SOURCE: “Melville's ‘Borrowed Personage’: Bartleby and Thomas Chatterton,” in ESQ, Vol. 33, No. 1, 1^st Quarter, 1987, pp. 35-44.

In the following essay, Harmon argues that Chatterton's life served as the inspiration for Herman Melville's story “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” which chronicles the short, dreary life of a solitary copyist—a job that Chatterton held before leaving Bristol.

Chatterton! methinks I hear thy name. 

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge¹

In his Preface to the 1966 edition of Melville's Reading, Merton M. Sealts, Jr., observed that Melville's “literary use of important surviving books remains to be studied; the implications of many known purchases and borrowings have yet to be assessed.”² In the interim since this comment, a number of source studies have appeared,³ but none assessing Melville's possible utilization of his two annotated volumes of the poetical works of the eighteenth-century “Bristol Boy” Thomas Chatterton, which he listed in his Journal of a Visit to London...