Bartleby, the Scrivener by Herman Melville: Free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB Download
Bartleby, the Scrivener
📖 Click to Read the Opening Pages Online Preview
“I am a rather elderly man”: the lawyer, his copyists and the white wall
I am a rather elderly man. The nature of my avocations for the last thirty years has brought me into more than ordinary contact with what would seem an interesting and somewhat singular set of men, of whom as yet nothing that I know of has ever been written:—I mean the law-copyists or scriveners. I have known very many of them, professionally and privately, and if I pleased, could relate divers histories, at which good-natured gentlemen might smile, and sentimental souls might weep. But I waive the biographies of all other scriveners for a few passages in the life of Bartleby, who was a scrivener of the strangest I ever saw or heard of. While of other law-copyists I might write the complete life, of Bartleby nothing of that sort can be done. I believe that no materials exist for a full and satisfactory biography of this man. It is an irreparable loss to literature. Bartleby was one of those beings of whom nothing is ascertainable, except from the original sources, and in his case those are very small. What my own astonished eyes saw of Bartleby, that is all I know of him, except, indeed, one vague report which will appear in the sequel.
Ere introducing the scrivener, as he first appeared to me, it is fit I make some mention of myself, my employés, my business, my chambers, and general surroundings; because some such description is indispensable to an adequate understanding of the chief character about to be presented.
Imprimis: I am a man who, from his youth upwards, has been filled with a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best. Hence, though I belong to a profession proverbially energetic and nervous, even to turbulence, at times, yet nothing of that sort have I ever suffered to invade my peace. I am one of those unambitious lawyers who never addresses a jury, or in any way draws down public applause; but in the cool tranquility of a snug retreat, do a snug business among rich men’s bonds and mortgages and title-deeds. All who know me, consider me an eminently safe man. The late John Jacob Astor, a personage little given to poetic enthusiasm, had no hesitation in pronouncing my first grand point to be prudence; my next, method. I do not speak it in vanity, but simply record the fact, that I was not unemployed in my profession by the late John Jacob Astor; a name which, I admit, I love to repeat, for it hath a rounded and orbicular sound to it, and rings like unto bullion. I will freely add, that I was not insensible to the late John Jacob Astor’s good opinion.
The preview stops after the opening pages, where the lawyer describes his office and his two copyists. The complete story is in the free download below.
Download Full EPUB1853
~15,000 words (estimated)
Approx. 50 minutes
Standalone
A law office on Wall Street, New York, in the 1850s
One story, no chapters
EPUB · AZW3 · KEPUB
0.16 MB (EPUB) · 0.21 MB (AZW3) · 0.17 MB (KEPUB)
Public domain in the United States
Project Gutenberg #11231
Bartleby, the Scrivener is Herman Melville’s short story of 1853, told by an elderly Wall Street lawyer who hires a pale, silent copyist and then spends the rest of the story failing to be rid of him. Bartleby copies beautifully, then answers every request — to proofread, to run an errand, to leave the office, to quit the place — with the same mild sentence: “I would prefer not to.” The lawyer moves his own chambers rather than turn the man out, and the story follows that refusal to the Tombs and to a final rumour about the Dead Letter Office.
It is a story about walls, and about what a decent man can do for someone who will not be helped. The office window looks onto a white brick wall; Bartleby’s desk faces it, and his refusal is as blank and as patient as the view. Around him the clerks grumble, the lawyer’s pity curdles into fear, and the commercial city goes on about its business. Bartleby, the Scrivener has been read since the 1920s as a forerunner of Kafka and as an early portrait of office life. The text is available via Project Gutenberg #11231.
Bartleby, the Scrivener by Herman Melville: Summary, Characters & Themes
This is a summary and analysis of Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street, published in 1853. The narrator is an elderly lawyer, a Master in Chancery with chambers on Wall Street and a snug practice among rich men’s bonds and mortgages. He employs two copyists, Turkey and Nippers, and an office boy called Ginger Nut; when business increases he advertises for a third. Bartleby arrives: pallid, neat, quiet, and for the first days a prodigious worker, copying by sunlight and candlelight. Then, asked to compare a copy with the original, he answers that he would prefer not to. The lawyer does not dismiss him. He reasons, scolds, pleads, and at last moves his own office, and the story ends in the Tombs.
Nothing in the story happens quickly. Bartleby refuses to proofread, then to run errands, then to do any copying at all; he stays behind his green screen, and the lawyer discovers on a Sunday that he has been living in the office, sleeping on a sofa and keeping his savings in a knotted handkerchief. The refusal spreads through the room as a habit of speech: Nippers says “prefer”, Turkey says “prefer”, and the lawyer catches himself using the word. Offered a clerkship, a bar-tender’s job, a tour of Europe or a room in the lawyer’s own house, Bartleby declines each in the same formula. He is taken to the Halls of Justice as a vagrant and dies in the yard, facing a wall.
Herman Melville was thirty-four in 1853, with seven years of celebrity behind him and the best of his reputation already spent. Typee and Omoo had sold well in the late 1840s; Moby-Dick (1851) and Pierre (1852) had not, and the reviews of the second were rough. He was living at Arrowhead, the farm near Pittsfield, Massachusetts, writing against debt and against a public that wanted South Sea adventure. The story is a magazine piece by a novelist who had once been famous: brief, dry and without a line of comfort. The story he sent to Putnam’s Monthly is the work of a man who had stopped trying to please: short, cool, almost without incident, and told in the voice of someone who is comfortable, well-meaning and entirely at a loss.
The story appeared without Melville’s name and was then largely forgotten for seventy years. Its revival came in the 1920s, when readers noticed that a Wall Street clerk who turns into something less than a man had been written more than sixty years before Kafka; and the comparison has stuck. What keeps it alive is the lawyer’s voice — patient, self-justifying, decent and helpless — and the comedy running underneath the sadness. Readers who respond to that combination can go on to The Yellow Wallpaper, another short study of a mind and a room, or to Notes from the Underground, whose narrator also refuses to be reasonable, or to Metamorphosis, where the transformation is literal and the family’s patience is not.
This edition follows the Project Gutenberg #11231 transcription of the text as it appeared in Putnam’s Monthly in November and December 1853. The story has no chapters and no divisions of any kind, and none have been added: the paragraphs run on as Melville set them, the long sentences are left long, and the punctuation of the transcription is kept. The story is printed as readers met it in 1853, long paragraphs and all. The eight sections below are a walkthrough for readers who want the shape of the story before or after reading it, and they stop short of the last pages. Word count, reading time and file sizes are measured from the files on this page, and all three downloads carry the same text.
Historical Context
Putnam’s Monthly was new in 1853. George Palmer Putnam had launched it that January as a serious American magazine, issued monthly for a general readership, edited by Charles Frederick Briggs; it paid badly and wanted fiction that would not embarrass a drawing room. Melville, who had published in the magazine before, sent “Bartleby” that year, and it ran in two instalments, in November and December, with no author’s name attached. Readers took it for an office sketch. The magazine lasted only four years; the story outlived it, and has outlived the century.
The Wall Street of the story is the commercial street of the 1850s, not yet the financial capital of the world. Law offices occupied the upper floors of buildings put up for merchants, and the window of a copyist’s room looked onto the blank side of the next building. Copying was the technology of the age: deeds, testimony and correspondence were duplicated by hand, and a good scrivener was a machine made of paper and ink. The Master in Chancery, which the narrator calls “now extinct in the State of New York”, had been abolished under the state constitution of 1846.
The Tombs, which the story names properly as the Halls of Justice, was the city prison on Centre Street, opened in 1838 and built in an Egyptian manner that visitors found oppressive; its walls were thick enough to keep out the noise of the street. The Dead Letter Office, in the Post Office Department at Washington, had existed since 1825 and burned unclaimed mail by the cart-load. Melville lived another thirty-eight years, nineteen of them as a customs inspector in New York, and the story’s reputation was made long after his death.
Key Characters & Literary Archetypes
- The lawyer: The narrator: an elderly, prosperous attorney on Wall Street, a Master in Chancery, a man who prides himself on prudence and method. He is kindly, vain, fond of comfort and unable to say a hard thing to anyone’s face, which is why his office ends up containing a man who will not work and will not leave.
- Bartleby: A pale, neat, silent young man hired as an extra copyist, who writes enormously for a few days and then stops. He answers requests with “I would prefer not to”, stands behind his screen looking at the dead brick wall, and lives in the office without telling anyone. He is courteous, immovable and without explanation; the story never supplies his history.
- Turkey: The first copyist: an Englishman of about sixty, short, pursy and flushed, excellent before noon and a blotting, noisy mess after it, once he has had his dinner. He is deferential, cheerful and sympathetic to Bartleby, and suggests that a quart of good ale a day might mend him. His afternoon temper and stained papers are the standing comedy of the office.
- Nippers: The second copyist: a whiskered, sallow young man of about twenty-five, ambitious and dyspeptic, irritable in the morning and calm in the afternoon, so that he and Turkey between them cover a working day. He grinds his teeth at Bartleby’s “prefer”, proposes giving him preferences with a horsewhip, and is the only person who says plainly what he thinks.
- Ginger Nut: The office boy: a lad of about twelve, the son of a carman, paid a dollar a week to fetch beer for Turkey, cider for Nippers and ginger-nuts for himself. The copyists treat him as furniture and the lawyer as a messenger; his name comes from the cakes he eats, and his future is a subject nobody has thought about.
- The grub-man: A broad, meat-like man in an apron who works the corridors of the Tombs, hiring himself out to prisoners with friends outside as a provider of better food. He introduces himself as the grub-man and is called Mr. Cutlets. He is cheerful, professionally curious, and takes Bartleby for a gentleman forger; his talk is the last comedy in the story.
Core Literary Themes
- Refusal without a reason: The famous sentence is a formula rather than an argument: Bartleby never explains, and the lawyer never gets a cause to argue with. “I would prefer not to” is polite, grammatical and complete, and it withdraws from the exchange at the same moment that it answers it. Melville builds the whole story out of that small refusal, and the people around Bartleby begin to reproduce the phrase before they notice they are doing it. What cannot be answered cannot be managed.
- Walls and the viewless office: The office window commands a white brick wall; the Tombs yard ends at a high wall; Bartleby’s reveries are reveries of the dead wall. Melville keeps putting his character face to face with masonry, and the lawyers keep describing it as a view. The story is full of enclosures meant to be temporary — a screen, a desk, an office, a prison — and of a man who treats each one as a place to stay. The last wall is the one he dies against.
- Pity that cannot act: The lawyer’s benevolence is real and useless. He gives money, offers his own house, pays for a better dinner in prison, and is honest enough to report that his pity turned to fear and then to repulsion once he understood the case was incurable. Melville is careful not to make him a villain: he is a decent man inside a system with no place for a person who will not be useful. The story’s cruelty is administrative rather than personal.
- Usefulness and the working city: Wall Street in the story is a machine for turning time into paper, and every character is defined by what he can be relied on to do: Turkey in the morning, Nippers in the afternoon, Ginger Nut with his errands, the lawyer with his deeds. Bartleby is hired precisely because he can produce more of this work, and his refusal is a refusal to be that kind of person. The office survives him without difficulty, which is the point of the ending.
- The unexplained life: The narrator ends by admitting that he knows nothing about Bartleby: no family, no origin, no reason. The rumour of the Dead Letter Office is offered as a rumour, with the warning that its basis could never be established. Melville leaves the centre of the story blank on purpose, and the blank is what readers have filled ever since, with Kafka, with office life, with grief. The story keeps its authority because it refuses to explain as stubbornly as its clerk does.
Why Download Our Custom E-Reader Edition of Bartleby, the Scrivener?
Because it is short and it does not soften. The whole of it runs to about 14,500 words and one sitting; nothing is explained, nobody is punished, and the last page is quieter than the first. Read it once for the comedy of the office — Turkey’s afternoon blots, Nippers’ indigestion, the lawyer’s argued cowardice — and again for what he keeps not saying. The text here is complete and unabridged.
The files are built for reading rather than for archiving: no page images, no scanning errors, no editorial introduction standing between the reader and the first sentence. The long sentences are left long, the dashes and the italics are kept, and the story opens on a phone, a Kindle, a Kobo or an old e-ink reader without conversion. Nothing is locked: no account, no sample chapter, no email address, no queue.
Read it beside this page rather than instead of it. The summary, the character notes and the context above are meant to be useful before and after the story, not to replace the last pages; the walkthrough stops where the ending begins. If you already know how it ends, the second reading is the more interesting one, because the lawyer’s kindness is easier to see as a failure when you are watching for it.
- Project Gutenberg transcription, via Project Gutenberg #11231, the source used for this edition, with its paragraphing, its long paragraphs and its period punctuation left as they stand, and with no chapter divisions added and no editorial labels invented.
- Complete, unabridged text The whole story as Melville published it, from “I am a rather elderly man” to “Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!”, with the long sentences, the italics and the punctuation of the period intact, and nothing modernised or trimmed.
- EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB One download per format, so the story opens on Kindle, Kobo, Apple Books and every other reader without conversion, with a table of contents that works on all of them, including older devices that dislike nested navigation.
- Free and DRM-free Public domain in the United States, with no account, no sample chapter and no lock on the file; download it once and it is yours to keep, to move between devices and to reread, with nothing to renew and nothing to lose.
- The Yellow Wallpaper — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- Notes from the Underground — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- Metamorphosis — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
Chapter summaries
The story is continuous: there are no chapters, no numbered sections and no scene breaks beyond Melville’s own paragraphing. The eight sections below follow it in order, from the lawyer’s description of his office to the final rumour about the Dead Letter Office, and they are a reader’s guide rather than a division of the text.
- The office and its people: The lawyer introduces himself: elderly, prudent, prosperous, a Master in Chancery with chambers on Wall Street and a window that looks onto a white brick wall. He describes his two copyists, Turkey, flushed and useful until dinner, and Nippers, sallow and useful after it, and the office boy Ginger Nut, who runs for beer, cider and cakes. The tone is dry, comfortable and complacent, and everything that follows depends on it. Nothing prepares the reader for the man at the door.
- Bartleby arrives: Business increases and the lawyer advertises for a third copyist. Bartleby appears at the door: pallid, neat, pitiable, respectable, and for three days he copies as if starved for documents, by sunlight and by candlelight, never speaking. Then, asked to compare a copy with the original, he answers that he would prefer not to. The lawyer is astonished, argues with himself, and does nothing. The office now holds a man who has refused an ordinary request.
- The refusals to proofread: The formula hardens. Bartleby will copy, but he will not verify what he has copied, and the lawyer discovers that no argument, kindness or threat reaches a preference. Turkey and Nippers are called in to examine the papers instead, and both catch the word “prefer” before the day is out. The lawyer, who has never had to force anyone to do anything, begins negotiating aloud in his own office, and the comedy turns on an employer begging a man who has already stopped.
- The Sunday visit: The lawyer calls at his chambers one Sunday morning and finds the key resisted from inside. Bartleby, in shirt sleeves and tattered dishabille, says he is deeply engaged and would prefer not to admit him. The lawyer walks round the block, comes back, and finds the office empty but inhabited: a sofa with the impress of a lean form, a blanket, a blacking box, a tin basin. In the desk is a savings bank knotted in a handkerchief. Pity turns to fear.
- Prefers not to leave: Bartleby gives up copying, first while his eyes are bad and then for good, and becomes a fixture behind his screen. The lawyer, unable to dismiss him and unwilling to compel him, delays for weeks. At last he gives six days’ notice, offers thirty-two dollars over the wages owed, and asks for the key to be left under the mat. Bartleby takes the money, stays, and answers the farewell with the same sentence. The lawyer’s morning-after doubts are the most honest page in the story.
- The office vacated: Rather than use force, the lawyer moves his practice, and on the day of the removal the scrivener stands in a bare room while the screen is folded last. A lawyer from the old building finds him in the entry; then the landlord arrives with tenants who cannot use their stairs. Bartleby sits on the banister by day and sleeps in the entry by night. Offered a clerkship, a bar-tender’s job, a tour of Europe, he declines each. The lawyer flees in an omnibus.
- The Tombs: A note from the landlord reports that Bartleby has been taken to the Tombs as a vagrant. The lawyer goes to the Halls of Justice, arranges what indulgences he can, and is told, without a look, “I know you” and “I want nothing to say to you.” He pays the grub-man, Mr. Cutlets, to bring a good dinner; Bartleby prefers not to dine. Days later he is found dead in the yard, huddled at the base of the wall, his knees drawn up, his eyes open.
- The Dead Letter Office and the last word: The narrator says plainly that he cannot explain Bartleby, then offers one unverifiable item of rumour: that the scrivener had been a subordinate clerk in the Dead Letter Office at Washington, dismissed by a change of administration. He imagines the work — rings, bank-notes, pardons and good news carried to people already dead — and the image closes the story. The last line is four words long, and it turns a case study back into a cry.
Bartleby, the Scrivener: Frequently Asked Questions
What is Bartleby, the Scrivener about?
Is it a novel or a short story?
Who tells the story?
What does “I would prefer not to” mean?
Where and when is the story set?
How long does it take to read?
Why is it compared with Kafka?
Where can I get the full story as a free download?
Part of: Short Classic Novels · The Yellow Wallpaper
