Pounds/Shillings/Pence: The Economics in the Tales

Abstract

The Dubliners of Dubliners occupy fifteen designated areas of that city, a territorial separation that allows for just enough overlappings to attest to the “unity” of Dublin more than to the unity of the text. Unlike the citizens of Ulysses that many of them will eventually become, they have almost no points of contact with each other, and is not until late in the process that a journalist for the Freeman named Hendrick, who was scheduled to review the Eire Abu concert in “A Mother”, turns up at the businessmen’s retreat in “Grace”, while Kathleen Kearney, who had figured so prominently in “A Mother”, is mentioned by Molly Ivors in “The Dead”. Almost all of the characters in the fifteen tales are (temporarily) confined within the space of their individual narratives. Whereas Ulysses will later reprise some of them, they are essentially “fictional” characters who displace the real people of James Joyce’s Dublin for the purpose of the fiction. Also in sharp contradistinction there is no attempt to introduce real and fictional people to each other (like J. C. Doyle and Molly Bloom on the concert stage, Myler Keogh and Percy Bennett in the boxing ring, George Russell and Stephen Dedalus in the National Library). At least one known personage, however, the English Jesuit Father Bernard Vaughan, mentioned by his actual name in Ulysses, is portrayed in Dubliners by a fictional surrogate, Father Purdon.KeywordsSalary FigureGold CoinSaturday NightMusic LessonMusical TalentThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.