The “Plain Facts” of Fine Paper in “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids”

Graham Thompson

doi:10.1215/00029831-1664701

Abstract

Thompson’s essay intervenes in conversations about mid-nineteenth-century authorship and print culture by distinguishing between the economy of paper and the economy of print. He argues that critical treatments of Melville’s work, and particularly “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” (1855), have not adequately attended to the material economy of paper that existed for Melville before the cycle of literary publication, distribution, and circulation began. Living in the important papermaking region of rural west Massachusetts allowed Melville to experience the raw materials of that economic sector not as a distant or vicarious consumer but, following his visit to the Old Berkshire Mill in Dalton in the winter of 1851, as a specialized purchaser. Instead of treating paper as a metonym of literary-market exchange, then, Thompson’s essay examines Melville’s experience and imagining of this raw material—literally avant la lettre—as a way of better understanding the economy of a substance whose manufactured sizes (folio, octavo, and duodecimo) he had already used to classify whales in Moby-Dick and on which his recalcitrant copyist, Bartleby, refuses to write.

Highlights

Ever since Adam, who has got to the meaning of his great allegory—the world? we pigmies must be content to have our paper allegories but ill comprehended. — Letter from Herman Melville to Nathaniel Hawthorne, 17 November 1851
Missing altogether from the listing for Harper’s, was an anonymously published short story in the April issue which seemed to link the material form of the print medium and the cohort of writers the New York Times considered responsible for the articles in the April issue of Putnam’s Monthly Magazine: “[m]ost of these one would judge to be written by gentlemen of taste and leisure—dreamy men, who go out occasionally to see life, not who are daily in contact with life’s hard realities.”
The starting point for this essay is not to emphasize the failure of the New York Times to make the connection between the paper making described in Melville’s story, the “dreamy men” writing for Putnam’s, and the gentlemen who inhabit “the quiet cloisters ... of the dreamy Paradise of Bachelors.”2 Rather, it is to note that making such a connection would rely on conjoining two material economies the New York Times saw no reason for conjoining: the economy of paper and the economy of print

Summary

Introduction

Ever since Adam, who has got to the meaning of his great allegory—the world? we pigmies must be content to have our paper allegories but ill comprehended. — Letter from Herman Melville to Nathaniel Hawthorne, 17 November 1851.

Results

Conclusion