At the end of 2011 “Bartleby, the Scrivener” took on a new life. Suddenly people were reading the story out loud in public and turning the refrain “I would prefer not to” into a slogan for posters, billboards, and banners. “Bartleby” had become a story of Wall Street for those who witnessed new kinds of depredations on America’s most symptomatic thoroughfare; a nineteenth-century magazine story was now lead soloist in the orchestration of Occupy protests across the United States. Occupy did not pick “Bartleby” at random. A permanent fixture on high school reading lists and in introductory surveys of nineteenth-century American literature, “Bartleby” always had the advantage of not being Moby-Dick, that great whale of a novel students struggle to read; in “Bartleby” one makes Melville’s acquaintance without embarking on a long and perilous voyage with Ishmael, Queequeg, and Captain Ahab. The story also persists in American literary culture with a stubbornness of which Bartleby himself would have been proud; its golden ratio of density to length keeps critics busy as they test out new methods and approaches. The result is that “Bartleby” has become the most written-about short story in American literature. No other story but “Bartleby” has ever been described as having its own “industry.”1 If such a thing as a public literary consciousness exists, “Bartleby, the Scrivener” is embedded there. The 2008–9 financial crisis and the economic events that followed inspired people to start humming a familiar melody.
Longevity is a notable achievement for any story. But it is particularly rare for the ordinariness and anonymity with which “Bartleby” entered and exited print circulation to precede such recognition and acclamation. No reprintings other than in The Piazza Tales appeared during Melville’s lifetime. Some of Hawthorne’s most important tales—“Roger Malvin’s Burial,” “Wakefield,” and “Rappaccini’s Daughter”—were not reprinted beyond the Twice-Told Tales and Mosses from an Old Manse; “Young Goodman Brown” reappeared only once, in 1859 in the Portland, Maine, Christian Intelligencer and Eastern Chronicle. But Hawthorne published multiple editions of these two collections during his lifetime, and his other tales were subject to perpetual and widespread unauthorized reprinting.2 Poe’s employment as an editor on various newspapers and magazines in different cities meant that he constantly reprinted his own work in slightly altered form. Multi-volume collections of this work appeared regularly after his death for the rest of the century.
Melville’s magazine work did enjoy an afterlife, but like the end of his tenure as a writer of magazine stories it was an afterlife marked by diminuendo rather than fanfare. As Melville embedded his writing in the everyday rhythms of literary life—its material economies, its genres, editorial practices, paratexts, and cast-off narratives—so the ordinary life of literary culture reciprocally embedded Melville in its material practices and its recycling and anthologizing impulses. In ways that make the contemporary pervasiveness of “Bartleby” gloriously and inexplicably unlikely, Melville continued to knock elbows with characters intimately connected to his magazine work and remained embedded to the last.
By the summer of 1855 he had turned his attention to a new project, The Confidence-Man. The evidence suggests Melville still considered himself a magazinist at this point but that his patrons at Putnam’s did not. Toward the end of June, George William Curtis wrote another of his diligent business letters to Joshua Dix. Among his thoughts on William Douglas O’Connor and Longfellow, Curtis offered a one-sentence judgment on Melville: “Decline any novel from Melville that is not extremely good.”3 This was ten days after his change of heart about “The Bell-Tower.” Dix’s letter to which Curtis responded no longer exists. But working backward from the date of Curtis’s letter we know that Melville wrote to Dix offering him The Confidence-Man for serialization in the hope that he could secure the same five dollars a page plus novel publication that he arranged for Israel Potter. After Curtis’s advice, Dix proved indifferent to Melville’s magazine ambitions. The break he took to concentrate on the unserialized The Confidence-Man meant Melville lost his magazine momentum. “The ’Gees” was nearly two years old by the time it appeared in Harper’s in March 1856. “I and My Chimney” and “The Apple-Tree Table” graced the March and May issues of Putnam’s even though Melville composed both stories the previous year. Cut adrift and determined to go through with what was now a stand-alone novel, Melville faded from the green wrappers of Putnam’s and the white wrappers of Harper’s and made only a fleeting encore when Harper’s published several poems from Battle-Pieces in 1866.
In financial terms Melville would have benefited from more, not less, magazine writing. In retrospect, The Confidence-Man gloriously caps a maverick novel-writing career, but a pragmatic word persuading Melville to churn out more stories would have been sage advice; it might have kept him going long enough to produce fictional gems other than just the posthumously published Billy Budd. In February 1856 he paused to complete “The Piazza,” a new story Dix asked him to write to introduce The Piazza Tales. But through the May publication of this collection, and the summer that saw him finish The Confidence-Man, Melville suspended his cycle of magazine writing. He was embedded in his own career to the extent that he either missed or misjudged the next move. All the best fiction writers have the capacity to distance themselves from their own writing, to demarcate author from narrator so that the writer’s thoughts appear in the third person. Melville was no exception. But he showed little capacity for thinking about himself in the third person long enough to forge a career in the same way he forged memorable narrators and ideas. Like someone learning to dance, Melville spent too long having to think where to put his feet; by the time they were in the right place the music had moved on. Dix & Edwards, and even Curtis, still had enough faith in him and his magazine output to see The Piazza Tales and The Confidence-Man into print, but whether or not Melville intended to resume his well-paid magazine career, events intervened to move him in a different direction.
Melville had agreed to pay back the loan from his friend Tertullus Stewart, which had enabled him to buy Arrowhead, by May 1, 1856. Even with his magazine work he could not afford the repayment. Instead he put part of the Arrowhead estate up for sale. The land sold quickly and Melville avoided financial insolvency, though mainly thanks to the beneficence of his always reliable father-in-law, who found a way to discharge his son-in-law’s debts even though Melville received payment for the land only in installments, the last of which was not due until April 1, 1859. Rheumatism and sciatica, as well as another unidentified illness, also affected Melville’s health. Melville and his family thought a prolonged trip abroad would effect a cure. The time to head off was on completion of The Confidence-Man. Melville left the manuscript with his brother Allan and shortly thereafter set sail for Europe and the Mediterranean on October 11. By the time he returned on May 20, 1857, Melville’s go-to publisher and magazine were in the midst of a spiral of decline from which neither would recover.
The rot at Putnam’s had already begun by the summer of 1856. In the Dix & Edwards partnership, Arthur Edwards took responsibility for financial affairs. To the cost of all others involved in the firm he proved no John Jacob Astor or J. P. Morgan. Dix eventually discovered that Edwards had disguised from the other partners that a promised investment from Edwards’s brother had never arrived. With their assets dwindling, the partnership needed capital from elsewhere. George William Curtis came to the rescue. He invested $10,000 in May 1856 and signed over to the company the copyright for all his books. But circulation continued to decline—to seventeen thousand by August 1856—and the other investors eventually forced Edwards to give up operational control. Frederick Law Olmsted, who invested $5,500 in March 1855, was furious with Dix:
I can’t tell how ashamed I am of being involved in such a mess as you describe. You have always, even when most out of temper with him, spoken of Edwards as prodigiously excellent as a man of business—a financier, namely. I am a wretchedly poor man of business. . . . But with half the obligations upon me that he has, if I made such a mistake as you describe him to have made, I would not sleep till I had resigned my office & relieved myself of obligations for which I was so incompetent. . . . That you have known of such a state of things and have still allowed Edwards to manage our money affairs is—I must say more than extraordinary—incredible.4
The firm was losing $1,000 a month, and disharmony affected relations among the partners. Substantial further investment was needed to pay off Edwards and put the business on a sounder footing.
Curtis came to the rescue again. Now married, he persuaded his father-in-law, Francis Shaw, to invest $25,000 in February 1857. In April, new articles of agreement dissolved the existing partnership; the business and its debts were sold for one dollar to a new firm consisting of Curtis, Olmsted, and the magazine’s printer, John Miller, who joined the others to protect his financial interests. To try to publish their way out of trouble, Miller & Co.—from June, Miller & Curtis—issued an American version of the Gentlemen’s Magazine, the first U.S. edition of The Dead Secret by Wilkie Collins, and a selection of long-forgotten minor works. Though Curtis defended their record, none of this activity brought financial stability. The inevitable followed. “We failed today!” Curtis wrote Olmsted on August 6.5 Treated as a general rather than a limited partner, Shaw was left with debts of $70,000; Curtis lost everything and had to support himself with his work at Harper’s and a busy lecturing schedule; Putnam’s ceased publication with the September issue, though Emerson’s United States Magazine bought the remnants of the business and kept the famous name alive for another year as the subordinate partner in Emerson’s Magazine and Putnam’s Monthly.
By the time Melville returned to New York City, then, Putnam’s was in its death throes. This book began with Melville traveling to Dalton to buy paper on which to write Moby-Dick and fortuitously stumbling on a mill he would later turn into the subject of his magazine fiction. The creditors who consigned his literary employers at Putnam’s to the ignominy of insolvency were the paper merchants Charles Kendall and Alexander Rice, who published an injunction in Boston and New York City newspapers preventing the partners of Miller & Curtis from disposing of their assets.6 Embedded in the material economy of paper even before he began his magazine career, the end of Melville’s magazine career was itself embedded in the balance sheet of paper exchange.
Had he wanted to continue with magazine writing there were magazines enough beyond Harper’s and Putnam’s to support his endeavors. As Godey’s Lady’s Book promised Melville to its readers in 1851, so now the Atlantic Monthly advertised Melville as a future contributor on the back cover of the new magazine’s first issue in November 1857. Melville had written enthusiastically to the magazine’s publishers, “I shall be very happy to contribute, though I can not now name the day when I shall have any article ready” (C 310). He may have fully intended to resume his magazine career at this point. But there is also something permanent about Melville’s deferral. He does not suggest he might send something next year, or in the next few months. If to the lawyer in “Bartleby” dead letters sound like dead men, then not being able to “name the day” sounds like not wanting to name the day and not wanting ever to “have any article ready.” The Atlantic Monthly’s promise proved false. The trip to Europe and the Mediterranean produced no new tales Melville felt compelled to turn into magazine stories or novels. Whether he knew it or not at this stage, Melville’s fiction writing career was over.
With the help of Curtis’s influence and contacts Melville chose the lecture circuit instead, but his diminishment continued. He told Curtis on September 15, 1857, that he had been “scratching my brains for a Lecture” and ended the letter by asking: “What is a good, earnest subject? ‘Daily progress of man towards a state of intellectual & moral perfection, as evidenced in history of 5th Avenue & 5 Points’” (C 314). If the suggestion was ironic, it indicated Melville’s skeptical attitude to the venture that would see him embark on three unsuccessful seasons as a lecturer. Invitations arrived on Curtis’s prompting, and Melville was thankful in his last known letter to his former editor: “I have received two or three invitations to lecture,—invitations prompted by you—and have promptly accepted. I am ready for as many more as may come on” (C 316). In his first tour, between November 1857 and February 1858, Melville spoke on “Statues of Rome” in sixteen towns and cities; the following season he chose “The South Seas” as his talk in ten locations; and in his final season, speaking on “Traveling,” he appeared only three times. Lecturing required that Melville the writer become Melville the speaker. No longer words on a page, he was now a voice and a person in a room full of other people. Neither the lectures nor the lecturer proved compelling.
Unsuited to this new interactive world, Melville remained embedded during what remained of his publishing career in the mediatory relationships of print. In September 1857 he corresponded with Curtis about the printing plates for The Piazza Tales and The Confidence-Man. While he initially showed some interest in acquiring the plates, later he wrote Curtis: “Sell them without remorse. To pot with them, & melt them down” (C 316). Fire had already destroyed Melville’s words when the Harper firm’s premises collapsed in flames four years earlier; now his words would dissolve in another cauldron of fire. Late in life Melville still liaised with printers as he had done with Moby-Dick. He hired Theodore Low De Vinne, the printer of Century Illustrated Magazine, to produce his penultimate collection of poems, John Marr. One of the most important nineteenth-century American printers, De Vinne wrote books on the history of printing and typography and cofounded the Grolier Club in New York City with other bibliophiles to promote the book arts. De Vinne also printed books for the Grolier, one of which was Curtis’s Washington Irving: A Sketch. Published in 1891, the same year Melville died and a year before Curtis himself died, the book appeared in a limited edition of 344 copies printed on handmade paper in a red morocco leather binding with the Grolier Club insignia stamped in gilt on the center of the front cover. This was much like the cover Melville said he would have preferred for Cooper’s The Red Rover when he reviewed a new edition in 1850 (PT 237). John Marr appeared in much less distinguished clothing. The “light creamy tan stiff paper” bore only the collection’s title and not even Melville’s name (PP 563).
For Timoleon, Melville engaged the Caxton Press to see his final work into print. A much less prestigious and meticulous printer than De Vinne, the Caxton firm compromised the layout of Melville’s poems by squeezing more than one poem onto a page and awkwardly paginating the collection (PP 577). Again, Melville’s name was nowhere to be found. After starting out as a named author with prestigious publishers, then becoming an anonymous author for prestigious magazine publishers, in his editions of poetry with print runs of only twenty-five copies each, Melville capped his writing life by achieving the dubious status of anonymous self-publication.
But Melville’s name and magazine life also lived on and became embedded in the anthologizing impulse of the mid- and late nineteenth century. Three of his stories materialized again in print. “Poor Man’s Pudding and Rich Man’s Crumbs” twice reappeared relatively quickly after the June 1854 issue of Harper’s: in the Salem Register of June 19, 1854, and the August 1854 issue of the Buffalo Western Literary Messenger. On both occasions the diptych made for quick periodical filler. With “The Lightning-Rod Man,” however, reprinting embedded Melville in new relation to his peers. The story appeared in William Evans Burton’s Cyclopedia of Wit and Humor, published first in 1857 and several times subsequently right through to 1898. A former actor, Burton founded Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine in 1837 and worked with Poe as his editor until their tempestuous relationship broke down in 1840; he sold the magazine a year later, at which point it became Graham’s Magazine. The Cyclopedia anthologized humorous magazine and book sketches and stories from America, Ireland, Scotland, and England, and combined them with several steel and hundreds of wood engravings in a two-volume extravaganza of lighthearted reverie.
“The Lightning-Rod Man” appears in volume 2. Sixty pages earlier appeared “Our New Livery and Other Things,” a section of The Potiphar Papers that Curtis published in Putnam’s Monthly in April 1853. Burton even deemed Curtis important enough to include his engraved portrait. And Curtis was not the only fellow Putnamite in the Cyclopedia. Burton also included two contributions from Charles Frederick Briggs: “Elegant Tom Dillar” and “Clearing a Stage.” Burton’s book reads like a who’s who of forgotten nineteenth-century American writers. Unspectacularly in their midst stands Melville and “The Lightning-Rod Man,” complete with an illustration by the prolific caricaturist and humorist Henry Stephens.
The only other story that reappeared after The Piazza Tales was the one over which Curtis changed his mind so dramatically, “The Bell-Tower.” Like “The Lightning-Rod Man,” what marked out this slightly later Melville story for editors was its generic qualities. The Italian Renaissance setting added a layer of mystery and distance to the events of Bannadonna’s demise. In 1875, Rossiter Johnson included “The Bell-Tower” in the third volume of what would become an eighteen-volume series of collected short stories and essays titled Little Classics. “Exile” and “Intellect” structured the first two volumes; Melville’s story fell under the heading of “Tragedy.” After Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue” and stories by J. W. DeForest and William Mudford, “The Bell-Tower” precedes Emily C. Judson and Henry Mackenzie before Thomas De Quincey’s “The Vision of Sudden Death” rounds off the volume.
Johnson was a former newspaper editor who became a gatherer, filterer, and précisist of Anglophone life and culture. Notwithstanding “some feeling of embarrassment” at the “lack of any perfect test” for a classic, Johnson in his preface to the series claims “ours is the day of small things,—small as the diamond and the violet are small.” While the novel is not yet done, he argued, brevity in literature possessed distinct advantages in the modern age: “The work of art which, embodying a sacred principle or a living idea, condenses its plot, its moral, and its effective climax into the limits of a single sitting must, in an age of crowding books and rushing readers, possess a decisive advantage over the unwieldy conventional novel, with its caravan of characters and its long bewilderment of detail.”7 In this preface one can here turning the gears of genre distinction out of which rolled the short story.
Johnson also worked as coeditor on various multi-volume projects, including the American Cyclopaedia with George Ripley and Charles Dana, before taking over as general editor of Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography. In Little Classics Melville’s name and work take their place once more besides his Harper’s and Putnam’s companions. The fourth volume of the series, “Life,” featured a piece of fiction from the December 1853 issue of Putnam’s Monthly in which the second installment of “Bartleby” appeared. But Johnson’s choice was not “Bartleby.” Instead, he selected “My Chateaux,” one of Curtis’s Titbottom pieces that appeared in book form as Prue and I. In the final volume of the series, Johnson provided pen portraits of each of the 150 authors whose work made up the previous seventeen volumes. In this volume Melville bumped along with Curtis, with William Douglas O’Connor, John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry David Thoreau, Arthur Clough, Thackeray, Bayard Taylor, Charles Reade, Donald Mitchell, James Russell Lowell, Longfellow, Edward Everett Hale, Dickens, William Cullen Bryant, and Joseph Addison. All these authors at one time or another shared the pages of the same magazines in which Melville appeared or were mentioned in the same breath as Melville. In Johnson’s series Melville was embedded as just one among the many, and Curtis, not Melville, offered a more credible vision of “Life.”
The final appearance of “The Bell-Tower” was similarly embedded in a voluminous publishing venture, Edmund C. Stedman and Ellen M. Hutchinson’s Library of American Literature from the Earliest Settlement to the Present Time (1887–90). A forerunner of the Norton and Heath anthologies, this work followed in the tradition of Evert and George Duyckinck’s Cyclopaedia of American Literature (1855), one aim of which was to make available to the public a digestible and modestly priced publication for the home library. In their preface, Stedman and Hutchinson write: “If our task shall be rightly executed, an important addition will be provided for the library of an American household. The work, as its name implies, will be a library in itself, whose contents are most attractive, offering precisely that of which the home-reader wishes to be informed.”8 Melville appeared in the seventh of eleven volumes. His presence was more substantial than in either the Burton or Johnson anthology. Three poems from Battle-Pieces appear immediately after “The Bell-Tower,” and Melville’s portrait, based on Joseph Eaton’s 1870 oil painting, is one of fourteen engravings in the volume.
But even this accolade makes the inclusion of “The Bell-Tower” and three poems seem partial and slight. The anthology spends three volumes on the period 1835–1860. This is necessary, the authors argue, “for any representation of the genius of Poe, Emerson, Longfellow, Bancroft, Motley, Hawthorne, Lowell and other worthies of their prime.”9 As well as “Young Goodman Brown,” extracts from The Scarlet Letter, The Blithedale Romance, The House of the Seven Gables, and The Marble Faun represent the range of Hawthorne’s career. But there is nothing from Typee or Moby-Dick to suggest Melville had a career in novels. Arranged chronologically by the author’s date of birth, the series included Curtis in volume 8. Together with an engraving there were two short poems and extracts from The Potiphar Papers, Prue and I, and a eulogy Curtis gave for Wendell Phillips. Melville and Curtis occupied precisely the same number of pages—fourteen—in this library of American literature. Curtis was no longer “Mr. Melville’s younger brother in letters,” as Fitz-James O’Brien once described him, but Melville’s twin. Neither warranted a steel engraving conferring status. That honor in these three crucial volumes went to Hawthorne, Poe, James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Francis Parkman, and Bayard Taylor. Melville and Curtis, who together circulated through American homes in the covers of Putnam’s and Harper’s, now recirculated in a library compendium as the dark matter between American literature’s true stars. In that position Curtis still hangs suspended; gravity eventually exerted enough pressure on Melville that he took his place in the night sky, but with no “Bartleby” and no “Benito Cereno,” American literature looked a very different galaxy at the end of the nineteenth century.
The aim of this book has been to show that historical contingencies inspired the production of Melville’s magazine writing but that contingency of this kind does not by itself account for their finished form. Melville’s embedded authorship brought him into relation with the materials of his trade, lodged him in the genres of magazine writing that set the parameters for his work, and brought him into contact with actors in the publishing industry who judged his work. But these contexts do not by themselves account for why Melville produced writing so different from, say, Curtis’s. When he is steering the Pequod in “The Try-Works” chapter of Moby-Dick, Ishmael observes his fellow whalers as they turn blubber into oil. In the intensity of his observation, he suddenly finds himself turned about, “fronting the ship’s stern, with my back to her prow and the compass” (MD 424). In this moment Ishmael sees himself and those he observes in a new light. Melville found perspective by turning in a different direction to face the world in which he lived; this capacity is what shaped the magazine writing’s form and saw him produce writing not expected or, in some instances, not wanted by his context. Curtis was never able to achieve this.
Not all of Melville’s magazine work demonstrates these qualities. One story absent from this book until now is “Jimmy Rose,” a story little written about during the last 160 years and for good reason. Of all the stories Melville published in Harper’s and Putnam’s it remains the most stubbornly prosaic. A sentimental sketch that blended seamlessly with the magazine content alongside which it appeared in Harper’s, this story has been forgotten even by the anthologists. There are traces of techniques Melville used to better effect elsewhere in his magazine writing: the iterative diction of “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” in the repetition of the word “fine”; Jimmy’s rosy cheeks that reprise the maids’ cheeks from that same story. But there are none of the signs that Melville was facing the world of downward mobility and migration from country to city he represents in the story with the cryptic perspective he adopted in his more memorable magazine work. Melville wrote “Jimmy Rose” in the summer of 1854 under the same conditions and in the same circumstances and contexts in which just a few months later he wrote “Benito Cereno.” The first part of this later story appeared in Putnam’s in the same month Harper’s published “Jimmy Rose.” Why Melville wrote such a conventional narrative in one story and such an innovative narrative in the other is a mystery that a specifically print-oriented approach cannot answer.
By the same token, my understanding of embedded authorship does not by itself sufficiently explain this distinction nor the longevity of some of Melville’s stories. What each of the chapters in this book has shown is that embeddedness is only an occasion for innovation; oftentimes that occasion passes by unclaimed by writers. But not always. Melville lived in a papermaking district of Massachusetts and bought his paper from an industrialized paper mill. There was no guarantee this experience would end up as fiction nor in the form Melville created when he turned it into “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids.” Of all the ways Melville could have rewritten Delano’s or Trumbull’s narratives, many would not have achieved the effects he created in Israel Potter or “Benito Cereno.” Concentrating on the embeddedness of his experience as a writer makes it possible to understand the conditions in which Melville wrote; showing what he did with these conditions makes it possible to appreciate the nature of his achievement. Whether one conceives of the author as a genius, as dead, or as a node in a matrix, the study of print is poorer when it underplays what occurs in authors’ minds and hands as they turn experience into surprising, disorienting, or astounding literary form.
Our access to this form is one inescapably marked by the passage of time. Humor might be the sum of tragedy plus time, but what would be the sum of writing plus time? Taking texts out of their time capsules recognizes that they are not timeless but “time-full.”10 Melville was never in a position to take responsibility for the afterlife of his writing. The one thing for which he could take responsibility was the writing itself. In its shape he carved the qualities over which time would drag its judgments and form its impressions. As I noted in the introduction, Melville’s prophetic qualities as a writer play a part in his reputation. By taking up “Bartleby,” the Occupy movement would seem to bear this out. But there is no prophecy in “Bartleby.” The story lasts because in it Melville responded to his embeddedness with defiance and innovation. A genre story rooted in the magazine and novel world of lawyers and clerks, and in a social milieu where young male urban workers increasingly consumed representations of themselves in magazines and books, “Bartleby” did more than reflect that world back to its original readers like so many other stories in this genre. The story can usefully help Occupy make sense of the madness of Wall Street and the economic system embodied there, but even the importance and significance of this setting cannot reduce the story to this context.
There is no well-developed critical vocabulary for explaining the time-travelling qualities of artworks, or at least not one that does not rely on transcendent timelessness. Wai-Chee Dimock offers the idea of “resonance.” Rather than texts whose integrity withstands the passage of time, Dimock suggests we think of “semantically elastic” texts whose endurance is a result of their “persistent unraveling” and their “lack of insulation against the currents of semantic change.”11 Whether this elasticity and openness is inherent to the nature of textuality itself or only to certain texts is not clear. If the former, then it does not help answer why some texts endure more readily than others; it would seem to push the responsibility for that endurance back onto the institutions of critical canon building and taste making. But the selection of survivor texts need not be imitative or random; if one wants to make a crown one must first buy jewels.
The “Bartleby” industry is just as much a result of Melville’s story as the readers or the context of their reading. The hundred-year gap between the story’s original publication and its emergence into the American literary canon prompts pause for thought. Is it the case that only the new circumstances of the postwar period—where, perhaps, the corporatization of life cast new shadows over the status of the individual worker, or where American literary studies cast around for heroes in the time of its maturity—provided context enough for “Bartleby” to achieve meaningful visibility? Curtis admired “Bartleby” and other Putnam’s readers did too, but few original readers, or later ones like Rossiter Johnson, thought this ordinary magazine story offered an insightful diagnosis of contemporary life. Yet even if it was the social and historical circumstances of the 1950s that electrified “Bartleby” into life, the meaningfulness of the story is generated by the story itself, not by the context of the 1950s. A story has first to make itself adaptable to a context before a context can find a way to adapt to a story. This quality is what makes a story last; such adaptability is an internal quality of “Bartleby, the Scrivener”—though not of “Jimmy Rose”—and not the result of external forces.
Treasures can remain hidden, like gems buried in the ground, or antiques abandoned in attics. When found, rather than setting them to work perhaps we might try to understand what it is about them that shines. In the “The Apple-Tree Table,” the narrator sits “spellbound” and stands “becharmed” when the first bug emerges from the table he retrieves from the attic at the beginning of the story. Embedded for many decades in the wood used to make the table, the bug shines first like a glowworm and then “a sparkling object, . . . a real marvel” (PT 389). The second bug emerges and lights up the room “like a fiery opal”; it is a “jeweler’s bug—a bug like a sparkle of a glorious sunset” (PT 395). At the end of the story the miraculous bugs are “embalmed in a silver vinaigrette” and sit on the table ready for the narrator’s daughters to show them off to visitors (PT 397). As with the best of Melville’s magazine writing, embeddedness is the occasion for the creation of gems. One should understand why apple-tree wood so successfully provides a home for bugs, just as one should understand why the Wall Street setting and the lawyer’s office and its occupants provide material suitable for a Putnam’s magazine story. But being spellbound or becharmed by sparkling and glorious objects is also an appropriate critical response to the beauty of buried treasure.
One also needs patience. As if in ratification of his own idea that “the greatest, grandest things are unpredicted,” the longevity and ubiquity of “Bartleby” is the gem that eventually emerged from Melville’s embeddedness in the contingencies of his reluctant magazine writing during the 1850s.12 In “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” Melville writes that truth reveals itself in literature “only by cunning glimpses . . . , covertly, and by snatches,” but that when it does, the reader senses “those deep far-away things” that hint at “the very axis of reality” (PT 244). Generation after generation continue to find such glimpses in “Bartleby.” Melville’s stories endure in proportion to the imaginative dexterity with which he transforms his own embeddedness into his magazine writing.
Other writers achieved similar effects within magazine wrappers. In his long and successful career as a writer of fiction for annuals and magazines, Hawthorne wrote dozens of pieces in which he reimagined the events of New England’s past and present; refining and adapting the formal and narrative expectations of this familiar territory meant he made important contributions to the larger story this book helps illuminate: the invention of the American short story. The emergence of this form in the nineteenth century has little concerned critics since the 1980s; when literature is culture and history, genre is only a subsidiary of ideas, politics, and ideology. But the short story is not only a genre or form. Born in the magazine, it is the matter of material culture. Embedded in the magazine’s transformation at the start rather than the end of his fiction-writing career, however much Hawthorne wrote about American religion, history, and gender he did so by bringing his writerly imagination to bear repeatedly on the short prose form, making important contributions to the genre in new material circumstances.
Harriet Beecher Stowe may have written the novel that started the Civil War, but she did so in the pages of the magazine, not between the covers of a book. The success and publicity of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and the novel’s subsequent critical standing, also overshadow the remainder of her magazine-writing and, albeit brief, magazine-editing career. Stowe was there from very near the beginning of the Atlantic Monthly’s reign as American premier literary periodical. The magazine serialized The Minister’s Wooing between December 1858 and December 1859; Agnes of Sorrento ran from May 1861 through April 1862 and appeared at the same time in London’s Cornhill Magazine. Many of her shorter sketches also appeared in the Atlantic and played their part in helping Stowe, like Hawthorne, imagine New England afresh. Stowe also clearly understood her value as a writer in the magazine economy; where Melville hoped with Israel Potter, The Confidence-Man, and The Piazza Tales to double up his earnings from a later printing, Stowe was an expert in turning not just Uncle Tom’s Cabin but her New England sketches into future income when they were published and anthologized in other forms. Feminist literary critics recovered Stowe’s reputation after it waned following the Second World War, but her embeddedness in the magazine world also suggests there is more to say about her contribution to the success of the Atlantic and of late nineteenth-century new regionalist writing, for which magazines were an important outlet.
Henry James was a prolific magazine writer. As William Dean Howells noted in 1888 in the pages of Harper’s Monthly: “With ‘The Aspern Papers’ in The Atlantic, ‘The Liar’ in The Century, ‘A London Life’ in Scribner’s, and ‘Louisa Pallant’ and ‘Two Countries’ in Harper’s, pretty much all at once, the effect was like an artist’s exhibition. One turned from one masterpiece to another, making his comparisons, and delighted to find that the stories helped rather than hurt one another, and that their accidental massing enhanced his pleasure in them.”13 James wrote with magazine audiences in mind, and in searching for wider appeal modified his shorter work later in his career to cater to broader audiences. He was certainly happy to publish in lower-ranking magazines more reliant on advertising than the quality literary monthlies if that meant being paid well. The sheer number of magazines in which James published makes studying his writing a very different proposition than the one faced here with Melville. But James’s continual fascination with the art of fiction, when set against his desire to earn money, means that similar forces are working alongside one another in the magazine writing: from his embeddedness in the requirements of paid writing he must first imaginatively create what audiences read.
Melville, Hawthorne, Stowe, and James are all familiar literary figures with careers that withstand the burden of intense scrutiny. To date, the magazine plays a more important role in our understanding of Stowe and James than it does of Melville and Hawthorne. This book has tried to correct the record for Melville and to put his magazine writing career into focus in ways that would also benefit the broader study of writers and magazines in the nineteenth century and beyond. Melville’s embeddedness took its own shape; for each writer different variables combine to give their experiences a unique fingerprint. But in all these cases, pressing familiar and obscure fictions back between the pages of the magazines in which they first appeared can be the occasion for watching with new eyes how writers turn their embedded experience of print production and circulation into literary form.