Other New York City Stories & Authors

Washington Square Park, Triumphal Arch

Despite the facts that "Bartleby the Scrivener" was set in Manhattan and that Melville has a close connection to New York City himself, he is not generally regarded as a New York City author. The Realists (post-1865) who came after the days of Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe, were more apt to use New York City as a setting for their novels and short stories -- telling of the lives of the upper crust of society as well as the immigrant poor. So, who are the New York City realists who followed Melville?

Edith Wharton is probably the most prolific and well-regarded of them. Several of her novels are set in New York City -- Custom of the Country, The Age of Innocence, and Old New York; Stephen Crane's Maggie of the Streets, Henry James' Washington Square, and John Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer are others. Although Willa Cather is best known for her prairie novels and short stories, she set several of her stories (e.g., "Paul's Case" and "Neighbour Rosicky") at least partially in New York City, usually in order to contrast big town lifestyles with small town attitudes.

This semester we will next be getting into the realm of realism by reading Edith Wharton, Stephen Crane, and Willa Cather, although not their New York stories.

Required Reading: The Dead Letter Office

The lawyer-narrator in "Bartleby" comments, "Dead letters! Does it not sound like dead men?" Melville quite purposefully gives only one fact about Bartleby, his perplexing scrivener -- and even that fact is ambiguous being that it is only based on hearsay. Bartleby's previous job is said have been as a sorter in the Dead Letter Office in the post office.

So, what's the Dead Letter Office? Here's an informative 1992 article from the National Postal Museum, giving a brief history of the office. This is required reading:

In the years before World War I thousands of letters handled by this country's postal service went undelivered. They ended up in the waste bin because they were addressed improperly or incompletely, or were illegible. When local postal workers were stumped about what to do with a letter they couldn't deliver they forwarded the stray mail to the Dead Letter Office.

This wasn't the letter morgue you might imagine. Here, the misguided missives were not simply forgotten. Instead, a group of skilled dead letter detectives set about to discover the correct destinations so that the mail might get delivered.

one day's collection of "dead letter"

Basically, dead letter clerks handled three types of mystery mail: Misdirected letters, which were those which had all of the right information necessary to get them delivered, but for some reason were sidetracked, largely either because they weren't handled correctly by postal employees or had been abandoned at the designated post office; "Blind Readings," so called because to the average postal worker the address would appear as though it was read blindfolded; and prank mail.

Only the Dead Letter Office had the authority to open letters which couldn't seem to get delivered. Once opened, the contents of letters were considered sacred, so much so that the dead letter clerks were—and still are—forbidden to read any more of the communications than absolutely necessary to determine where the letters should go.

At the end of the 19th century it was not uncommon for the clerks in the Dead Letter Office to handle as many as 23,000 pieces of "dead" mail daily. Unfortunately, scarcely more than 40 percent of these letters ultimately got to the proper destination, although not for lack of effort. The rest generally were sold as scrap paper.

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Bartleby: The First American 'Office Space' Drama?

Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" presents the first known mention of a cubicle-like office space in American literature. The cubicle in its present form made its appearance in 1968, the invention of Robert Propst -- who lived to regret his invention despite the fact that it made him millions. It is now a $3 billion per year business. Before he died Propst denounced and disowned the invention, calling it "monolithic insanity" among other epithets.

Dilbert

Here's a 2006 article called "Trapped in Cubicles," published in Fortune magazine:

Robert Oppenheimer agonized over building the A-bomb. Alfred Nobel got queasy about creating dynamite. Robert Propst invented nothing so destructive. Yet before he died in 2000, he lamented his unwitting contribution to what he called "monolithic insanity."

Propst is the father of the cubicle. More than 30 years after he unleashed it on the world, we are still trying to get out of the box. The cubicle has been called many things in its long and terrible reign. But what it has lacked in beauty and amenity, it has made up for in crabgrass-like persistence.

Reviled by workers, demonized by designers, disowned by its very creator, it still claims the largest share of office furniture sales--$3 billion or so a year--and has outlived every "office of the future" meant to replace it. It is the Fidel Castro of office furniture.

So will the cubicle always be with us? Probably yes, though in recent years individuals and organizations have finally started to chart productive and economical ways to escape its tyranny.

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Cubicle office life has been the comic and tragic-comic subject of some contemporary entertainments such as the cartoon Dilbert and a recent movie called Office Space. The movie features a character named Milton, a guy who was laid off, but didn’t know it and kept working at the company even when they corrected a clerical error that kept paying him. Here's an interesting tidbit from the real world: A story from New Jersey is basically the opposite of that. Anthony Armatys accepted a job at a telecom company called Avaya in 2002, then changed his mind. However, he’d already been added to the company payroll, and it didn’t occur to anyone to take him off of it. Five years later,in 2007, someone finally realized Armatys had been collecting a paycheck for not working. He pleaded guilty to a count of theft as part of a plea bargain.

Wall Street, 1850's

Wall Street, 1850's

Our next tale -- Bartleby the Scrivener: A Tale of Wall Street -- is set primarily on Wall Street in New York's finance district during the 1850's. The view above shows Trinity Church at the head of Wall Street and the old Custom House, seen at right with flag--today the Sub-Treasury--and a number of bank buildings in the Greek Revival style of architecture. Both Trinity Church and the old Custom House are both mentioned in Melville's story.

Wall Street, 1902

Wall Street, financial heart of the nation, is itself but little more than a third of a mile long from its head at Broadway to its foot at the East River, although its name is applied to a small district lying to the north and south. Functionally, Wall Street is a complex mechanism developed to provide the centralized banking and credit facilities and the efficient securities market place that modern industry and commerce demand. Walled in by towering structures, the street, by historical coincidence, is well named.

Wall Street Financial District, lower Manhattan

Wall Street, 2006

At this place in 1653, Peter Stuyvesant, governor of New Amsterdam, ordered a protective wall built across what was then the colony's northernmost limit. It was not long before the city had pushed past this barrier, and under British rule the district flourished as a center of government and fashion. Following the Revolution, Wall Street became for a year the seat of the Federal Government, and here were located the establishments of such statesmen and leaders of commerce as Alexander Hamilton and John Jay. Read on...