links to Chatterton

" .... there is a degree of heroism in his obstinacy." (Warton on Chatterton)

Not to solve Bartleby but wow, Maryhelen C. Harmon makes a persuasive case for Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770) as the model of Melville's eternally mysterious and uncompliant scrivener.  As Harmon shows, Melville refashioned many suggestive passages and hints from extensive biographical materials in the two-volume work he had purchased in London in December 1849,  The Poetical Works of Thomas Chatterton. 
 

Some links to aid further study 

 

Maryhelen C. Harmon on Melville's "Borrowed Personage" 

• Harmon, Maryhelen C. "Melville's 'borrowed personage': Bartleby and Thomas Chatterton." ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 33 (First Quarter 1987): 35-44.

Sealts Number 137 entry at Melville's Marginalia Online

Volume 1, The Poetical Works of Thomas Chatterton (1842 Cambridge edition at archive.org)

Volume 2, The Poetical Works of Thomas Chatterton (1842 Cambridge edition at archive.org)

Here are links to Herman Melville's short fiction "Bartleby, The Scrivener" as it originally appeared in Putnam's Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2 (July-December 1853), via Google Books:

• Part I, November 1853 Putnam's
  https://books.google.com/books?id=BgE0AQAAMAAJ&pg=PA546&dq#v=onepage&q&f=false

• Part II, December 1853 Putnam's
  https://books.google.com/books?id=BgE0AQAAMAAJ&pg=PA609&dq#v=onepage&q&f=false

and again, courtesy of HathiTrust Digital Library:

• https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.b5218189?urlappend=%3Bseq=558
• https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.b5218189?urlappend=%3Bseq=620 

Later included in The Piazza Tales (New York: Dix & Edwards, 1856), pages 31-107.

In one of the verse epigraphs to The Encantadas, Sketch Eighth, Melville adapted lines from Chattertons' minstrel song in Aella. Chatterton's and Melville's versions are presented for comparison here.

Boy of Learning, Bard of Tropes

That would be Bartleby, see:

Bar / Bard
T / Tropes
Le / Learning
By / Boy  

Wouldn't that be wild if Melville grabbed Bartleby's name Anagram-Style from a line in
"Chatterton's Will":

For had I never known the antique lore,
I ne'er had ventur'd from my peaceful shore,
To be the wreck of promises and hopes,
A Boy of Learning, and a Bard of Tropes  (The Poetical Works, vol 2)

What got me looking into Boy-Bard or better, Bard-Boy Chatterton was the fine inspiring article by Maryhelen C. Harmon, "Melville's 'Borrowed Personage':  Bartleby and Thomas Chatterton" over at Bartleby, the Scrivener the University of Kansas site edited by Haskell Springer.  Originally published in ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 33 (First Quarter 1987): 35-44.

Harmon shows fascinating correspondences not only between Bartleby and Chatterton as inscrutable  scriveners but also between narrators, Melville's smooth Wall Street lawyer and Chatterton's annoyingly smug biographer.

Yes Melville owned and marked The Poetical Works of Thomas Chatterton. Sealts Number 137 in the Catalog at Melville's Marginalia Online. Harmon makes a great connection, most provocative. I'm way behind but would be glad to know of any discussion anywhere that engages or develops or even comments on Harmon's argument.  Robert Sandberg is there already, good.

Who else?