“Our library he is hoping to ye public.” (FW 313)

About Dubliners Bookshelf

Introduction

One of the hallmarks of great literature is an ability to engender a curiosity in the literary worlds created by other authors. James Joyce understood his debt to the wordsmiths who came before him, and his Dublin of childhood through adulthood from first light into nighttime contains the traces of books from other times and places. The characters that inhabit Joyce’s Dublin read and discuss books. In an effort to find our own places in the Hibernian metropolis, we as readers want to join the conversations about these books. When the young protagonist of “Araby” discovers the musty, yellowed volumes left behind by the former tenant of his house, a priest who had died on the premise, Joyce’s readers, like the young hero, have only the paper-covered copies of The Abbot, The Devout Communicant, and The Memoirs of Vidocq to discern the character and symbolism of this ghostly presence. Although Walter Scott’s novels are widely available, few student libraries—or university collections, for that matter—have the nineteenth and early twentieth century editions of Pacificus Baker and Eugène François Vidocq similar to the ones read by Joyce as a young man.


When the first story of Dubliners was published in 1904, the National Library of Ireland had only been open for fourteen years. Joyce was part of the first generation of Irishmen and women able to peruse the stacks of this national institution, which received its charter in 1877 and entered its permanent residence adjacent to Leinster House in 1890. The physical space of the library resonates in Joyce’s literary imagination. In the “Scylla and Charybdis” episode of Ulysses, the reading room of the National Library sets the scene for Stephen’s literary repartee and Bloom’s workday research. Joyce knew libraries and how to use them, and furthermore, he sent friends and colleagues into the stack of public and private libraries to track down the bits and pieces of information that texture his works. Amidst the eighteenth-century grandeur of Archbishop Marsh’s Library, Joyce encountered dark oak shelves with hand-carved and painted gables holding the leather-bound books of antiquity and modernity. In Stephen Hero, the young protagonist enters the library and consults the works of the Tre Corone, Franciscan philosophers, and W. B. Yeats. Marsh’s Library, Ireland’s first public library founded in 1701, provided the space and resources for Irishmen and women to satisfy their curiosities, pursue their intellectual projects, and find pleasure in reading. Dubliners Bookshelf is an attempt to build upon the librarious institutions that have supported Joyce scholars and readers in the past.


In Finnegans Wake, Joyce writes that Shaun is “strikingly brainy and well letterread in yourshelves” (FW 425), which is to be both well read in the books on one’s shelves but also an interpreter of self. In a similar way, the texts of Dubliners Bookshelf might be thought of as bookselves. The term seems to have three relevant valences here. First of all, it points to the ways in which we see ourselves through books. The man who accosts the boys at the end of “An Encounter” defines himself as a bookworm and uses this association with books in an attempt to connect with the narrator of the story (D x). Secondly, bookselves are the ways in which we store and organize ourselves through books. The logic of our libraries can reflect the ways in which we organize and narrate our lives. In “A Painful Case”, James Duffy’s room “bore witness of the orderliness of his mind” and his bookshelves are all carefully organized according to bulk. The bookshelves are indicative of Duffy’s aspirations toward what he imagines is a neat and orderly life. Lastly, books have a kind of selfhood that grows through the personal and material associates that accumulates around a text within a fictional work. These books can become characters in their own right because of the roles they play in driving the narrative of the stories. For instance, the three books that the narrator of “Araby” inherits from the dead priest create opaque but provocative interpretive paths for the reader. Scott’s The Abbot offers insights into the character of the priest and the boy who finds the volume, but the way in which we read The Abbot is also altered because of the role it plays in Joyce’s story. These modes intertextuality ask us to think about how books, both in their linguistic and bibliographic content, function in a text such as Dubliners.

 

James Joyce and the Publishing of Dubliners

In “A Curious History” Joyce set out to throw “some light on the present conditions of authorship in England and Ireland” (160). Publishing Dubliners was no easy feat. On the fifteenth of June 1914, Grant Richards delivered Dubliners to the reader public in a simple maroon morocco bound volume in an edition of 1,250. The book lacks any overtly ornate touches, but its calm appearance masks the struggles its author had in bringing it to publication. Yet, the tale of Joyce’s scrapes with publishers, agents, and printers has been often retold, and the publication history of Dubliners extensively researched.

Vicki Mahaffey reminds readers that Dubliners deals intimately with the notion of reproduction in many senses. The mechanical reproduction of literature through printing is one such form of propagation that runs through the stories.

 

Grant Richards, Publisher

Joyce tells one tale of the publishing world at the beginning of the twentieth century; however, his tale of righteous indignation and the rights of authorship laid out in “A Curious History,” “Gas from a Burner,” and elsewhere give a very limited view of what it meant to publish books during this period. Joyce, whose grudges and literary invectives had intensity and style, writes from the perspective of the beleaguered author fighting against philistinism, censorship, legal constrictions, and general cowardice and stupidity. Joyce levels attacks at Richards, George Roberts of Maunsel Press, John Falconer, the printer who refused to hand over the printed sheets of Dubliners and later had them destroyed, and others. There is no doubt that the road to publication was long and frustrating to Joyce, and to the twenty-first century reader of Dubliners the objections to the text seem small indeed. However, a fuller examination of the literary business and the specifics of Richards’s enterprise at the time reveal the many forces, players, and institutions that collaborate to produce a published volume.

The year of Dubliners publication also saw the first issues of The Little Review and Blast, George Moore finishes his controversial memoir with Vale, and the beginning of the serialization of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in the The Egoist. When one encounters the story presented by Joyce, there is a sense in which, Joyce presumes that his manuscript is the only literary event happening at Richards’s firm. During 1914 Richards published around fifty books and managed a sizable backlog of previously published titles. These volumes were diverse in appearance and subject matter. Books on photography, travel, art, business, and children’s books mingled with the works of fiction, poetry, and criticism that made Richards’s lasting reputation.

When he entered the publishing in 1897, Richard modeled his business and aesthetic on some of the great publishers of the period.

Later in the year, the Great War brings about great change in the publishing industry, but in June of 1914, the anglophone publishing industry has an international reach and a broad set of concerns. As David McKitterick notes,

Booksellers and publishers built their careers on negotiating and trading across boundaries of language and government, creed and currency. . . . By the beginning of the twentieth century, internationalism was the dominant defining characteristic of the book trade – at least in Britain, the United States, France, Germany and their respective global offshoots. London and American east coast publishing were intertwined.

Richards’s firm was no different. For instance, Richards cultivate a close relationship with The Century Company in New York. He introduced the American writer Theodore Dreiser to the firm, and he often published British editions of books brought out by this American publisher. In 1914, books such as Prostitution in Europe, ???? appeared on both sides of the Atlantic in volumes by the Century and Richards. Often Richards would publish editions from sheets printed in America in these cases.

Of the many books that Richards published in the same year as Dubliners, Robert Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists was met with many of the same barriers to publication that Joyce fought against. Born a Dubliner, Tressell left Ireland in 1886 worked as a sign painter and decorator in South Africa and later relocated to England in 1901 where he became increasingly involved with socialist politics and later wrote The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists as an attack on the injustices of capitalism by showing a realistic portrait of working class life.

Tressell was unable to secure a publisher for the long novel that he completed in 1910, and he died a year later while trying to emigrate to Canada. The manuscript was kept by his eighteen year old daughter Kathleen, and it came to Richards hands through a mutual friend and writer Jessie Pope, who later edited the novel. Richards recognized the books as “damnably subversive, but it was extraordinarily real” (“Author Hunting,” 280).

While Joyce cared about the integrity of his art and the economics of putting food on the table, Richards had to think about the health of his business, often with regrettable decisions made on the side of financial caution. Richards published the early books of John Masefield, but in 1909

he declined to publish Masefield’s latest play, The Tragedy of Pompey the Great. This decision prompted Richards to reflect on the hard decisions and mistakes he made in his trade:

To tell the truth, I had allowed my ledgers to influence me. It was a folly. No publisher worthy of his job, if he has any money left in his banking account, will, if he can help it, allow an author whose work he respects and admires to go elsewhere. In the long run things will come right—and even if they don’t—well, he will have the happiness and satisfaction of having been true to his own taste and of having on his shelves good books of which he is proud rather than rubbish which he has acquired in the mistaken belief that he knows what the public wants. In the Masefield case I was the more to blame as it was no literary adviser who counselled me to do without the luxury of Pompey the Great. (Author Hunting 228-229).

 

The Texts and Editorial Note

The goal of Dubliners Bookshelf is to collect and archive books and texts relevant to the composition, interpretation, and reception history of Dubliners. A task such as this has many difficulties, some of which I will elaborate on shortly; consequently, the editorial team has attempted to form a scrupulous criteria for initial inclusion into the library. Rather than striving for definitiveness, we have tried to collect texts that appear explicitly in the writings of Joyce. These take two main forms: 1) Works mentioned in the text of Dubliners. For example, Little Chandler’s copy of Byron’s Hours of Idleness in “A Little Cloud” or Mr. Duffy’s volumes of Nietzsche in “A Painful Case.” 2) Collecting and displaying these works gives us a sense of Joyce’s bibliographic environment.

The second step in amassing a digital library is the selection of a copy texts from which a digital surrogate can be made. In all cases, an effort has been made to identify and digitize editions that Joyce would have most likely encountered. In some instances, identification is rather straightforward, especially if only one edition of the book had been printed or bibliographic details given by Joyce allow us to positively identify the volume. The descriptive catalog of Joyce’s Trieste library gives a sense of the books Joyce had in his possession at the end of his life, giving us a starting point for thinking about what titles and types of books he might have encountered as a young man writing his short story collection. In the absence of these more useful markers, we have tried to select editions which would have circulated in Dublin during the fin de siecle, choosing publishers and titles available in the bookstalls and libraries of Ireland.

After identifying titles and choosing appropriate copytexts, we must consider the individual witness which will be digitized and displayed within our library application. Despite the relative fixity of print in comparison to forms of textual transmission in oral or digital cultures, the printed book often has slight variations, even within a single print run. Consequently, we have tried to choose individual witnesses that are ostensibly free from idiosyncratic defect and are representative of the larger edition and printing. The decision to represent the books in digital facsimile, as opposed to a clean transcription, allows the reader to interact with the visual forms of the written page, as Joyce encountered them. An odd advertisement, illustration, colophon often caught Joyce’s attention, and these para- textual elements are retained in the digitized book.

Today many of these books are rare and can only be found in a handful of institutions around the world, and in bringing them together within a single digital space, accessible across the globe, we hope to participate, on a small scale, in the types of reading revolutions envisioned by the public library and more recent large-scale digitization and archiving projects. The project utilizes the most advanced technologies in book imaging and page-turning software that will allow users to read, browse, search, and annotate the first edition of Dubliners as well as the other texts in the library collection on their desktop, laptop, or tablet. Creating an aesthetically pleasing and conveniently organized library of texts will hopefully assist scholars and students of Joyce in exploring and delighting in the intertextual worlds scripted by Joyce.