Joyce in Dublin

Joyce as a pupil at Clongowes Wood College in Dublin. He was the youngest pupil of the college. The Jesuit sitting behind Joyce is Father William Power. He was to appear in A Portrait as Fr. Arnall, who taught Stephen both Latin and mathematics
> courtesy Clongowes Wood College Archive, Dublin

1882
1888

A portrait of the artist as a child

Joyce was the eldest of ten siblings, with a drunken, overbearing, profligate father and a devoted mother who died prematurely. His childhood was a story of decay from a relatively comfortable condition to one of destitution. May Goulding Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is based on his mother, whose death was to become one of Stephen’s obsessions in Ulysses and one of the leitmotifs of the text. On 29th August 1904, Joyce wrote to Nora: “My mother was slowly killed, I think, by my father’s ill-treatment, by years of trouble, and by my cynical frankness of conduct. When I looked on her face as she lay in her coffin – a face grey and wasted with cancer – I understood that I was looking on the face of a victim and I cursed the system which had made her a victim”.

Above: Joyce as a pupil at Clongowes Wood College in Dublin. He was the youngest pupil of the college. The Jesuit sitting behind Joyce is Father William Power. He was to appear in A Portrait as Fr. Arnall, who taught Stephen both Latin and mathematics
> courtesy Clongowes Wood College Archive, Dublin

Baby Tuckoo

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“Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming (...)

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1889
1892

Ad maiorem Dei Gloriam

Joyce e i gesuiti

Il padre iscrive il piccolo James al prestigioso Clongowes Wood College, gestito da gesuiti, deciso a dare al suo primogenito la migliore educazione possibile. Pure i successivi istituti che Joyce frequenta, Belvedere College e University College Dublin, sono retti da gesuiti che, consapevolmente, stanno formando la nuova classe dirigente cattolica d’Irlanda. Anche quando si allontanerà dalla religione e svilupperà un pensiero critico verso il clero, Joyce manterrà un’alta opinione dell’educazione ricevuta e proverà una fascinazione profonda per i cerimoniali ecclesiastici, la musica sacra, la liturgia.

John Stanislaus Joyce

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In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and in Ulysses, Joyce created Stephen’s (...)

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Below: The Martello Tower of Sandymount in an early 20th century photo. In this building, in which the opening chapter of Ulysses takes place, Joyce lived for a very short period with Oliver St John Gogarty, the inspiration for Buck Mulligan, “stately and plump”, in the incipit of the text > coll. National Library of Ireland, Dublin.

The Martello Tower of Sandymount in an early 20th century photo. In this building, in which the opening chapter of Ulysses takes place, Joyce lived for a very short period with Oliver St John Gogarty, the inspiration for Buck Mulligan, “stately and plump”, in the incipit of the text > coll. National Library of Ireland, Dublin

1893
1903

«Non serviam»

At the end of his school career (he graduated with an underwhelming pass in October 1902), Joyce underwent a difficult spell due to his precarious family and economic circumstances and to a sense of enstrangement he felt in Ireland. He failed to find appreciable sources of inspiration in contemporary Irish literature, whose specific forms of nationalism he challenged and critiqued.
He therefore developed the idea of leaving Dublin. In 1903 he was in Paris, in theory to continue studying medicine. He soon gave up medical studies and started making some money writing reviews for the “Daily Express”. He ate very little, read an awful lot, and met up with other expatriates, uprooted artists and intellectuals, including the triestino Theodor Däubler, who threatened to challenge him to a duel.

Letter from Stanislaus Joyce to Italo Svevo

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Letter from Stanislaus Joyce to Italo Svevo, Trieste, 18th January 1927 “Dear Mr Schmitz, […] I (...)

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1903
1904

Nora

The Parisian stay came to an abrupt end on the evening of 10th April 1903, when Joyce found a telegram from his father waiting for him in his room, which read “MOTHER DYING COME HOME FATHER”. However, his stay in Dublin proved increasingly difficult. When he met the young hotel maid Nora Barnacle and fell in love with her, he decided to involve her in a new, more radical escape project. On 8th October 1904 the de facto couple left Dublin. Joyce never returned, except for short stays, but was to write about it for the rest of his life.