“Bartleby, the Scrivener” takes place in New York City in the 1850s. Most of the story is set in a Wall Street law office, which is significant given Wall Street’s growth during the mid-19th century. While the New York Stock Exchange started out small in the 1810s, by the time the story is set it had turned New York into the financial capital of the United States (replacing Philadelphia). In part due to the development of the New York financial sector, working- and middle-class people across the country started leaving rural jobs (like farming and agriculture) behind, moving to New York to find administrative and clerical positions. Though not a popular position today, “scriveners” were in high demand in the 1850s as they wrote and copied legal documents.
Part of the development of Wall Street was the start of corporate office work culture—sitting at desks all day, walls separating bosses from their employees, bland office decorations and furnishings. All these elements of work culture appear in “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” and even the Lawyer comments on how their office is “entirely unhallowed by humanizing domestic associations.”
Though most of the story takes place in the Lawyer’s office, the final section of the story is set in the Tombs, the prison where Bartleby is sent after he refuses to vacate the office (even after the Lawyer and his other employees move their offices elsewhere). This is a reference to an actual prison that was constructed in Manhattan in 1838—officially known as the Halls of Justice—and that was built in the Egyptian Revival architectural style (thus the nicknamed of “the Tombs”). Melville even describes this architecture in the story, noting how “the Egyptian character of the masonry weighed upon” the Lawyer when he visited Bartleby there.
