Herman Melville, a subscriber to Harper's Monthly Magazine in 1852, would have found there the serialization of Charles Dickens's Bleak House. Melville had just completed Moby Dick and was busily composing Pierre, or The Ambiguities. Bleak House might well have startled this alert, despairing American mind. Dickens, the best-known, best-selling Victorian author on the New York newsstands, could have been seen by Melville as writing a novel unmistakably indebted to the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the mentor-author whom Melville had nominated as the American equivalent of Shakespeare. If one considers Melville's “Bartleby the Scrivener: A Tale of Wall Street” (first published anonymously in Putnam's Magazine in 1853) it seems he fired back across the Atlantic a rejoinder to Dickens's apparent appropriation of Hawthorne. This textual encounter moves us quickly to the literary relations between British Victorian novelists and their American contemporaries, and it suggests how American writers in the mid-nineteenth century enacted a second war of independence in their major writings.