Chatterton! methinks I hear thy name.--Samuel Taylor Coleridge¹

In his Preface to the 1966 edition of Melville's Reading, Merton M. Sealts, Jr., observed that Melville's "literary use of important surviving books remains to be studied; the implications of many known purchases and borrowings have yet to be assessed."² In the interim since this comment, a number of source studies have appeared,³ but none assessing Melville's possible utilization of his two annotated volumes of the poetical works of the eighteenth-century "Bristol Boy" Thomas Chatterton, which he listed in his Journal of a Visit to London and the Continent⁴ as "obtained in London 1849" and valued enough to have rebound near the dirty bookstall in Chancery Lane where he bought them.⁵ Volume One, in addition to Chatterton's poetry, includes the lengthy "Notices of His Life," and it is here, as well as in the poetry, that a surprising number of previously unnoticed "singular coincidences" are found that link not only the biographic facts and careers of the two writers, but also, and of greatest consequence, two exceedingly disparate narratives: the life of the poet and law-office scrivener Chatterton and Melville's tale of Bartleby.

Melville unquestionably examined the contents of both Chatterton volumes, for he not only inscribed each by pen with his name and the date purchased ("Dec. 19, 1849"), but also marked numerous passages throughout in pencil, using his characteristic check mark or vertical line in the margin. Volume Two was later presented to his brother-in-law, John C. Hoadley, and its dedication, dated January 6, 1854, supports the argument that Melville read both Chatterton volumes between their purchase in 1849 and 1854; Jay Leyda, in The Melville Log, states his belief that Melville in all likelihood read his Chatterton volumes at sea on his return voyage from Europe sometime before February in 1850.⁶ At any rate, Melville certainly became familiar with the details of Chatterton's life and with "the strange ambiguity of his character" (C, p. cxi), during a critical period of his literary germination that produced not only "Bartleby, the Scrivener" and others of the collected Piazza Tales, but also Moby-Dick and Pierre.

It is not surprising that Melville was drawn to Chatterton, whose "forte . . . was pathos" (C, p. 319). Here was a ready-made personal emblem--a literary genius, author of sweeping epics, and quintessential romantic whose fate at the hands of Philistines had inspired panegyrics for almost a century after his death. Perhaps Melville experienced a "shock of recognition" when he read about Chatterton, seeing himself as a reincarnation of the earlier self-impelled isolato. Certainly he incorporated many details from Chatterton's life and character in his creation of Bartleby, a figure many see as an autobiographical "parable of the artist."⁷ Both Melville and Bartleby "at first prefer to copy, . . . prefer solitude, both are suspected of being mentally unbalanced. and both are inclined to suicide,"⁸ traits the two share with Chatterton. Furthermore, scriveners, like authors, are paid only for the number of pages they produce, a piece-work means of employment galling to Melville.

As to his acquaintance with Chatterton's poetry, Melville utilized, in slightly altered form, a stanza of the minstrel's song from Aella as an epigraph to Sketch Eighth, "Norfolk Isle and the Chola Widow," in "The Encantadas or Enchanted Isles," a collection written in the same period as "Bartleby." That stanza, along with all the other minstrel songs, Melville marked with a marginal pencil line in his edition. Also, "Cock-a-Doodle- Doo!" published in Harper's in December 1853 (when the second half of "Bartleby" appeared in Putnam's), includes a parody of a stanza of Wordsworth's "Resolution and Independence" reflecting on the desolate fate of poets and citing thoughts of Chatterton, "the marvelous Boy, the sleepless Soul that perished in his pride," as a stimulus for his cheerless meditations. Earlier lines of this poem, which Melville could not have failed to note, allude to "all the ways of men, so vain and melancholy," and to anxiety concerning "Solitude, pain of heart, distress, and poverty,"⁹ circumstances certainly descriptive of both Chatterton and Bartleby.

What did Melville find worthy of marking in his two volumes of the life and works of Chatterton that might appear later in "Bartleby, the Scrivener"? The Preface begins with the editor and biographer C. B. Willcox's compelling declaration that "Perhaps there was never an age in which the literary world were more devoted to studies which involve metaphysical disquisition or analytical reasoning" (C, p. i) than that of which he wrote. Chatterton's chronicler aims "to gratify that class of readers who recognize in the study of man the proper and most ennobling study of their race, and who find delight in examining into the darkest mysteries of the human heart, and exploring the most hidden springs of the human will" (C, pp. i-ii).

Thus the tone is set for "the most curious investigation" (C, p. i) of the life of Chatterton. The verbose and often sentimental biographer emphasizes his subject's "dark destiny" and "perpetual struggles," the brevity of life, and "the solemn agony and terrific grandeur of his death" (C, p. ii). Seeing Chatterton's life as "a kind of psychological romance" (C, p. xxix), Willcox unequivocally declares that such personal qualities and events render Chatterton "at once a sublime study for the poet, and a character of the most absorbing interest to the psychologist" (C, p. ii).

These introductory statements, which Melville marked with a long, vertical pencil mark in the margin, are akin in tone, verbosity, and sentimentality with those of his lawyer, who sees scriveners as an "interesting and somewhat singular set of men," the willful Bartleby obviously obsessing him. Although confident of his powers as a raconteur ("if I pleased, [I] could relate divers histories"¹⁰ of other scriveners), he chooses the brief and fragmentary encounter with Bartleby as his sublime study. The elusive figure proves to be, like Chatterton, "a character of the most absorbing interest to the psychologist," a role the lawyer assumes in his narrative as he seeks to analyze in retrospect his enigmatic employee. Melville describes Bartleby as "inscrutable" (M, p. 35), "unaccountable" (M, p. 27), one "of whom nothing is ascertainable" (M, p. 13), whose actions prove increasingly to be a "sore perplexity" (M, p. 22) both to the lawyer and to the reader who shares his bafflement. Chatterton also troubled his chronicler, for Willcox begged his readers to be patient "till we have rightly unravelled the mysteries of his character" (C, p. lxxii).

Working with what he gleaned from previous versions of Chatterton's biography, Willcox, after his lengthy and melodramatic prefatory apologia, then feels impelled--like Melville's lawyer--to proceed with details of the brief life of his fated subject. He begins with the circumstances of the poet's birth and environment, likewise convinced that "some such description is indispensable to an adequate understanding of the chief character about to be presented" (M, p. 13). Melville's lawyer too sensed the need to know where Bartleby was born, for him to tell him "any thing" about himself, to which inquiries the scrivener replied, of course, "I would prefer not to" (M, p. 20). Therefore there can be no "complete life," as "few passages in the life of Bartleby" are discovered, and Melville's lawyer laments that "no materials exist for a full and satisfactory biography of this man" (M, p. 13); Chatterton's chronicler, in a similar vein, complained, "there are no documents to which we can refer for facts; there are no biographical notices which we can consult.... All that is to be told must be ... woven, as best it can, into the form of a narrative" (C, p. cxx). Thus both Willcox and the fictional lawyer resolutely intend to fill in themselves in compensation for what they see as "an irreparable loss to literature" (M, p. 13).

Melville read that Chatterton's early years were spent as a "charity-boy" at Colston's school in Bristol, a seven-year period that a twentieth- century biographer, E. H. W. Meyerstein, describes in almost Bartleby-like terms: Chatterton "was now immured in . . . a training prison . . . near the heart of the noisy city . . . "¹¹ In 1767, at age fourteen, the youth was apprenticed as a scrivener to Mr. John Lambert, whose offices, like those of Melville's lawyer in New York, were in two different locations during Chatterton's employment, first in Small Street (the suggestion of Wall Street is uncanny), then in two rooms opposite the Bristol Exchange, that city's equivalent of Wall Street. Under the terms of Chatterton's employment, he was provided "food, clothing, and lodging by his master" (C, p. xlix). Melville depicts Bartleby as also dependent on his employer, by one stratagem or another, for his subsistence, keeping "bachelor's hall" in the law chambers, "his constant abiding place and home" (M, p. 29) where he "ate, dressed, and slept" (M, p. 27). Further, in their final confrontation in the office, the lawyer invites Bartleby to go home with him; and when Bartleby is imprisoned in the Tombs, the lawyer pays the grub-man "to provide [Bartleby] with something good to eat" (M, p. 43).

The financially comfortable and "unambitious" Lambert was described by Meyerstein "as a kindhearted man, who read a great deal" (p. 67) but, like Bartleby's employer, had "distinctly limited perception."¹² At first he had little difficulty with his scrivener, "who was always accessible" (C, p. lxxvii) in the same way that Bartleby "was always there" (M, p. 26). Chatterton was "of a melancholy and contemplative disposition" (C, p. Ii) and "not disposed to be over-communicative" (C, p. Iv), like Melville's "silent man" (M, p. 44). The young scrivener at first produced, like Bartleby, "an extraordinary quantity of writing" for this conservative attorney: "Chatterton was a good apprentice. There are still extant in his hand-writing a folio book of law forms and precedents, containing three hundred and thirty-four closely written pages" (C, p. Ii). In a strikingly similar phrase, Melville describes a certain work of Bartleby as "five hundred pages, closely written . . . " (M, p. 20).

In order to accomplish such a volume of work along with his literary endeavors, which by now occupied much of his time, Chatterton "seldom slept, and would even write by moonlight" (C, p. Ix); Bartleby also "ran a day and night line, copying by sun-light and by candlelight" (M, p. 19). He "never went to dinner," "never eat[ing] a dinner, properly speaking" (M, p. 23). Nor did Chatterton eat regularly; ("Of his meals he was ever oblivious;" C, p. xxviii), "living upon a tart only" (C, p. lxi). Twice in the Chatterton "Life" the young man's taste for gingerbread tarts is mentioned; these flat cakes or tarts were indeed one of his few foods,¹³ a close parallel to the diet of Bartleby. Chatterton "never tasted strong or spiritous liquors" (C, p. lxi), while Bartleby "never drank beer like Turkey, or tea or coffee even, like other men" (M, p. 28). As Chatterton's biographer observed, such a life "is rather singular" (C, p. lxvi), a descriptive term Melville uses four times in "Bartleby" (M, pp. 13, 15, 19, 26).

Needless to say, at first Lambert was well-pleased with his diligent new scrivener and gave "the highest testimony to the worth of Chatterton . . . to his regularity in his profession, his punctual attendance on all the duties required of him"; he "never knew him in bad company, or suspected him of any inclination thereto" (C, p. li-lii). In similar phrasing, Melville's lawyer remarked about Bartleby's "freedom from dissipation," for "it was not to be thought of for a moment that Bartleby was an immoral person" (M, p. 27).

A crisis occurred, however, when Chatterton submitted anonymously to local officials, who were planning a celebration of the anniversary of the construction of the Bristol Bridge, a parchment purporting to be an original fifteenth-century document describing the dedication. The scrivener was suspected of being the author, and several citizens confronted him, beseeching him, like Bartleby, "to verify the accuracy of his copy," as it were. When he adamantly refused, Chatterton, who had indeed created the spurious document, "was assailed with threats, to which he retaliated with haughtiness, and flatly refused to give any account. Finding him invincible, they assumed another tone, spoke to him in a gentle manner, talked of patronage and assistance . . . " (C, p. lxv). In a similar scene, Melville's lawyer confronts Bartleby, and Nippers intrudes indignantly, calling Bartleby "a stubborn mule" (M, p. 31). Yet "Bartleby moved not a limb," preferring "not to be a little reasonable" (M, p. 30). Then the lawyer gently called him into his office, but receiving no reply, "in a still gentler tone" (M, p. 30), he repeated his summons. Bartleby, however, was obdurate: "his countenance remained immovable" (M, p. 30). About Chatterton, Willcox cited the opinion that "there is a degree of heroism in his obstinacy" as he "inflexibly persisted to the last," increasingly "more determined in asserting what he had once asserted" (C, p. 308).

A telling marginal notation by Melville in the "Life" of Chatterton appears beside the context of the controversy that ensued when the young scrivener unsuccessfully sought the patronage of Horace Walpole, the renowned connoisseur and man of letters. Like Bartleby, Chatterton "had considerable time to himself." He spent it not only copying legal documents but also creating the pseudo-medieval chronicles of Thomas Rowley, a fictitious fifteenth-century Bristol cleric, samples of which Chatterton sent Walpole. Intrigued at first, Walpole became suspicious about their authenticity and sought to know more about the discoverer of such curious manuscripts. Imprudently Chatterton informed him of his age and station in life, after which Walpole, fearing exploitation, abruptly withdrew interest in Chatterton's chronicles. The young man, however, was resolute, for throughout his brief life, when challenged "to verify the accuracy of his writings," he steadfastly claimed that certain of his poems and essays were originally the work of Rowley, and that he merely copied them, scrivener- like, from antique manuscripts he discovered in a local church. Walpole was convinced, nevertheless, that the "singularly impertinent" (C, p. ciii) Chatterton "was deliberately practicing a deception on him" (C, p. cvi). Yet the image of Chatterton continued to haunt Walpole like an "intolerable incubus," even after the youth's death. Just as the New York lawyer admitted that "In vain I persisted that Bartleby was nothing to me" (M, p. 40), Walpole also was never to free himself of the specter of a pale scrivener.

In Willcox's biography, the word "forger" appears repeatedly to describe Chatterton as creator of the putative author Rowley's works. Perhaps the word is the seed of Melville's grub-man's impression that Bartleby was "a gentleman forger" (M p. 44). Willcox remarked about the irony of Walpole, himself a literary "forger" in his original ascription of The Castle of Otranto,¹⁴ assailing Chatterton for misrepresenting himself both as petitioner and as perpetrator of the Rowley attribution. Melville noted the biographer's rhetorical question about the Walpole controversy: "So might Chatterton have appealed--Was not my Rowley a 'borrowed personage,' and am not I therefore excusable?" (C, p. xcvii-xcviii). Sir Walter Scott is quoted in the 1842 edition of Chatterton's life and works that Melville purchased as having the opinion that Chatterton "probably deprecated the doubtful fame of an ingenious but detected imposter, and preferred the internal consciousness, that, by persisting in the deception he had commenced, future ages might venerate the power of Chatterton, under patronage of the fictitious Rowley."¹⁵ The facts, then, are that Thomas Chatterton was a scrivener/forger, that Bartleby, also a scrivener, was thought to be imprisoned for forgery, and that Melville penciled a passage describing Chatterton's complex "house of forgery" (C, p. cxviii).

The lawyer Lambert's satisfaction with Chatterton's work as an apprentice was short-lived. He began to observe certain "strange peculiarities," especially that his enigmatic young man was becoming increasingly "gloomy and sullen, exhibiting frequent fits of ill temper" (C, p. li). "For days together he would scarcely utter a word. He would enter . . . without deigning to address a single inmate; would occupy his stool at the office in rigid silence, noticing the observations of his fellow-clerks only with a supercilious, sarcastic smile of contempt" (C, p. lxxvii). Elsewhere Willcox describes Chatterton as "silent and gloomy for long intervals together, speaking to no one, and appearing angry when noticed or disturbed" (C, p. lxiv). Chatterton's "intervals of silence, when with difficulty he could be got to speak or make answer to an inquiry" (C, p. liii), are uncannily like Bartleby's "great stillness," "austere reserve," and "morbid moodiness" (M, pp. 26, 28, 29).

"What had he in common with his vulgar associates?" (C, p. lx), Chatterton felt, loathing "the mechanical and always detested duties of his clerkship" (C, p. xlviin). The robotlike nature of scrivener's work also struck Melville, whose Bartleby "wrote on silently, palely . . . mechanically." It was clear that for Chatterton "the disgust which he had conceived for his profession continued to increase" (C, p. lv), much like Nippers, who had "a certain impatience of the duties of a mere copyist" and "wanted . . . to be rid of a scrivener's table altogether." Just as Bartleby was spied upon, so was Chatterton. Lambert would "watch his actions, and if possible, detect him off his post" (C, p. liii). But Chatterton relentlessly "maintained a gloomy reserve, speaking to no one--retreating into his own invisible world" (C, p. lxxvii), silently asserting his "pride, the reserve, the native and unconquerable haughtiness" (C, p. xxvii) of his being.

Such erratic behavior increasingly infuriated the Bristol lawyer, as it does his New York counterpart, and Lambert came to recognize that his employee's neurotic conduct, "already the source of much uneasiness" (C, p. xxiii)--"the silence, the solitude . . . his eccentric habits, his singularities of behavior" (C, p. 308)--"were not attributed to a true cause" (C, p. lxxviin.); Chatterton was, as Melville would describe Bartleby, "the victim of innate and incurable disorder" (M, p. 29). Similarly, Bartleby becomes "a phenomenon totally alien to [the lawyer's] experience and sensibilities,"¹⁶ causing, as the elderly man complains, "a whisper of wonder" to run "all through the circle of my professional acquaintance," "perplexing my visitors, and scandalizing my professional reputation" (M, p. 38).

Chatterton's "fits of absence were remarkable" (C, p. lxxvii); these "moody intervals in which he would be long invincibly silent" (C, p. xxii) increased alarmingly, his life becoming a "total abstraction from all the external world" (C, p. liii). Chatterton too spent time in "dead-wall revery," "would often look stedfastly . . . without speaking, or seeming to see . . . for a quarter of an hour or more" (C, p. lxxvii), with gray eyes (C, p. cxlii), like those of Bartleby. Melville echoes the same terminology: twice in "Bartleby" the lawyer looks "steadfastly" at his scrivener (M, pp. 20, 32). The tense situation soon became unendurable for both Chatterton and his employer; the youth "was continually insulting him and making his life miserable" (C, p. liii). No doubt to Lambert, as to Melville's lawyer, "his perverseness seemed ungrateful, considering the undeniable good usage and indulgence he had received" (M, p. 30), but nothing could be resolved. As Chatterton himself later wrote of his "confinement" in the sterile office routine, "Bristol's mercenary walls were never destined to hold me" (C, p. 712). "The irksomeness of his profession, and the disgust which he had conceived for its restraint, continued to increase, and he soon came to the determination . . . to abandon it altogether" (C, p. cviii). Like Bartleby, "he had permanently given up copying," "had decided upon doing no more writing," and "his decision was irreversible" (M, pp. 31, 32).

One day, while Lambert was rummaging in Chatterton's desk (he too probably thought, like Bartleby's employer, that "the desk is mine, and its contents too"; M, p. 28), he discovered an alarming document, Chatterton's "Last Will and Testament," in which the young man announced his decision to commit suicide in the office the following day. He wrote, "I must either live a slave--a servant, have no will of my own . . .--or DIE" (C, p. cxvii). Lambert, with relief, immediately dismissed him, for like Bartleby's lawyer, he wanted no scandal, sharing the "conviction that the easiest way of life is the best" (M, p. 14). Thus he resolved his predicament of employing the difficult young man with such a "proud and unconquerable will" (C, p. cxliii).

Here the signal correspondence between the life of Chatterton and Melville's Bartleby is most evident: in each narrative, a tolerant yet exasperated lawyer is sorely tested by a remarkably similar exercise of will by an eccentric and threatening young employee. Bartleby's lawyer is so distressed by his scrivener's "strange willfulness" (M, p. 23) that he seeks a resolution of his dilemma by consulting Jonathan Edwards' Freedom of the Will and is thereby inspired to accept his situation with grace as "predestined from eternity," and would have done so, he rationalized, were it not "for the unsolicited and uncharitable remarks" (M, p. 37) of his professional colleagues. In Bristol there was "the general impression that [Chatterton] was going mad" (C, p. lxxvii). Bartleby provoked similar fears, Ginger Nut finding him "a little luny," the lawyer asking "Are you moon-struck?" and later concluding that "he is a little deranged."¹⁷ Perhaps the instability of both scriveners stemmed from the incompatibility of their jobs to their natures; certainly Chatterton was torn between mechanical copying and the obsession with "his own peculiar business"--"copying" the Rowley chronicles that he claimed to have found--just as Bartleby, as Newton Arvin observes, was reduced to the uninspired and intolerable drudgery of a scrivener (p. 242).

After he quit copying for Lambert, Chatterton left Bristol almost immediately for London, in April 1770. Prefiguring Melville's descriptions of Bartleby's prison of "grimy . . . bricks" (M, p. 19) and his view of a "lofty brick wall, black by age" (M, p. 14), in verses said to have been found after his death, Chatterton wrote, "Farewell, Bristolia's dingy piles of brick."¹⁸ His final gesture to those few who wished him well was to purchase and distribute ginger tarts. "Little now remained to be said of Chatterton," Willcox concluded, "and that little consists of no stirring adventures, and of no incidents that can satisfy curiosity or afford amusement to any but those who love a simple story" (C, p. cxx), much as Bartleby's chronicler expresses a similar sense of finality in similar terms: "there would seem little need for proceeding further in this history" (M, p. 45).

The final brief phase in London of Chatterton's life again resembles Bartleby's. He began "miserably to starve," existing on a "morsel of bread, the penny tart and draught of spring water" (C, p. cxxxiv). He settled in a tiny garret room in Brooke Street, like Bartleby's move "from the four walls of the law office to four walls of the city prison."¹⁹ Again his plight resembles Bartleby's, whose "miserable friendlessness and loneliness are here revealed! His poverty is great, but his solitude, how horrible!" (M, p. 27). Offered food by a solicitous neighbor, Chatterton "scorned subsistence" (C, p. lx-viiin), "angrily refused to be fed--to be kept alive--by the bread of charity" (C, p. cxxxvii); though starving, "nothing could induce him again to satisfy his hunger at another's expense" (C, p. cxxxviii). When a kindly benefactor "begged him to take some dinner with her, knowing that he had eaten nothing throughout that period, he was offended at her expressions--refused the invitation, and assured her that he was not hungry" (C, p. cxxxvii). In Bartleby's words, he "prefer[red] not to dine today" (M, p. 44). In his squalid room he had two viewless dormer windows, and "friendless, lone, and unassisted" (C, p. cxxxvii), the young man "in that window . . . loitered for some hours before he retired to his last rest,"²⁰ literally his ultimate "dead-wall revery" (M, p. 31). That same night, August 24, 1770,²¹ Chatterton drank arsenic, lay down just as Bartleby did in the prison yard, and died a suicide.²²

After an inquest, "a coroner's verdict of insanity was returned" (C, p. clx). He was seventeen years old, his life, like Bartleby's, a short story. Willcox describes the "solemn agony and terrific grandeur" of Chatterton's death (C, p. i), when "the sleeper awoke" for the final time "to find his only pillow was a stone" (C, p. cxxxvi); the dead Bartleby is found "lying on his side, his head touching the cold stones," seeming "profoundly sleeping" (M, pp. 44-45). "It is not our intention," Chatterton's biographer gravely concludes, "to profane the chamber of death, or to portray with unavailing and heartless minuteness, the dark imaginings and mental convulsions of 'the sleepless boy that perished in his pride"'; the details, "are not to be coldly delineated in words, but are to be realized by the thinking and sympathetic heart alone" (C, p. cxxxix). In like manner Melville's lawyer demurred, choosing not to describe the analogous scene verbally, confident that "Imagination will readily supply the meager recital" of the denouement (M, p. 45). Each victim would be buried without dignity, Chatterton "among paupers" (C, p. clx) and Bartleby "among uncaring strangers" (M, p. 28).

Turning philosophic, Willcox admitted that he found it "difficult to form a just appreciation of the character" (C, p. cxlii) of the strange young man whose life he documented to "its most melancholy termination" (C, p. cx), especially poignant being the details of "his departure from the world, in which we are all pilgrims and strangers" (C, p. cxxxix). Equally philosophic is Bartleby's baffled narrator, assigning the pathetic scrivener to eternal sleep with "kings and counsellors" (M, p. 45). Melville read in his Chatterton volumes the biographer's conclusion about the brief life of his subject, what he felt was "a tale half-told" (C, p. 319n), "only a melodrama, and no complete tragedy" (C, pp. lxxxi-lxxxii).

In the conclusion of "Bartleby," the lawyer recounts a "vague report," "one little item of rumor" (M, pp. 13, 45), in his frustrated efforts to analyze his subject, to enhance his melodramatic narrative so "sentimental souls might weep" (M, p. 13): that Bartleby had previously worked in the Dead Letter Office in Washington. Willcox's "Life" records curious parallels, first that in Chatterton's death-room "the floor was covered with a multitude of small fragments of paper" (C, p. cxxxix), the poems he destroyed, communications destined never to reach anyone's eyes. Further, "it is related that Dr. Fry. the head of St. Johns College, Oxford, very shortly after the unhappy end of the young poet, proceeded to Bristol . . . to befriend and assist [Chatterton]" (C, p. clxi). On discovering that his venture was futile, that he was too late "on errands of life," Fry realized that an interval of only a few days thwarted his offer of help to one who "died despairing." Similarly, Melville described Bartleby as one "who died unhoping," one who died stifled by unrelieved calamities" (M, p. 45). Another biographer reports an additional incident regarding Chatterton's request on the day before his suicide "to a very respectable friend for some money. . . . The money was sent, with an assurance that he might have more, if he wanted it";²³ in this "dead letter" there was "a bank-note sent in swiftest charity:--he whom it would relieve, nor eats nor hungers any more" (M, p. 45). The young Bristol poet had directed this inscription to be inscribed in "a Mourning Ring" in his "Last Will and Testament": "Alas! poor Chatterton--"; "Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!" concludes Melville's lawyer (M, p. 45).

Melville was an omnivorous reader, "ever dependent upon his sources,"²⁴ gorging himself on whatever he could lay his hands on, but unlike Bartleby, for whom "there was no pause for digestion," what Melville read stayed with him: "the books that really spoke to Melville became an immediate part of him to a degree hardly matched by any other of our great writers in their maturity."²⁵ As an extreme depiction of dejection, denial of self, and retreat from any kind of creative involvement in life, Melville's realization of Bartleby is a powerful study in the ultimate effect of Chatterton's story. Each scrivener would convey a legacy of depression to haunt his employer, whether the lawyer in Bristol or the lawyer in New York, as well as those who read of their similar plights, Chatterton's story providing both a model and imagery for what Melville felt compelled to dramatize as a telling and cautionary statement about the perils of a totally unrealized life. Surely, as so many critics have observed, in "Bartleby" Melville was expressing his doubts and frustrations about reversals in his own literary career; yet he was also writing more universally a parable about human endeavor that all men might heed.

I argue that Melville recognized a kindred spirit in Chatterton, an "appeal . . . hardly to be resisted" (M, p. 16), and that familiarity with the two volumes of his life and works so impressed him with its "fraternal melancholy" that he incorporated in Bartley's genealogical substance something of the scrivener/artist Chatterton. Melville read and marked the lament that the life of Thomas Chatterton had "never been drawn by the hand of a master" (C, p. cxin); the biography of Bartleby related by Melville's Master in Chancery is evidence that there was not to be another such "irreparable loss to literature" (M, p. 13).

University of South Florida

Notes

I wish to express my gratitude to the curators of the Berg Collection in the New York Public Library for granting me permission to inspect these two books of Melville's, from which a record of his notations was made. Metcalf (Melville's granddaughter) remarks that "these volumes of Chatterton contain numerous interesting markings in Melville's usual manner . . . " (p. 152).

return to bibliography