To say that “Bartleby” is Melville's account of how the lords of the loom held their workers in bondage demands immediate qualification. To be sure, the story is about the relationship between an employer and his employee, but it fits few of the stereotypes associated with anticapitalist literature. “Bartleby” is no more a direct indictment of wage slavery than “Benito Cereno” is of chattel slavery. Just as a comparison between Melville's source for “Benito Cereno” seems to indicate that he weights the evidence against the Africans – they are more violent, Delano kinder in the fictional account – so it seems that Melville weights the evidence against his scrivener. By making his lawyer-narrator a kind and accommodating employer, Melville gives us a character familiar to readers of the period's popular fiction: a well-to-do, amiable New York lawyer or bachelor who intervenes in the affairs of misused young people. For instance, in The Lawyer's Story: Or, The Wrongs of the Orphans, By a Member of the Bar, which was serialized in New York newspapers in 1853, a lawyer temporarily employs a young scrivener who appears plagued by a constitutional melancholy. Through the lawyer's intervention, the youth is reunited with his sister, his only friend and relative. The brother and sister turn out to have royal blood and, with the aid of the lawyer, receive their proper inheritance.

Clearly Melville's story is at odds with the sentimentality of this happy ending.