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T.J. Firestone
Prof. Ulman
English 569
Bartleby: The New “Scriveners”

Last summer in my English 201 class, we were assigned to read Herman Melville’s

Bartleby the Scrivener. Soon thereafter, I was bored with the banal anthology book that

contained this excellent short story and found myself on the internet searching for online texts.

Similar to the profession of Bartleby in Melville’s story, there are online “scriveners” transcribing

texts to the internet. These transcribers are, in fact, making their own editions of the text. Even if

they don’t realize it, the choices they make could adversely affect the newly created edition of the

text when compared to other editions. The online text I am studying in particular has certain

advantages and certain drawbacks to the Norton Anthology print counterpart. There are

differences in the two texts, mainly the footnotes and appearance, but essentially both editorial

gestalts are similar. However, I found that reading both editions proved the most useful, taking

information from both.

In comparing the physicality of the two works, Ann Woodlief, the compiler of the online

edition, seems to have taken a very practical approach to Melville’s story. She is a retired

Associate Professor who apparently worked in the Virginia Commonwealth University English

Department (I found this out by clicking the link titled “Ann Woodlief”). It looks like she wanted

to provide her college class with a more affordable way to read the stories, without having to buy

an expensive anthology book. She has many online texts on her website, for use in her classes I

estimate. The Norton Anthology on the other hand, has a more formalized look, but still provides

good text representation for students of all ages, not just college students (though I’m sure college

students represent most of the buyers of the anthology). All the stories, poems, etc, share the

same font and basic structure. The Norton Anthology would of course keep this formalized

aspect because it’s an anthology and has certain formatting it must keep consistent.
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Woodlief also inserts pop-up footnotes and questions throughout the work through

underlined “linked” words, to help with some archaic terminology or references and to breed a

more critical thinking approach in her students while they read. Footnotes are in the Anthology

edition as well, different from the ones on the online edition; this is a reason I think reading both

editions could be advantageous. The actual text of the site is black, while the title and the

hyperlink footnotes are both colored red. The page loaded rather fast (taking into account that I

am connected to the internet via a cable modem) and is not extremely complex in the design of

the page (no flash animations, large images, etc). The background of the page could perhaps be

meant to look like old, browned paper, maybe trying to give an air of realism to the work, as if

you’re reading a first edition copy. The “old paper” look of the background seems to be a theme

Woodlief uses in most of her online texts. The print edition is black text on white paper; also,

the print edition has a few pages containing a Melville biography which can be useful when

reading the author’s work; knowing an author’s history may help the reader to see the context of

the story more clearly and may help to establish the author’s mindset when writing a particular

work. The online site did not have any Melville biography, but did have a small thumbnail

picture of Melville, while the print edition doesn’t contain images.

The material technologies of the printed document are in the form of a 2500 page, 9 x 6 x

2 inch monstrosity of an anthology. This is what prompted me to find an alternative to Melville’s

story in the first place. The anthology is difficult to lug around, hold upright, etc. The online

edition is much easier to read, as I scroll down the page in the comfort of my cushioned hi-back

computer chair. The online text, since it uses pop-ups, might use a form of java-script that

perhaps only certain newer web browsers recognize. If you have an older version of Microsoft or

Netscape’s web browsers, you may not be able to read the pop-up footnotes, but I had no problem

using the Windows XP version of Internet Explorer.

The layout of the document in the anthology is about 12.75 pages worth of text (front and

back) and each page takes about 2 minutes to read. There are breaks at every page, (as most
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printed books do, you can only fit so many words on a page) and it does takes a few seconds to

turn the page and reestablish what you are reading again. The online document has no page

breaks and can be read in one fluid movement, scrolling down the page. One thing I notice

though, in the online edition, there are <br> breaks for ever paragraph and piece of dialog,

whereas in the printed texts, there is only one break (excluding page breaks) and that comes at the

end of the story -- the last paragraph of the story is spaced further down then the preceding text

and the first sentence is not indented. None of the paragraphs in the online text are indented

which differs from the printed text in which all but the last paragraph are indented.

Both online text and printed text are useful, and when used in conjunction, provide an

excellent resource. While both intended for scholarly use, the anthology is meant for a more

broad range of people, while the online text is made exclusively (though not limited to) Virginia

Commonwealth College students, namely, those in Ann Woodlief’s class. I’m glad I have the

anthology copy though, as it will make a good edition to the other great works of literature on my

bookshelf. I don’t think a printed out copy of the online text would look very good sitting on a

bookshelf.
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Works Cited:

-Melville, Herman. Bartleby the Scrivener. Comp.

Ann Woodlief. Virginia: Virginia Commonwealth University. 21 Jan.
2003 <http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/webtexts/bartleby>.

-Melville, Herman. Bartleby the Scrivener. Ed.

Julia Reidhead. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Fifth Edition,
Volume 1: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1998.