comments on Bartleby

The passage to be commented on is:

This view might have been considered rather tame than otherwise, deficient in what landscape painters call "life." But if so, the view from the other end of my chambers offered, at least, a contrast, if nothing more. In that direction my windows commanded an unobstructed view of a lofty brick wall, black by age and everlasting shade; which wall required no spy-glass to bring out its lurking beauties, but for the benefit of all near-sighted spectators, was pushed up to within ten feet of my window panes. Owing to the great height of the surrounding buildings, and my chambers being on the second floor, the interval between this wall and mine not a little resembled a huge square cistern.

After the narrator hired Bartleby as his newest scrivener he observed an interesting habit of his:

I now recalled all the quiet mysteries which I had noted in the man. I remembered that he never spoke but to answer; that though at intervals he had considerable time to himself, yet I had never seen him reading--no, not even a newspaper; that for long periods he would stand looking out, at his pale window behind the screen, upon the dead brick wall; ...

And in another related passage:

Being under no disgraceful charge, and quite serene and harmless in all his ways, they had permitted him freely to wander about the prison, and especially in the inclosed grass-platted yards thereof. And so I found him there, standing all alone in the quietest of the yards, his face towards a high wall, while all around, from the narrow slits of the jail windows, I thought I saw peering out upon him the eyes of murderers and thieves.

Consider the "view" in the first passage. How does this description relate to the "view" of society at the time. Bartleby stares for long periods of time at the "dead brick wall" at his workplace and also again while in prison. Consider how his work environment has influenced his inability to do anything else in his down time. What is the significance about the statement of how the murderers and thieves also stare.