Nay it was, by representation, a Grand Parliament of the best Bachelors in universal London; several of those present being from distant quarters of the town, noted immemorial seats of lawyers and unmarried men — Lincoln's Inn, Furnival's Inn; and one gentleman, upon whom I looked with a sort of collateral awe, hailed from the spot where Lord Verulam once abode a bachelor — Gray's Inn. My point is that Melville's irony is ever-present but gentle, skeptical but not corrosive: there is real pleasure and conviviality to this story—I was reminded of a humanistic English Renaissance poem like —and it is not a Rousseauist or Tolstoyan attack on civilization as an incorrigible stew of hypocritical corruption. In what is now the Temple Garden the old Crusaders used to exercise their steeds and lances; the modern Templars now lounge on the benches beneath the trees, and, switching their patent-leather boots, in gay discourse exercise at repartee. In a few moments, feeling revived a little, I went into the folding-room — the first room I had entered, and where the desk for transacting business stood, surrounded by the blank counters and blank girls engaged at them. The whole hollow gleamed with the white, except here and there, where a pinnacle of granite showed one windswept angle bare. My travels were at an end, for here was the end of the machine. Follow on now, and see it as it slides from under that to the next cylinder.
. He had a romantic turn of mind and was fairly naive in his views of the world and its workings. The heat becomes too much for the narrator and they move him to another room. Round and round here went the enormous revolutions of the dark colossal water-wheel, grim with its one immutable purpose. Gaining the Bellows'-pipe, the violent blast, dead from behind, all but shoved my high-backed pung up-hill. He separates the two social classes of the maids and the bachelors through the usage of imagery in the form of Heaven and Hell to highlight the capitalistic ideological culture that is dominantly cultivated at that particular time. Very dull and repetitive, this scene appears mind numbing.
This is known as Devil's Dungeon. Following this road to its highest point, you stand as within a Dantean gateway. They call this strange-colored torrent Blood River. The whole hollow gleamed with the white, except, here and there, where a pinnacle of granite showed one wind-swept angle bare. Then, shooting through the pass, all alone with inscrutable nature, I exclaimed — Oh! This story, as you will see, works in a persistent idiom of double entendre, so we should understand the transition from iron to patent-leather footwear and sword to quill to imply a diminution or at least softening in the phallus. He starts by highlighting the lavish life the bachelors live and argues that it makes them be out of touch with the realities of life Melville, 31.
However, the reality was that these societal changes brought economic divisions; the boundaries were drawn more clearly between the privileged class and the working class. Of a rich russet hue, its agreeable flavor dissipated my first confounding of its main ingredient with teamster's gads and the rawhides of ushers. He asks her if there are any men around and at that moment a dark-complexioned well dressed man enters. But what made the thing I saw so specially terrible to me was the metallic necessity, the unbudging fatality which governed it. This increase of laborers cause a decline in pay and safe, sanitary work environments. But, like many others tumbled from proud glory's height — like the apple, hard on the bough but mellow on the ground — the Templar's fall has but made him all the finer fellow.
And so, having no married women, what females we have are rightly enough called girls. Though, here and there, I could not follow the thin, gauzy veil of pulp in the course of its more mysterious or entirely invisible advance, yet it was indubitable that, at those points where it eluded me, it still marched on in unvarying docility to the autocratic cunning of the machine. Sounds of torrents fall on all sides upon the ear. It is easy to damn the heretic, but what, really, can the pious tell us about why the universe is arranged so poorly? But for all this, quite unprepared were we to learn that Knights-Templars if at all in being were so entirely secularized as to be reduced from carving out immortal fame in glorious battling for the Holy Land, to the carving of roast-mutton at a dinner-board. Nevertheless, this idealized vision eventually gave way to the reality of human greed.
In a few moments, feeling revived a little, I went into the folding-room — the first room I had entered, and where the desk for transacting business stood, surrounded by the blank counters and blank girls engaged at them. It seemed held something indelicate, selfish, and unfraternal, to be seen taking a lonely, unparticipated glass. But time presses me; I must depart. From the steepness of the walls here, their strangely ebon hue, and the sudden contraction of the gorge, this particular point is called the Black Notch. The Temple is, indeed, a city by itself. A sixth was erudite in wines.
The apartment was well up toward heaven. The next room was filled with similar rows of blank faced girls but this time they were sliding white rags across a large sharp edge, creating almost a lint like substance. But as soon as this fell from me, the dark-complexioned man, standing close by, raised a sudden cry, and seizing my arm, dragged me out into the open air, and without pausing for a word instantly caught up some congealed snow and began rubbing both my cheeks. The steel shoes of my pung craunched and gritted over the vitreous, chippy snow, as if it had been broken glass. Within Mill town, where the story is specifically set, there were beautiful landscapes with a female dormitory belonging to the female factory workers standing out Melville, 31. The church and cloisters, courts and vaults, lanes and passages, banquet-halls, refectories, libraries, terraces, gardens, broad walks, domicils, and dessert-rooms, covering a very large space of ground, and all grouped in central neighborhood, and quite sequestered from the old city's surrounding din; and every thing about the place being kept in most bachelor-like particularity, no part of London offers to a quiet wight so agreeable a refuge.
But what made the thing I saw so specially terrible to me was the metallic necessity, the unbudging fatality which governed it. It's a bad sign, if they do. A fifth had a funny case in law to tell. The Devil's Dungeon is no place for flowers. Nothing was heard but the low, steady, overruling hum of the iron animals. Who wants to dine under the dome of St. Capital idea this, thought I, of taking snuff at about this juncture.