And then there’s an office boy, Ginger Nut, whose working-class father wants him to have a job with a desk instead of a cart, and so has passed him on to the firm as a dollar-per-week apprentice. Nippers is a young man who embodies the kind of directionless ambition to ‘do better’ in life without much in the way of aptitude or focus. Turkey is a man of the narrator’s age who veers between fully inept and bad-tempered, especially after a liquid lunch. Bartleby is the story of a Wall Street legal practice and a narrator who believes that the “easiest way of life is the best”, which is one reason he tolerates a small crew of unpleasant and careless co-workers with bizarre nicknames. But Bartleby is a different proposition altogether, speaking to an extent to Melville’s own personal frustrations with the unglamorous world of making your living by your pen: he had found the process of writing and editing Moby Dick an onerous proposition, and while it’s highly regarded now, its reputation was quite slow to grow after its publication, and not particularly lucrative. Its author, Herman Melville, is renowned these days as one of America’s great novelists, the author of Moby Dick who based many of his seafaring storylines on personal experience. The short story of Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street appeared in Putnam’s Magazine in 1853, and it’s a testament to passive resistance, of opting out of the world of white-collar work completely.

Office work doesn’t present the dangers that many working-class professions could boast, but being sat at one’s desk performing a host of tedious tasks certainly, well, took people in different ways.

A new generation of people, educated and trained, took up their places in offices where some of them embodied the new culture of competitiveness and industry and some – didn’t. New York in the 1850s was a rapidly modernising city: as it grew, new strata of white-collar workers emerged to prop up its systems, rules and regulations. Literature’s great refusenik remains as ambiguous as ever – the everyman protestor who rebels of all stripes feel represents them.

Bartleby the scrivener i prefer not to