IN A LETTER TO RICHARD HENRY DANA, JR., DATED MAY 1, 1850, Herman Melville describes his meeting in London with Edward Moxon, Charles Lamb's friend and publisher. Moxon became "cordial" upon mention of Lamb, and

concluded by offering to send me a copy of his works (not Moxon's poetry, but Lambs prose) which I have by me, now. It so happened, that on the passage over, I had found a copy of Lamb in the ship's library--& not having previously read him much, I dived into him, & was delighted--as every one must be with such a rare humorist & excellent hearted man.¹

The explicit evidence of Melville's "dive" includes one of the epigraphs to Moby Dick, and an extensive paraphrase, in the lecture called "The South Seas," of Lamb's "The South-Sea House."²

The extent of Melville's immersion becomes more evident, however, in a comparison of the "Elia" essays with Bartleby the Scrivener (1853), one of the Piazza Tales.³ This much annotated story has been interpreted, among other ways, as a"parable" of Melville's career as a popular novelist whose increasing obscurity forced him into a professional and private retreat, and as a study of absolutism versus free will.⁴ The character of the scrivener has also been interpreted as the psychological double of the lawyer narrator.⁵

Various models, in addition to Melville himself, have been suggested for Bartleby, including Thoreau and Melville's friend Adler,⁶ but the influence of Lamb on the characterization, style, humor, and even on the title of the story has never been examined.

Both in tone and in structure Bartleby is patterned on the familiar essay as written by Lamb. The urbane narrator, who has Elia's disposition and love of comfort, introduces himself in a manner both intimate and casual, commenting upon his philosophy, his business, and his general surroundings. The narrator then describes the other occupants of the lawyer's office by the method used in such essays as "The South-Sea House" and "The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple." That is, he pictures each, in turn, in terms of distinguishing habits or traits, so that he gives the reader a short series of near caricatures rather than full character descriptions.

Specific elements in these caricatures seem to be borrowed from Lamb. Turkey, for example, is "a short pursy Englishman" whose changeable demeanor Melville describes by a sun image: "In the morning, one might say, his face was a fine florid hue, but after twelve o'clock meridian--his dinner hour--it blazed like a grate full of Christmas coals . . . the face, which, gaining its meridian with the sun, seemed to set with it. to rise, culminate, and decline . . ." (p. 18). Lamb uses this meridian image, juxtaposed with food and drink, in "The South-Sea House" to picture Evans, a Cambro-Briton with something of the choleric complexion, who has a "tristful visage clearing up a little over his roast neck of veal at Anderton's at two . . . but not attaining the meridian of its animation till evening brought on the hour of tea and visiting." (II, p. 3)

We find aspects of the character of Nippers in Lamb's "The Good Clerk." Nippers "always dressed in a gentlemanly sort of way; and so, incidentally, reflected credit upon my chambers" (p. 21). Lamb's clerk "is clean and neat in his person . . . to do credit (as we say) to the office" (I, p. 127). Nippers "wrote a neat, swift hand" (p. 20), and Lamb's clerk "writeth a fair and swift hand" (I, p. 127). Of Nippers the narrator says, "He was, at least, a temperate young man" (p. 21), and Lamb says of his character, "He is temperate in eating and drinking" (I, p. 127). In introducing Turkey, Nippers, and Ginger Nut, Melville writes "These may seem names, the like of which are not usually found in the Directory" (p. 153), just as Lamb admits, after introducing John Tipp, Thomas Tame and others in "The South-Sea House," that "the very names, which I have summoned up before thee are fantastic. . .' (II, p. 7)

As important as "The Good Clerk" and "The South-Sea House" are, however, it is in Lamb's "Oxford in the Vacation" that Melville possibly found the germs for the name and characterization of Bartleby. After describing himself as "a votary of the desk--a notched and cropt scrivener--one that sucks his sustenance, as certain sick people are said to do, through a quill" (II, p. 3), Elia laments the dissolution of freedom on certain saints' days:

And here I must have leave, in the fulness of my soul, to regret the abolition, and doing-away-with altogether, of those consolatory interstices, and sprinklings of freedom, through the four seasons;--the red-letter days, now become, to all intents and purposes, dead-letter days. There were Paul, and Stephen, and Barnabas--Andrew and John, men famous in old times--

We were used to keep their days holy, as long back as when I was at School at Christ's. I remember their effigies, by the same token, in the old Baskett Prayer Book. There hung Peter in his uneasy posture--holy Bartlemy in the troublesome act of flaying, after the famous Marsyas by Spagnoletti." (p. 8)⁷

The proximity of "scrivener," "dead-letter days" and "Bartlemy" suggests Bartleby, the scrivener, who had previously worked in a dead-letter office, and for whom every day as a clerk is a deadletter day. Bartlemy, or St. Bartholomew, whose feast day is August 24, was a contemplative apostle of Jesus. According to Roman martyrology, he was flayed alive in Armenia, suspended on a cross, and left to die in agonies, exposed to flies.

Both the solitary, saint-like quality and the "dead," ghost-like aspects of Bartleby are related to Bartlemy, though the specific source of these characteristics is less important than that numerous images in the story clearly underline their importance. The scrivener, a contemplative man in a non-contemplative society, retreats, monk-like, into his walled-in hermitage. He moves from a busy world of chaotic reality into a world of spirit, finally achieving a quiet martyrdom by becoming completely non-operative. The word hermitage, which resembles Lamb's description of the South-Sea House as a "Lay-monastery" (II, p. 3), occurs six times in the story.⁸ The repetition emphasizes Bartleby's silent, solitary character. Within this hermitage he remains, in his dead-wall reveries, "oblivious to everything but his own peculiar business there" (p. 27). Even when the furniture is removed from the office he remains, "mute and solitary" (p. 40), in the middle of the deserted room. It is worth noting that Bartleby had not refused to work in the Dead Letter Office, the cloistered hopelessness of which did not necessarily cause his monastic agoraphobia, but which instead provided an escape from the market place. The narrator's discovery "that Bartleby had been a subordinate clerk in the Dead Letter Office at Washington, from which he had been suddenly removed by a change in the administration" (p. 54), is strikingly like, and unlike, Lamb's words in "The Superannuated Man": "I was a poor Carthusian, from strict cellular discipline suddenly by some revolution returned upon the world" (II, p. 197). The difference between "suddenly removed" and "suddenly . . . returned" is significant. The Dead Letter Office, the place of non-communication, is Bartleby's world, his Carthusian monastery, and it is only in such a setting that he is able to exist.

The references to Bartleby as lifeless, related also to the martyred Bartlemy, are even more numerous than those relating to the monastery. He is referred to as a "ghost" (p. 30), and is called "the apparition" (p. 32). He has a "cadaverously gentlemanly nonchalance" (ibid.), makes a "mildly cadaverous reply" (p. 36), and is not permitted "to enjoy his cadaverous triumph" (p. 42). His pale form appears to the narrator as "laid out, among uncaring strangers, in its shivering winding sheet" (p. 3). He fronts the "dead brick wall" (p. 34) in his "dead-wall revery" (p. 38), and persists in "haunting the building generally" (p. 48). The narrator stops seeing him as a person, "a sort of innocent and transformed Marius brooding among the ruins of Carthage!" (p. 35), and begins to regard him as a thing, "the last column of some ruined temple" (p. 39). Finally, the narrator comes to the point where he considers walking "straight against him as if he were air" (p. 42). In his progression to actual, physical death, Bartleby goes from the Dead Letter Office to a Petra-like place of dead, desolate walls, a very tartarus of scriveners. By starving himself, the monk achieves his martyrdom.

Other passages in the Elia essays may have contributed to the characterization of Bartleby. In "Oxford in the Vacation," the same essay in which "Bartlemy" appears, Lamb describes at length the character of D. (George Dyer), a passive scholar who resides at Clifford's-inn, "where, like a dove on the asp's nest, he has long taken up his unconscious abode, amid an incongruous assembly of attorneys, attorneys' clerks, apparitors, promotors, vermin of the law, among whom he sits, 'in calm and sinless peace' . . . none thinks of offering violence or injustice to him--you would as soon 'strike an abstract idea.'" (II, p. 10)

Melville seems to have been especially interested in Lamb's treatment of remote and tranquil individuals. Several of the passages marked with pencil in his personal copy of Thomas Noon Talfourd's Final Memorials of Charles Lamb⁹ concern contemplation. One such passage is about George Dyer, the scholar just mentioned, to whom books were the real world. Lamb describes him as "vegetating" on them (just as Bartleby, in his initial surge of activity, "seemed to gorge himself" on documents) in great libraries, "with the least possible apprehension of any human interest vital in their pages . . ." (II, p. 136). The quoted phrase, suggesting a sort of academic dead-letter clerk, is underlined as well as marked in the margin.

Finally, Bartleby's unwillingness to function as a clerk, or even as a human being, was possibly suggested by "The Superannuated Man," one of Lamb's darker essays. After describing the tedium and meaninglessness of his work as a clerk, Elia says "A man can never have too much Time to himself, nor too little to do. Had I a little son, I would christen him NOTHING-TO-DO; he should do nothing. Man, I verily believe, is out of his element as long as he is operative. I am altogether for the life contemplative" (II, p. 198). Unlike Nippers, who wants "to be rid of a scrivener's table altogether" (p. 20) but who lacks the will to act (or not to act), Bartleby, who "prefers not to," finds his own element by literally doing nothing, by becoming completely non-operative.

The manner in which Melville selected and expanded these diverse passages from Lamb is typical of his elusive creative process; but the indications of influence in tone, general point of view, and especially in character, are discernible. It is evident that Bartleby, the superannuated son of Elia, would be a very different character, or possibly would not exist at all, had Melville not plunged into the "charming punster" in 1849. This is reason enough to add to the long list of those who have contributed to the greatness of America's great scrivener the name of Britain's "rare humorist and excellent hearted man."

1. The Letters of Herman Melville, Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman, eds. (New Haven, 1960), pp. 107-108. The edition Melville read on board the Southampton is unidentified. The presentation copy that he "had by him" was The Works of Charles Lamb (London, 1848). Other pertinent works in Melville's library were Thomas Noon Talfourd, Final Memorials of Charles Lamb, and Lamb's Specimens of English Dramatic Poets, Who Lived About the Time of Shakespeare (New York, 1845). See Merton M. Sealts, Jr., Melville's Reading, A Check-list of Books Owned and Borrowed (Madison, 1966), p. 73. Quotations from Lamb in this essay are from The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, 7 vols., E. V. Lucas, ed. (London, 1903).

2. Merton M. Sealts, Jr., Melville as Lecturer (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), pp. 155-180.

3. The story first appeared in Putnam's Monthly Magazine in November and December, 1853. Quotations in this paper are from The Piazza Tales, E. S. Oliver, ed. (New York, 1948), pp. 16-54.

4. Leo Marx, "Melville's Parable of the Walls," Sewanee Review, LXI (Autumn 1953), 602-627; R. H. Fogle, "Melville's Bartleby: Absolutism, Predestination, and Free Will," Tulane Studies in English, IV (1954), 125-135. Mr. Marx interprets Bartleby's switch from copying what he is told to copy to staring at the wall as "the emblematic counterpart to that stage in Melville's career when he shifted from writing best-selling romances to a preoccupation with the philosophic themes which dominate Mardi, Moby Dick and Pierre." The Scrivener, or artist, Mr. Marx suggests, makes the fatal error of turning his back on mankind. The study, thus, is seen as a rebuke to the self-absorption of the artist.

5. Mordecai Marcus, "Melville's Bartleby as a Psychological Double," College English, XXIII (February 1962), 305-368.

6. Egbert S. Oliver, "A Second Look at Bartleby," College English, VI (May 1945), 431-439; Leon Howard, Herman Melville, a Biography (Berkeley, 1951), p. 208. For additional interpretations see Marvin Felheim, "Meaning and Structure in 'Bartleby,'" College English, XXIII (Feb. 1962), 369-376; Frank Davidson, "'Bartleby,' A Few Observations," Emerson Society Quarterly, XXVII (2nd Qar., 1962), 25-32; R. D. Spector, "Melville's Bartleby and the Absurd," Nineteenth-Century Fiction, LVI (Sept. 1961), 175- 177; Norman Springer, "Bartleby and the Terror of Limitations," PMLA, LXXX (Sept. 1963), 410-418. See also the Melville Annual 1965 A Symposium: Bartleby the Scrivener, Howard P. Vincent, ed. (Kent, Ohio, 1966).

7. The Spagnoletti referred to by Lamb is José de Ribera, the Spanish painter who worked in Naples in the 17th century. The painting is in the Museo di San Martino, Naples. See Elizabeth du Gue Trapier, Ribera (New York, 1952).

8. Pp. 25, 27, 28, 30, 36, 44.

9. Talfourd, two volumes (London, 1848). I wish to express my gratitude to Mr. Alexander Clark of the Firestone Library, Princeton University, for permission to inspect these volumes.

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