Melville, the Colt-Adams Murder, and "Bartleby"

MELVILLE, THE COLT-ADAMS MURDER, AND "BARTLEBY" T. H. Giddings0 After being neglected by critics for almost a century, Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" has for the past two decades commanded a considerable degree of scholarly attention.1 Interest has been focused mainly upon the tale's many shades of meaning, suggestion, and application. Little concern has been shown for the contemporaneous allusions to be found in the story. Several have been briefly noted, but little more than casual interest in them has been expressed. One of these allusions, however, that to the Colt-Adams murder case, is particularly interesting. A careful look at Melville's use of this notorious event is rewarding in the light it sheds upon the author's method and his assumption that the allusion would enhance the effectiveness of a crucial point in the story. The structure of Melville's thought-provoking tale is simple. The story begins with the introduction of a Wall-Street lawyer (the narrator) and his employees. Into the established routine of these comes Bartleby, a motionless young man, "pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn."2 After giving unexceptionable service for a few days, Bartleby suddenly declines to participate in checking copy. From here on he more and more withdraws from the routine work of the office until, finally, he is doing no work, simply remaining on the premises day and night, for he also declines to leave. Since Melville does not go behind the screen of Bartleby's mind—the first-person narration would make it difficult—the tale evolves as a study of the lawyer's mind as he struggles with a situation totally outside the bounds of his previous experience. The narrator's attitude varies: he moves from utter exasperation to quiet reconciliation, then to the verge of violence, and to acceptance of the incomprehensible. Among these moods he vacillates, and this accounts for the greater part of the movement of the tale. Unwilling to order the expulsion of this unproductive clerk from his offices, the lawyer himself moves to new accommodations. Bartleby lingers on in what has become his home until the landlord has him committed to the Tombs Prison. "Professor Giddings teaches in the Department of Humanities of the United States Merchant Marine Academy. 124T. H. Giddings Here, Bartleby prefers not to eat, and by this ultimate exercise of the will he dies. About two-thirds of the way along in the tale, Melville introduces an extended allusion—the only detailed allusion in the story—to the ColtAdams murder case, which had caused a sensation in 1841 and 1842. The lurid aspects of the crime itself, the unusual publicity provided by the emerging sensational press, doubts about the justice of the decision to hang Colt, and the curious denouement which substituted suicide by knife for the hangman's noose, combined to make an impression which lingered in the minds of some for many decades after the event.3 Though the Colt allusion has not been completely overlooked, it has been given only slight attention. In his biography of Melville, Leon Howard speculated that the Colt case, along with several other possibilities, might have provided a germ for the tale.4 Egbert S. Oliver speaks of Melville's "application" of the allusion, suggesting only that Melville implies that behavior such as Bartleby's can arouse one's resentment to the point of his wishing to murder someone.5 After mentioning the case—and, incidentally, misdating the murder—Robert S. Forsythe proposes Colt's suicide death as a possible source for the final scene of Pierre.6 There are a few other passing references to the allusion, but that is about as far as scholarly inquisitiveness has carried the matter. In mid-afternoon of September 17, 1841, Samuel Adams, the proprietor of a printing shop at the corner of Ann and Gold Streets, was seen strolling up Broadway. He had told an acquaintance that he was going to call on John C. Colt, who owed him money in connection with the printing of the latter's work on bookkeeping. He then vanished from sight. Five days later Horace Greeley's New-York Tribune, an Ann Street neighbor of...