Its author, Herman Melville, is renowned these days as one of America’s great novelists, the author of Moby Dick who based many of his seafaring storylines on personal experience. The short story of Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street appeared in Putnam’s Magazine in 1853, and it’s a testament to passive resistance, of opting out of the world of white-collar work completely. Office work doesn’t present the dangers that many working-class professions could boast, but being sat at one’s desk performing a host of tedious tasks certainly, well, took people in different ways. A new generation of people, educated and trained, took up their places in offices where some of them embodied the new culture of competitiveness and industry and some – didn’t. New York in the 1850s was a rapidly modernising city: as it grew, new strata of white-collar workers emerged to prop up its systems, rules and regulations. Literature’s great refusenik remains as ambiguous as ever – the everyman protestor who rebels of all stripes feel represents them.
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