in the light it sheds upon the author's method and his assumption that the allusion would enhance the effectiveness of a crucial point in the story.

The structure of Melville's thought-provoking tale is simple. The story begins with the introduction of a Wall-Street lawyer (the narrator) and his employees. Into the established routine of these comes Bartleby, a motionless young man, "pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn."² After giving unexceptional service for a few days, Bartleby suddenly declines to participate in checking copy. From here on he more and more withdraws from the routine work of the office until, finally, he is doing no work, simply remaining on the premises day and night, for he also declines to leave. Since Melville does not go behind the screen of Bartleby's mind--the first-person narration would make it difficult--the tale evolves as a study of the lawyer's mind as he struggles with a situation totally outside the bounds of his previous experience. The narrator's attitude varies: he moves from utter exasperation to quiet reconciliation, then to the verge of violence, and to acceptance of the incomprehensible. Among these moods he vacillates, and this accounts for the greater part of the movement of the tale. Unwilling to order the expulsion of this unproductive clerk from his offices, the lawyer himself moves to new accommodations. Bartleby lingers on in what has become his home until the landlord has him committed to the Tombs Prison. Here, Bartleby prefers not to eat, and by this ultimate exercise of the will he dies.

About two-thirds of the way along in the tale, Melville introduces an extended allusion--the only detailed allusion in the story--to the Colt-Adams murder case, which had caused a sensation in 1841 and 1842. The lurid aspects of the crime itself, the unusual publicity provided by the emerging sensational press, doubts about the justice of the decision to hang Colt, and the curious denouement which substituted suicide by knife for the hangman's noose, combined to make an impression which lingered in the minds of some for many decades after the event.³

Though the Colt allusion has not been completely overlooked, it has been given only slight attention. In his biography of Melville, Leon Howard speculated that the Colt case, along with several other possibilities, might have provided a germ for the tale.⁴ Egbert S. Oliver speaks of Melville's "application" of the allusion, suggesting only that Melville implies that behavior such as Bartleby's can arouse one's resentment to the point of wishing to murder someone.⁵ After mentioning the case--and, incidentally, misdating the murder--Robert S. Forsythe proposes Colt's suicide death as a possible source for the final scene of Pierre.⁶ There are a few other passing references to the allusion, but that is about as far as scholarly inquisitiveness has carried the matter.

In mid-afternoon of September 17, 1841, Samuel Adams, the proprietor of a printing shop at the corner of Ann and Gold Streets, was seen strolling up Broadway. He had told an acquaintance that he was going to call on John C. Colt, who owed him money in connection with the printing of the latter's work on bookkeeping. He then vanished from sight. Five days later Horace Greeley's New York Tribune, an Ann Street neighbor of Adams's, briefly noted the disappearance and put out a call for information. On Sunday, the 26^th, Adams's body, crated and consigned to New Orleans, was found on board the Kalamazoo, which was docked at the foot of Maiden Lane. Colt was charged with the killing of his creditor. The murder and the subsequent trial, which began on January 17, 1842, and ended with the jury's decision on the 30^th, created a sensation unprecedented in the annals of New York City crime. The killing had occurred in Colt's office on the second floor of a building at the corner of Broadway and Chambers Street.⁷ After an initial denial, the defense admitted that Colt had killed Adams with a hatchet, insisting that the act had been committed in self-defense. It was admitted, too, that Colt--a brother of Samuel Colt, the inventor of the revolver--had boxed the body and had it carted off to the Kalamazoo. The possibilities of premeditation, accidental slaying in the heat of quarrel, and self-defense were debated in the course of the trial. The fact of Colt's killing Adams was not, except at the very outset, in question.

The jury's decision that Colt should be hanged did not bring an end to the excitement. All avenues of appeal were tried. Prominent citizens publicly took sides. New testimony was offered in the press.⁸ Henry Anthon, the noted clergyman and brother of the even more noted Columbia College classical scholar, conferred with Colt in his cell and was convinced of the veracity of the condemned man's story.⁹ In mid-November Governor Seward turned down the final appeal for clemency. On November 18^th, the day set for the hanging, Colt was married to Caroline Henshaw, his mistress, thus legitimizing the daughter who had been born shortly before the trial. Henry Anthon performed the ceremony in Colt's cell. Long before four o'clock, the hour set for the hanging, the prison yard was filled to capacity with eager sensation seekers.¹⁰ When, a few minutes before four, Anthon and others entered Colt's cell to conduct him to the gallows, they found him dead, a knife through his heart. That the death-wound was self-inflicted was clear; how Colt had got the weapon was not.¹¹ At about this time fire broke out in the wooden cupola of the Tombs Prison, a circumstance later viewed by some as a diversion to effect the escape of Colt. As one today reads the New York City newspapers of 1841 and 1842, it is easy for him to understand why the Colt case became a good deal more than a nine days' wonder.

One might pass the Colt allusion by as not remarkably different from a host of allusions with which authors commonly seek to call upon their reader's knowledge to supply at the hint of a name or an event a multitude of supplementary and illuminating details. But Melville's method in this instance requires a second glance. This was not a hint. Starting with a well-known instance, Melville digressed to ponder small details of the case, even, in effect, to reopen and rejudge it.¹² Moreover, there is a certain amount of interest attached to the fact that he used this allusion at all.

Melville, to be sure, was thoroughly familiar with the New York City scene. He had lived in lower Manhattan and had walked many times past the building in which the crime took place. "Bartleby" was published in the November and December, 1853, issues of the new Putnam's Monthly Magazine. In mid-June of that year Melville was in New York seeing his uncle, Peter Gansevoort, off to Europe. The ship left from the foot of Canal Street,¹³ and it is altogether conceivable that if Melville had "Bartleby" under way at the time, he might have made the easy excursion to Wall Street and to the murder site. There is evidence in the Colt allusion both to support and to refute such an assumption. Whatever he may have done in 1853 or while he was living in New York in the 1847-1850 period, the fact remains that Melville was far from the United States during the Colt-Adams furor.

While Colt was misusing his hatchet on Adam's skull, on that September day of 1841, Melville was far out in the Pacific, south of the Line, and well to the west of the Galapagos Islands. And in that same area he was still aboard the Acushnet, pursuing whales, at the time of the trial. And in November of 1842, when Colt took his own life, Melville was probably at Tahiti. He had sailed out of Fairhaven on January 3, 1841, not to return to the United States until October of 1844.¹⁴ Thus, interest in the case had had about two years to subside before Melville's return and almost eleven years in which to be forgotten by the time he wrote "Bartleby."

It is because Melville's use of the allusion is not casual that one's curiosity is aroused. Why did Melville ponder the Colt-Adams case, at so late a date, as he wrote his tale of a Wall Street lawyer and his most unusual clerk? The question here is of Melville; there is no question that it would be altogether appropriate for his lawyer to think of it. It would be gratifying to discover what brought Colt to Melville's mind at so late a date, but more significant is what Melville did with this recollection after it had somehow made an impression upon his creative consciousness.

As previously noted, the Colt allusion is introduced at a point about two-thirds along in the tale. Bartleby's "preferring not" to do first this and then that has brought on a series of confrontations between the lawyer and his clerk, the latter maintaining a gently adamant refusal to do anything but to copy and the former oscillating among moods of perplexity, self-possession, reconciliation, spasmodic passion, impotent rebellion, stinging melancholy, and repulsion (pp. 107-11). Time effects a rapprochement and it becomes tacitly understood that Bartleby will copy but will do nothing else, e.g., check copy, "step around to the post office," or put his finger on the tie of a bit of red tape. But, in due course, Bartleby refuses even to copy. With remarkable forbearance the lawyer accepts his clerk's incomprehensible idiosyncrasy and, presently, with reluctance, gives him his "notice." Bartleby refuses to leave. It is a this point that, rising to a state of nervous resentment, the lawyer recalls "the tragedy of the unfortunate Adams and the still more unfortunate Colt in the solitary office of the latter" (p. 120). From the outset, Melville thus raises the allusion above the incidental, using it as a means of introducing a loosely related little commentary on the ways of justice. Technically, it is the lawyer who is voicing an opinion here, and he says that he had often pondered the subject (p. 120). Melville's extended allusion indicates that he knew the case in some detail and hence that his sympathy for Colt rested upon something more than a casually charitable mood.

The author's assumption regarding the physical details of the setting of the murder are interesting. To fit his Bartleby theme, he emphasizes the "being alone" and the solitary office aspects of the crime. He seems to see aloneness as bringing out the worst in man. "It was the circumstance of being alone," he says, "in a solitary office, up stairs, of a building entirely unhallowed by humanizing domestic associations . . . which greatly helped to enhance the irritable desperation of the hapless Colt" (p. 120). Several points are in question here. As has been pointed out, Melville knew the general scene. Nevertheless, the facts, as adduced in the testimony during the trial, suggest a somewhat different place from the one imagined by Melville's lawyer.

"Humanizing domestic associations" may have been limited in the building in which the murder was committed, but a caretaker and his wife lived on the premises (Jan. 22, 1842). The former testified that the building housed many portrait painters, at least one sculptor, and an art gallery (Jan. 22, 1842). Colt's next-door neighbor--a man who testified, incidentally, to peeking through Colt's keyhole on the day of the murder--conducted a writing academy. A member of the defense counsel described the building as one "exposed to the visits of the whole community" (Jan. 26, 1842), and one of the attorneys for the prosecution made the surprising statement that Colt had committed the murder in his exposed room on the assumption that "no one would suspect or believe that such an act had been perpetrated there" (Jan. 29, 1842). The presiding judge, the highly respected William Kent, said in his charge to the jury that the building in which the crime took place was "the most frequented house in the most populous city in the Union: the time midday, and separated only by a folding door was a schoolroom filled with scholars" (Jan. 31, 1842). This raises a doubt about the accuracy of Melville's description of a "solitary office." He chose to envision "an uncarpeted office, doubtless, of a dusty haggard sort of appearance" (p. 120), qualifying by the use of the adverb what would otherwise suggest very precise knowledge.

Melville assumed that solitariness, barrenness to the specific point of "uncarpetedness," and the lack of immediate human associations in the surroundings increased Colt's "irritable desperation." Melville had no firsthand acquaintance with the men, and whether Colt was irritable or not, a number of witnesses testified to Adams's irritableness (Jan. 27, 1842). J.R. Whiting, counsel for the prosecution, surprisingly admitted that Adams was "a man of an irritable temper under certain circumstances (Jan. 29, 1842). On the other hand, the young Cyrus Field¹⁵ described Colt as being "more diffident than other people" (Jan. 26, 1842), and John Howard Payne, the actor-playwright author of "Home, Sweet Home!" had "the highest opinion of Colt in every way" (Jan. 27, 1842). But there is no point in pressing the testimony. It is sufficient to say that Melville wrote from assumption rather than from exact knowledge. No one knows who made the first move in the tragic action. The only on-the-scene account was "Colt's Confession," which was read by a member of the defense counsel at the trial and disallowed as evidence by Judge Kent (Jan. 31, 1842). Melville's lawyer-narrator was familiar with the doctrine of assumptions; in fact, he was aware of its shortcomings (pp. 117, 119).

There is a looseness, too, in Melville's ponderings over the Colt case. Overstating in his own mind the solitariness of the office and questionably positing the irritability of Colt, he dwells upon the unfortunate effects of aloneness. He makes here what, even in the most charitable view, must be regarded as an odd statement. He proposes that "had that altercation taken place in the public street, or at a private residence, it would not have terminated as it did" (p. 120).¹⁶ Setting aside the speculation about a private residence, it is important to recall the actual circumstances. The two men quarreled in an office. A fight ensued.¹⁷ Colt killed Adams with a hatchet, packed the body into a crate, and had it carted off. Taken literally, Melville's remark that the altercation would have terminated differently had it occurred "in a public street" is ludicrous.

It has been suggested thus far that Melville was not as thoroughly familiar with the facts of the Colt case as his detailed commentary implies, that he gently shaped the facts to suit his artistic needs, and that in at least one instance his notation upon them was not felicitous. One may also question whether the allusion is truly a propos in the situation in which it is introduced.

The narrator finds himself frustrated in his efforts to handle Bartleby in a manner satisfying to his own ego and to the expectations of a rather obtuse society. His annoyance with Bartleby is not personal. His strong sympathy for the pallid young man constantly betrays itself. The lawyer has been generous to his inactive employee beyond the requirement of Christian forbearance. "Are you ready to go on and write now? Are your eyes recovered? Could you copy a small paper for me this morning? or help examine a few lines? or step around to the post-office? In a word, will you do anything at all, to give a coloring to your refusal to depart the premises?" (p. 119). This is abject pleading. What the lawyer is obviously looking for is not a return for the wage he continues to pay the clerk, but an excuse for his own behavior. How must he look in the eyes of his other employees, not to mention those of the "legal gentlemen" who constantly visit his offices? Some answers are given. One of the lawyer's employees, Nippers, says, "I think I should kick him out of the office" (p. 103); another, Turkey, roars, "I think I'll just step behind his screen, and black his eyes for him!" (p. 105). But violence is really not the lawyer's way of settling personal differences. All who knew him considered him to be "an eminently safe man." The late John Jacob Astor had named prudence as his foremost trait (p. 93). "Cool tranquility" was the hallmark of the behavior of this lawyer who had never suffered turbulence to invade his peace (p. 92).

That this gentle, prudent, tranquil man should finally be raised to the point of nervous resentment by Bartleby's refusal of his employer's most generous request is quite believable. It is believable, too, that he would be irritated by his loss of self-esteem in finding that his clever schemes for getting rid of Bartleby had failed. This is the established tone of their relationship when Melville introduces the Colt allusion. The jump, then, from "nervous resentment" to a recollection of one of the most notorious crimes of the era is vast. The connotations of hatchet-murder-corpse-in-box are simply unsuited to the lawyer-Bartleby confrontation. To the extent that the allusion suggests any actual parallel, it must, after all, put the lawyer in the position of Colt, and Bartleby in that of Adams. It is Melville who insists on this. In the sequel to the allusion he clearly implies that murder entered the mind of the lawyer: "Men have committed murder for jealousy's sake, and hatred's sake, and selfishness' sake, and spiritual pride's sake," he says, "but no man, that ever I heard of, ever committed a diabolical murder for sweet charity's sake" (p. 120). When he then rationalizes himself away from what was presumably the verge of mayhem, it is very difficult to believe that he has actually been there. Moreover, Melville is careless. For it is not until some days later, when the lawyer has moved to new premises to be rid of his clerk, that he finds himself "for the first time," in all his exasperating connection with Bartleby, "fairly flying into a passion" (p. 126, my italics). And then there is the inevitable pun, suggesting that it is all just a big joke. Immediately following the Colt-Adams reference, the lawyer says, "But when this old Adam of resentment rose in me and tempted me concerning Bartleby, I grappled him and threw him." It takes something from the edge of Melville's sympathy for "poor Colt," whose grappling ended differently.

It is clear that in pondering the Colt case Melville was concerned not so much with causes as with the physical details and practical ethics. He seems to see Colt as a victim of a sort of environmental determinism, a force which the lawyer eludes because he is a more prudent, less irritable man. Melville sympathizes with Colt as the lawyer sympathized with Bartleby, but the latter never speculates about the causes of his clerk's behavior. His problem is to cope with Bartleby, not to understand him. Bartleby was "a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness" (p. 131). And poor Colt is "more unfortunate" than Adams (p. 120). Melville assumes Colt's desperation, but probes no further.

Though the Colt allusion seems rather carelessly applied to Bartleby's story, and though it permits speculation about the accuracy of Melville's imagination of the scene, it is chronologically and geographically right on target. The tale has two frames of time reference: the actual time of the lawyer-scrivener episode, and a subsequent time from which the lawyer views the action in retrospect. The two times are not widely separated. Since the lawyer held the office of Master in Chancery at the time of his troubles with Bartleby--indeed, had hired the new clerk because of the additional demands of this office--and since that office was abolished in 1848, it is fitting that he should recall the Colt case, which dated no more than a half dozen years earlier at the most.

Also, the allusion is appropriate to a setting which is centered with detailed care at No. _ Wall Street. (Melville's brother Allan's law office was located at 14 Wall.) A glance at a street map of lower Manhattan in mid-nineteenth century enables one to imagine the lawyer's surroundings much as Melville did, and evoke the spirit of the place. A stroll of a few blocks, perhaps less, would carry one to busy Broadway. "I remembered the bright silks and sparkling faces I had seen that day, in gala trim, swan-like sailing down the Mississippi of Broadway," the lawyer says, describing its Sunday morning appearance. This contrasted sharply with that of Wall Street, which was, on a Sunday morning, as deserted as Petra (p. 109). It was an easy walk from Trinity Church which stood then as now on Broadway at the head of Wall Street, to the lawyer's office, so easy that one finding himself early for the service might quickly step around and pay an unwonted visit to his chambers (p. 108). And the lawyer was a good walker, as was Melville himself. Sometimes he strolled home after work (p. 107), or from home to his office after breakfast (p. 117). Writing to her stepmother in December, 1847, when the newly married Melvilles were living on Fourth Avenue, between Eleven and Twelfth Streets, Melville's wife described a typical day in the life of her author-husband. They would dine at four and then chat for an hour or so. "Then he goes down town for a walk, looks at the papers in the reading room etc., and returns about half-past seven or eight."¹⁸ For the peripatetic habits of his lawyer-narrator, Melville could draw upon pleasant memories.

On the day of the Colt allusion, the lawyer walked to work after breakfast. Just how far uptown his imagined house was he does not say, but it would not have been far from where Melville himself had lived in the early years of his marriage. Only after walking far enough to weigh the pros and cons of his problem with Bartleby does the lawyer come to "the corner of Broadway and Canal Street" (pp. 117-18). The map indicates that at this point he still has something in the neighborhood of twenty-two blocks to go before he will arrive at his destination, perhaps a two-mile constitutional. In spite of his walk, the lawyer arrives at his office earlier than usual, hoping to find Bartleby gone. It is now, when he finds his pallid clerk still in possession of the battlefield, so to speak, that his resentment causes the Colt murder to enter his thoughts. The map shows why the macabre story came readily to mind. After his pause at Broadway and Canal, the lawyer would continue down the former.¹⁹ Eight or nine blocks would bring him to the corner of Broadway and Chambers, the murder building on his right and the top of City Hall Park, where the Colt trial had taken place, on his left, familiar territory to Melville, and familiar to his fictitious lawyer. The evidence is that Melville was very much in and of the scene as he wrote "Bartleby," and perhaps never more so than when he was making his interesting use of the Colt-Adams murder case.

1. In Lewis Leary's Articles on American Literature, 1900-1950 (Durham, N.C., 1954) only two articles devoted exclusively to "Bartleby" are cited. In the supplementary volume (1970), mention is made of at least seventeen.

2. "Bartleby the Scrivener," in Selected Tales and Poems by Herman Melville, ed. Richard Chase (New York, 1950), p. 99. Subsequent references to this work will be included parenthetically in the text.

3. George Templeton Strong, the posthumously noted diarist, was out of the city at the time of the murder, but he gave a great deal of attention to the trial and its aftermath. In 1857 and again over thirty years after the murder, he used the case as a point of comparison in referring to the excitement and interest aroused by latter-day New York City crimes. (See The Diary of George Templeton Strong, ed. Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas [New York, 1952], I, 168, 189-93; IV, 472.) Philip Hone, another diarist of the period, a well-known merchant who had once been mayor of New York, recorded many details of the case in his journal as well as a positive and hostile opinion of the man on trial. (See The Diary of Philip Hone, ed. Allan Nevins [New York 1927], II, 579-80, 635-36.)

4. Herman Melville (Berkeley, Calif., 1951), p. 208.

5. Egbert S. Oliver, "A Second Look at 'Bartleby,'" CE, 6 (May, 1945), 438.

6. Pierre, or The Ambiguities, ed. Robert S. Forsythe (New York, 1941), p. xxvii. As a matter of tangential interest, the Colt case has been seen as a possible source for Poe's "The Oblong Box." See Clifford Vierra, "Poe's 'Oblong Box': Factual Origins," MLN, 74 (1959), 693-95.

7. In the New-York Daily Tribune's running account, the building was sometimes referred to as the "granite building," at other times as the "Granite Building." By the following decade it had come to be known as the Irving House. See [Isaac Pray], Memoirs of James Gordon Bennett and His Times (New York, 1855), p. 296; and "New-York Daguerreotyped," in Putnam's Monthly Magazine (February, 1853), p. 361. Subsequent references to the Tribune will be given by date in the text.

8. See "Colt's Case," The United States Magazine and Democratic Review, XI (Dec., 1842), 652-53.

9. The Diary of George Templeton Strong, I, 190.

10. In London, on November 13, 1849, Melville himself paid for a rooftop vantage site in order to view the hanging of the Mannings, a man and wife who had been involved in a particularly sordid murder. See Herman Melville, Journal of a Visit to London and the Continent, 1849-1850, ed. Eleanor Melville Metcalf (Cambridge, Mass., 1948), p. 36.

11. Diarist Strong noted in italics that Anthon was the last person who was alone with Colt (I, 191).

12. It is not surprising that once Melville became interested in the case, he formed an opinion of its merits. Just about everyone did. Of the three hundred prospective jurors, at the beginning of the trial, the court could select only eleven. The majority of the others said that they had already made up their minds. The twelfth man had to be chosen arbitrarily by the sheriff. See Tribune, January 20, 1842.

13. Jay Leyda, The Melville Log (New York, 1951), I, 475.

14. Leyda, I, 120, 124-25, 156-57.

15. I have found no mention by Field's biographers of his participation in the Colt trial. The latest, Samuel Carter III, makes no mention of it in his fine Cyrus Field: Man of Two Worlds (New York, 1968).

16. Melville himself had ridiculed this kind of speculation. After hearing an Emerson address in Boston he wrote to Evert A. Duyckinck (March 3, 1849): "Swear he [Emerson] is a humbug. Lay it down that had not Sir Thomas Browne lived, Emerson would not have mystified--I will answer, that had not Old Zack's [Zachary Taylor's] father begot him, Old Zack would never have been the hero of Palo Alto." The Letters of Herman Melville, ed. Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman (New Haven, Conn., 1960), p. 78.

17. If I, too, here seem to be making assumptions, I can only plead that I am accepting Melville's premise that an "altercation" did take place. In this assumption I believe he was entirely correct.

18. Eleanor Melville Metcalf, Herman Melville: Cycle and Epicycle (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), p. 49.

19. About six blocks further along he would pass Pearl Street, where Melville was born.

*Used by permission of Studies in American Fiction and Northwest University

**Professor Giddings teaches in the Department of Humanities of the United States Merchant Marine Academy.

return to bibliography