Excerpted from the Hardcover Edition 1 The Clerking Class The torn coat sleeve to the table. The steel pen to the ink. Write! Write! Be it truth or fable. Words! Words! Clerks never think. --Benjamin Browne Foster, Down East Diary (1849) They labored in poorly lit, smoky single rooms, attached to merchants and lawyers, to insurance concerns and banks. They had sharp penmanship and bad eyes, extravagant clothes but shrunken, unused bodies, backs cramped from poor posture, fingers callused by constant writing. When they were not thin, angular, and sallow, they were ruddy and soft; their paunches sagged onto their thighs. Clerks were once a rare subject in literature.

Their lives were considered unworthy of comment, their workplaces hemmed in and small, their work indescribably dull. And yet one of the greatest of short stories is about a clerk. In "Bartleby, the Scrivener" (1853), Herman Melville, who had become famous for writing memoirs and novels about spectacular sea voyages to exotic islands--gaining a readership he eventually lost with that strange, long book about a whaling voyage--decided to turn inward, to the snug, suffocating world of the office. The titanic hunt for the white whale was exchanged for the hunt for the right-sized pen. And for finding the right position to sit at a desk: "If, for the sake of easing his back, he brought the table lid at a sharp angle well up towards his chin, and wrote there like a man using the steep roof of a Dutch house for his desk, then he declared that it stopped the circulation in his arms. If now he lowered the table to his waistbands, and stooped over it in writing, then there was a sore aching in his back." Melville himself had worked as a clerk for a merchant in Hawaii before he--as Ishmael put it--took to the ship. He knew from the inside the peculiar emptiness that office work could often have, its atmosphere of purposeless labor and dead-endedness.

Even in Moby-Dick he speaks of the thousands in Manhattan who idle along the Battery, lost in "sea-reverie," avoiding returning to their work lives "pent up in lath and plaster--tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks." Appropriately, the few windows in the Bartleby office look out onto nothing but more walls. "On one end," the unnamed narrator writes, the window faced "the white wall of the interior of a spacious sky-light shaft, penetrating the building from top to bottom." And on the other side, "an unobstructed view of a lofty brick wall, black by age and everlasting shade." This wall, the narrator adds, wryly, "required no spy-glass to bring out its lurking beauties, but, for the benefit of all near-sighted spectators, was pushed to within ten feet of my window panes." On two sides, then, two walls: one, the white wall of the light shaft; the other, a soot-black brick wall hemming in vision and light. A walled-in window: a room with no view. But the office of "Bartleby," like the Pequod of Ishmael and Ahab, is also a place of male bonding, cheery with camaraderie and bonhomie.

The narrator, a lawyer, initially employs three clerks with absurd nicknames--Turkey, Nippers, and Ginger Nut--that he uses affectionately. Each of them behaves with exact predictability the same way every day; for example, Turkey, an old man, always ceases to get work done after his noontime dinner, which he takes with an inordinate quantity of wine, causing his face to "blaze like a grate full of Christmas coals." But the boss is too kind to do anything Trump-like, and the distempered workers never challenge their boss. The entire order dissolves, however, when a sudden increase in the volume of business pushes the narrator into hiring a new scrivener--the eponymous Bartleby. He arrives looking "pallidly neat, pitiably respectable," and, mysteriously enough, "incurably forlorn." The narrator gives him a desk next to a window, but like the other windows it offers little to look at, "having originally afforded a lateral view of certain grimy backyards and bricks, but which, owing to subsequent erections, commanded at present no view at all, though," the narrator concedes, "it gave some light." At first Bartleby works diligently, his thinness inversely proportional to his ravenousness for writing: "As if long famishing for something to copy, he seemed to gorge himself on my documents. There was no pause for digestion.

He ran a day and night line, copying by sun-light and by candle-light. I should have been quite delighted with his application, had he been cheerfully industrious. But he wrote on, silently, palely, mechanically." The trouble comes when this routine is interrupted. The lawyer-narrator calls Bartleby in for assistance in comparing two copies of a document. After outlining the duty, the narrator is stunned by Bartleby''s infamous reply--"I would prefer not to." Repeating the maddening phrase at the narrator''s every spluttering attempt to get him to work, Bartleby plunges the calm predictability of the office into thunderous irregularity. In the end, the lawyer, baffled by Bartleby''s intransigence, his passive resistance, is forced to leave his office altogether; Bartleby himself is taken off to prison, where, bereft of his sustenance of documents, he starves to death.

What "Bartleby" means has been a subject of endless debate. Office workers have always taken it to be a mirror of their condition, with Bartleby''s "I would prefer not to" an encapsulation of how the office reduces all titanic conflicts to petty grievances and simmering resentments. But in 1853, when the story was written, the term "office"--and the sort of labor that was performed there--had nowhere near the universal significance it has now. In those tense years before the Civil War, clerks were a small but unusual phenomenon, a subject of anxious scrutiny; their workplaces were at once significant centers of American business and breeding grounds for a kind of work that nobody recognized as work. Clerks were a kind of worker that seemed, like Bartleby, at once harmless and ominous. "Bartleby" was evidence that the office had just begun to blot its inky mark on the consciousness of the world. When does the office begin? It''s a question without an easy answer. One can associate the origins with the beginning of paperwork itself--until recently, the most common mental association with office work (think of the derogatory phrase "paper pusher").

In other words, since the invention of writing and the corresponding ability to keep records in a systematic manner, there have always been places that resemble offices: monasteries, libraries, scholars'' studies. Banking furnished an especially large amount of paperwork; the Uffizi, an incomparable gallery of Renaissance art in Florence, was also one of the first office buildings--the bookkeeping offices of the Medici family''s groundbreaking financial operations. Clerks, too, have existed for ages, many of them unclinching themselves from their desks to become quite famous: from Samuel Pepys, the British government diarist who reported on the gossipy world of seventeenth-century England, to Alexander Hamilton, who had cut his teeth as a merchants'' clerk before he became the first secretary of the Treasury of the United States; Benjamin Franklin, paragon of pecuniary restraint and bourgeois self-abnegation, started out as a dry goods clerk in 1727. Perhaps some of the tediousness of Franklin''s own writing was honed in the conditions of his first job: since clerks have had the opportunity to keep diaries, they have bemoaned the sheer boredom of their tasks--the endless copying, the awkward postures, the meaninglessness of their work. When not doing writing for the job, clerks have cultivated the habit of writing about the job--or literally around it, as in the case of some infamous marginalia from medieval scribes. "Writing is excessive drudgery," one such jotting reads. "It crooks your back, it dims your sight, it twists your stomach and your sides." "Oh, my hand," goes another--even though writing out that sentence would have only magnified the problem it described.

The notion of the office as the quintessential location of alienated work, or simple drudgery, is far from the etymological root of the word. "Office" itself comes from the Latin for "duty." One of the more famous philosophical works of Cicero, long-winded scold of the latter days of the Roman Republic, is a treatise called De officiis, usually translated as "Of Duty" or "On Duty," though it might just as well be "Of Office." For Cicero''s understanding of duty isn''t far from our contemporary sense of "holding office" or the "office of the president": "office" as connoting a specific set of responsibilities. For Cicero, "office" was what was proper to you, what fitted you as your natural duty. This, too, seems far from any understanding of the office as workplace: few people have ever considered office work to be natural, proper, or fitting. To find the emergence of the office in history--the workplace that prefigures the offices of today--one has to look at a peculiar confluence of new sorts of buildings, deep economic changes, as well as (most slippery of all) new kinds of feelings and mass awareness of one another among particular strata of the workforce. Industrialization in Britain and America was producing more and more administrative work, and alongside it a need for a rational approach to managing accounts, bills, ledgers: in short, paperwork.

Rising to take these positions were clerks, who, looking around, began to see themselves growing in number, and to feel themselves as belonging vaguely to a special group. One finds the evolution of the office coinciding, then, with a change in the position of the clerks themselves--a new restive.