Freeman's Journal Research Articles

Joyce in the Fold, the Fold in Joyce

Joyce in the Fold, the Fold in Joyce

"Built with glue and clippings": Joyce, Clipping Bureaus, and the Art of Recycling

"Built with glue and clippings":Joyce, Clipping Bureaus, and the Art of Recycling Dipanjan Maitra (bio) On 22 April 1915, Joyce wrote to Grant Richards from Venice: "It is possible that your press clipping agency has overlooked the two notices in question. I shall perhaps write to my brother and ask him to search the files of the 'Freeman's Journal' and of 'Sinn Fein.'"1 "[Y]our press clipping agency"—a phrase easily lost in a letter where Joyce was trying his hardest to see Dubliners into print, secure "dramatic rights" for Exiles, and make arrangements for the publication of A Portrait all in the shadow of World War I—were nevertheless words known to most men, if not all, in Europe and the United States in 1915. They were certainly known to many working-class women. Clipping agencies had become popular in the 1880s in France and England and were rapidly exported to the United States when one of the early pioneers, Henry Romeike (1855-1903) decided to expand his business in 1887. These agencies gathered press clippings for their clients for a price. Like many celebrity artists and public figures of the time, Joyce and his entourage soon became subscribers. As a result, he amassed an enormous collection of press-cuttings (over 3,000) now scattered across holding institutions in the United States, England, and Ireland.2 Joyce's clippings show his growing stature as an artist in the public eye. As the letter to Richards shows, he was aware of clipping agencies and their role at least as early as 1915. His more direct involvement with bureaus, however, began slightly later in 1917 when British postal surveillance forced Harriet Shaw Weaver to become a client of Durrant's Press Cuttings in London. She subscribed to multiple bureaus from London and supplied Joyce with press cuttings for the remainder of his life. Weaver was not alone in this, though, since, in Paris, Sylvia Beach subscribed on Joyce's behalf from at least 1926 onward. Even Paul Léon subscribed to press-cutting agencies for mentions of Joyce.3 The surviving clippings are in more than ten languages from about five continents. Despite their reach, however, few studies have taken into account the role of these clipping bureaus in shaping Joyce's work.4 In this essay, I will discuss the circumstances that inspired this remarkable collecting practice and its impact on the production of Joyce's texts. Significantly enough, Joyce's subscription to clipping agencies coincides with the rise of celebrity culture and [End Page 135] tabloid journalism, which magnified the bureaus' popularity.5 How did these clipping agencies function? Now hailed as a "steampunk version of Google," press-cutting agencies employed special readers, mostly women, to speed-read manually hundreds of newspaper articles every day.6 These readers looked for keywords requested by their clients and then isolated news items. The press-cuttings were swiftly mailed to the client with a receipt that usually provided the name of the newspaper, date, and place of publication. Thus in 1915, if Joyce was looking for specific reviews of Dubliners, a press-cutting agency would have been his best bet. By 1915, Joyce had successfully negotiated with Richards to publish Dubliners and was told by the publisher that early reviewers had, despite their reservations, "almost without exception, spoken very well of the book"; thus he became increasingly interested in collecting, copying, and circulating press reviews of the collection.7 His interest in press reviews of his work went back to his first publication, Chamber Music with Elkin Mathews.8 Joyce collected reviews of the book and, according to Ellmann, employed a printer in Trieste to have them copied and sent to Richards "for insertion in copies [of Dubliners] sent to the press" (LettersII 332, n3).9 While Joyce seems to have gathered press reviews primarily to circulate them among influential reviewers to generate further publicity, they also came in handy during more urgent moments. John McCourt notes that when, in September 1914, war protocols dictated Joyce's teaching position at the Scuola di Commercio Revoltella be suspended until further notice, he wrote to the Royal Lieutenancy to have himself...

From Silence to Plenty: The Famine in Early Twentieth-Century Periodical Fiction

From Silence to Plenty:The Famine in Early Twentieth-Century Periodical Fiction* Lindsay Janssen (bio) "The remains of centuries are here; and the mind wanders from the wonderful and sublime in natural scenery to contemplate in solemn, gloomy silence the waste and desolations of time."1 "The Famine had fallen upon the land, with a cloud of horrors unknown to other peoples, undreamt of by the men of this generation. It was not merely that thousands sickened of starvation and walked the land, gaunt and ghastly heralds of fast following death. The gasp of the dying, the silence of the dead—these were awful and appalling."2 In 1850, toward the end of the Great Irish Famine (1845–51), William Stevens Balch—an American preacher, evangelist, journalist, politician, and historian—published Ireland as I Saw It. As the first of the above epigraphs demonstrates, Balch's narrative is marked by a duality found in travel writing about Ireland in the post-Famine decades; his admiration of the landscape stands in uneasy contrast to his remarks invoking desolation and silence.3 The second epigraph appeared almost a quarter-century later when the exiled nationalist John Mitchel returned to Ireland. To describe his warm reception, his life, and his accomplishments, the New York Irish-American reprinted an article from the Dublin Freeman's Journal. In that biographical [End Page 123] sketch's references to the Famine, the article's author alludes to the "silence of the dead." "Silence" and the related word "absence" have become key terms in academic and popular discourse about the Famine. Especially since its 150th anniversary and the accompanying commemorative boom of the mid-1990s, scholars, politicians, and journalists have insisted on the appropriateness of both words in their assessments of how Irish and diasporic communities approached the event and its human costs. Many have emphasized the paucity of material as the starting point of any sustained engagement with the Famine. Such presumed "silence" and "absence" are read in light of psychoanalytic trauma theory that turns to both concepts to describe symptoms of a society suffering the effects of traumatic repression. Scholarly research since the commemoration years, however, including work by Christopher Morash, Margaret Kelleher, Vincent Comerford, Melissa Fegan, Christopher Cusack, Marguérite Corporaal, and this author counters such perceived absence by unearthing ample textual confirmation of Famine memory. Yet despite such accumulated evidence, the conviction that the Famine has been cloaked in silence persists in both Irish and Irish American discourse. Building upon previous scholarship, this essay seeks to further qualify notions of traumatic silence and repression in relation to the impact of the Great Famine. After reviewing recent developments in the understanding of that event as a cultural trauma in psychoanalytic discourse, I turn to a literary case study to demonstrate an early twentieth-century engagement with the Famine's legacy—thereby complicating readings assuming communal silence and repression. This exploration focuses on a selection of stories about rural Ireland published in the Dublin story paper the Irish Packet between 1903 and 1906. Although the essay's argument is informed by a larger corpus of rural fiction in the magazine, I will limit the analysis to four examples: "Con the Quare One" and "Herself" by Jane Barlow (1857–1917), "The Frenzy of Famine: A Tale of '47" by Harry Allen, and "The Holy Well" by the magazine's editor Matthias McDonnell Bodkin (1849–1933).4 My current research on Irish and Irish North [End Page 124] American periodical culture between 1850 and the early twentieth century demonstrates a plethora of material, both fiction and nonfiction, that engages with memories of the Famine and Irish famines more broadly. The Irish Packet is just one of many examples that demonstrate the pervasive role of such memory in popular periodical literature. I have selected this Dublin magazine as my central case study for several reasons. The contents of the Irish Packet suggest that representations of the Famine were considered suitable matter for creative work. Moreover, these rural stories evidence the formulaic nature of Famine fictions as they tap into familiar representations of victimhood. And, crucially, the Irish Packet stories have a moral dimension in that they provide opportunities to...

Schoolchildren or Citizen Shareholders?: Provincial Repertory Audiences, Letters to the Editor, and Public Subscription

When the Abbey Theatre installed a nightly police cordon to silence protesting playgoers during the 1907 run of Synge'sThe Playboy of the Western World, spectators voiced their objections in newsprint. Under pseudonyms like “A Western Girl,” “A Commonplace Person,” “A Much Interested Foreigner,” and “A Lover of Liberty,” correspondents sent letters to theDublin Evening Telegraph, Freeman's Journal, andDublin Evening Mail. “Vox Populi” wrote that the arrested protesters “showed an admirable public spirit, which in any other country would be highly honoured.” “Oryza” reported a conversation overheard from the stalls in which Synge had said that the audience's hissing was “quite legitimate.” After journalist and Galway MP Stephen Gwynn penned a letter supporting the Abbey, biographer D. J. O'Donoghue responded that “the vindictiveness which has been shown night after night in expelling and prosecuting people who ahve [sic], in their excitement, called out ‘It's a libel’ or ‘shame,’ or otherwise mildly protested, is a serious menace to the freedom of an audience.” He referred to the furor as a “newspaper controversy”; others called it a “newspaper war.” In a public discussion at the Abbey after the play's run, Yeats quoted from the correspondence when defending his decision to call in the police. According to playwright William Boyle, the controversy boiled down to political representation. In a letter to theFreeman's Journal, he argued that protesters had not reacted “by staying away,” as some supporters had suggested they should, “because the ‘Abbey’ is a subsidised theatre, independent of the money taken at the door. Therefore … the public had no remedy, but the one resorted to.” Private subsidy had muffled the democratic shuffling of playgoers’ pocketbooks; forced to shut their mouths inside the theatre, playgoers opened up to the newspapers that circulated around it.

Keeping an Eye on Youghal: The Freeman's Journal and the Plan of Campaign in East Cork, 1886-92

Keeping an Eye on Youghal: The Freeman's Journal and the Plan of Campaign in East Cork, 1886-92

The Picture Odyssey of Ben Bloom Elijah

The Picture Odyssey of Ben Bloom Elijah Jonathan Morse (bio) It would be nice getting better slowly. You could get a book then. There was a book in the library about Holland. There were lovely foreign names in it and pictures of strangelooking cities and ships. It made you feel so happy. (P 26) At about noon on Wednesday, 27 January 1904, the Oceanic Steamship Company's ship Sonoma docked in Honolulu, Territory of Hawaii, where it would remain until the next day en route from San Francisco to Australia (see Figure 1). The Sonoma has a place in literary history; in 1916, it was the vessel on which W. Somerset Maugham was quarantined in the harbor of Pago Pago, American Samoa, where he was inspired to write "Rain," a short story about a missionary hell-bent on saving souls.1 The 1904 voyage also had a religious character, for the passengers who debarked in Honolulu included the party of John Alexander Dowie, the leader of a cult called the Christian Catholic Church. By that point in his career, Dowie was wearing Levitical robes as he preached in his tabernacle at Zion City, Illinois,2 and he had begun referring to himself as Elijah the Reformer (see cover image).3 The tabernacle and its congregation made an impressive spectacle (see Figure 2). Preaching total immersion, abstinence from alcohol and pork, and healing by prayer, Dowie gathered thousands of followers at Zion City, a capitalist Utopia with streets gridded in the pattern of a Union Jack. It had factories and schools, a university, and, at the heart of the enterprise, a bank. "Where God rules, man prospers," ran the Zion City slogan. But the bank operated on Ponzi principles, and in 1904 Dowie, an old man by then, was desperately touring the world on a mission to convert more depositors. He was accompanied all the way by excited coverage in the press for his various ministries had been dogged by scandal ever since the 1880s—first in Australia, where he had emigrated from Scotland as a boy in 1860, and then in the United States, where he moved in 1888. Five months after his visit to Hawaii, for example, the 13 July 1904 Honolulu Evening Bulletin reported the following on p. 6: [End Page 669] Click for larger view View full resolution In Dublin, two days before Bloomsday, the 14 June 1904 Freeman's Journal carried an earlier bulletin from the expedition, this one headed "Dowie in London" and referring sarcastically to "'Dr.' Dowie" (8). So when Dowie stepped down the gangplank of the Sonoma on 27 January, his arrival in Honolulu was front-page news, and the tone of the headlines was knowing.4 But the pictures under the headlines told a different story, and a part of that story's vocabulary turned out to be the now-interesting word "Zionism." There on page 1, the word taught the Honolulu of 1904 to read it in association with a group of portraits nestled in a fashionable matte surface (see Figure 3). The matte itself is printed with an art-nouveau design. As a term, [End Page 670] "art nouveau" may not have been widely known to readers of The Pacific Commercial Advertiser in 1904, but its defining whiplash curve is a living form within which everyone in Hawaii has always been at home. What may have been the fascinating chic nature of the exotic in the Zion City studio of Deacon Ernest Williams, Stenographer and Photographer, was only part of an everyday coiffure in Honolulu, where flowers are generally worn on the body. In Honolulu, as Andrew Marvell observed about a similar locale, all that is made is annihilated to a green thought.5 There, under the flowers, sarcastic quotation marks do not really work. In a green space, everything thrives, and everything seems equally worthy of love. You might call the islands another Zion. In accordance with that happy Hawaiian norm, the Advertiser's direct reporting on Dowie's advent came to scoff but remained to pray. It prayed, too, in the language of Dowie's bank: over the sacrament of a miraculously large tip. Click for larger view...

A Selected Bibliography of Writings by Bernard Shaw Concerning Health, the Medical Profession, and Related Topics

This selected bibliography gathers Bernard Shaw’s pronouncements on health and related topics. References in brackets are to Dan H. Laurence’s Bernard Shaw: A Bibliography, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983). References to items reprinted in The Works of Bernard Shaw: Collected Edition (London: Constable, 1930–38) are marked “Repr. in A198.” Items reprinted in Ronald Ford, ed., The Letters of Bernard Shaw to The Times, 1898–1950 (Sallins: Irish Academic Press, 2007) are marked “Repr. in Ford.”

The changing nature of advertisements inThe Freeman's Journal: a case study, 1763-1924

Purpose– The aim of this paper is to examine the nature of newspaper advertisements published in the Irish newspaperThe Freeman's Journal. This is approached by examining the construction of a selection of printed advertisements, including the strategies used in each, which appeared inThe Freeman's Journalbetween 1763 and 1924.Design/methodology/approach– The central primary source used isThe Freeman's Journaland the selected advertisements. A number of primary and secondary sources are employed in the analysis of the featured advertisements in respect to the format, language and marketing strategies used in each.Findings– The case study finds that there were a number of constants in the advertisements examined, as well as a number of advertising strategies employed from the eighteenth century onward, that have more commonly been associated with the 1918 to 1939 interwar period. It also found that the use of illustrations did not solely depend on twentieth century printing advances, but that printing developments did much to expand and progress advertising in Ireland.Originality/value– This case study explores a little researched area in Irish advertising history.

The Failure of Burton's Bank and its Aftermath

Between c.1700 and its failure, in 1733, Burton's bank was run by a series of partnerships – Benjamin Burton and Francis Harrison (1700–1725); Benjamin and Samuel Burton (1725); Benjamin Burton, Samuel Burton and Daniel Falkiner (late 1725); finally Samuel Burton and Daniel Falkiner (1728–33). In 1733, concerns over Samuel's ill health prompted a run on the bank – the catalyst for its failure. After Samuel's death in 1733 responsibility for resolving the bank's difficulties fell to Falkiner. Although he promised to honour its commitments, a petition presented to Parliament by a group of influential creditors led to a parliamentary inquiry. It established the bank's insolvency as well as the partners' financial obligations to the bank. In the years that followed, despite various acts giving the parliamentary-appointed trustees considerable powers, the persistent obduracy of Abraham Creighton, responsible for meeting Harrison's debts, ensured progress in winding-up the bank was slow. Creighton's tactics prompted Robert Roberts, the creditors' agent, to write a book in which he sought to vindicate his actions. After 1757, matters ground to a virtual standstill; the next creditors' meeting was not called until 1778. Once again little was achieved and, in 1817, appeals were made to the Freeman's Journal asking it to use its influence so that the creditors' claims might finally be settled.

Noirse-Made-Earsy:

It has been said that “anybody who takes ‘Finnegans Wake’ as an ur-text will probably have a low signal to noise ratio.”1 Doubtless any meaningful signal that the reader of the Wake receives must be separated from a much larger background of confusion and dissonance. Another way of looking at it, however, is that noise is inseparable from the process of sense making. In this study I use such theoreticians of noise as Jacques Attali, Michel Serres, and Avital Ronell to show how noise in the Wake does not merely destroy, distort, or obscure meaningful patterns and structures but collaborates in their creation. The article is divided into three sections. First, I take two test cases from Ulysses and the Wake respectively, to show how noise is coded into meaning by both the waking and dreaming mind. Second, I examine the political dimensions of the imposition of meaning on noise and the subversions of meaning by noise in terms of the battle between generations (father against sons) and within generations (brother against brother). Finally, I place these themes in the context of the postmodernist

An Enthusiast : Edith Œ. Somerville's Novel of the Irish War of Independence

An Enthusiast:Edith Œ. Somerville's Novel of the Irish War of Independence Nicole Pepinster Greene With the publication in 1915 of the third volume of the Irish R.M. short stories, In Mr. Knox's Country, the collaboration of Somerville and Ross was at the height of its popularity when Martin Ross died that same year.1 Readers might have reasonably concluded that this highly successful literary partnership had ended, and that Edith Somerville's writing career would end as well. But this was not the case. By 1917, Somerville began publishing memoirs and collections of essays and stories under the familiar literary trademark "Somerville and Ross," despite some occasional objections from the author's publisher, Longmans and Green.2 In 1919, she published the first of three novels that would appear under both names, Mount Music, followed by An Enthusiast (1921), and The Big House of Inver (1925), a popular and critical success. Longmans continued to reprint and republish the women's novels and collections of short stories, and their works gradually came to be included in the canon of Irish literature. An Enthusiast, however, is their only work of fiction that was never republished before Somerville's [End Page 98] death in 1949. In fact, it was reprinted just once, in 1985, and has remained almost unknown. Set in Ireland during the Anglo-Irish War of 1919 to 1921, An Enthusiast is the most overtly political and least representative of all Somerville and Ross fiction. A dark novel written when Ireland's future was still uncertain, it confronts the immediate political situation in southwest Cork and reflects the author's own divided loyalties. Its main protagonist, Dan Palliser, is an Anglo-Irish reformer who has rented his Big House to the returned colonialist, Lord Ducarrig, a Northern Unionist. Convinced that economic prosperity is the answer to Ireland's political problems, Dan—the author almost always refers to him as "Dan" rather than Palliser—farms the demesne and introduces the idea of cooperative farming to his neighbors. A loner who is alienated from his own class and family, Dan is befriended by the parish priest, Hugh Macnamara, SJ, who introduces him to the local Sinn Féin activist Eugene Cashen. Although Dan's efforts for reform are supported by both Father Hugh and Cashen, they are opposed by his family and by Nicholas Coyne, a nationalist entrepreneur and president of the Rural District Council. By the novel's end, Cashen is imprisoned, and Dan Palliser is killed on the steps of his own house, a victim of the crossfire between Northern Unionists and the IRA. Somerville herself was concerned about the reception of this wartime novel. She understood the artistic, commercial, and political risks in writing a novel focusing on the Troubles. To gain her readers' sympathy, Somerville writes in the preface that, "to be strictly impartial is to be equally disliked by all sides. In trying to keep an even keel . . . I have risked this disaster."3 Admittedly, Dan Palliser calls himself "Mr. Facing-Bothways" (E 74), and Somerville represents the local population as the victims of both the IRA and the British military forces. However, her Conservative and Unionist readership would not have considered her portrayals of both Father Hugh and Eugene Cashen as men of honor, nor her casting of the Unionist Ducarrig as one of the novel's villains, to be impartial. They would have had little sympathy for Dan, whose dilemma is singularly that of the Anglo-Irish, and, moreover, of the Anglo-Irish foolish enough to remain in an independent Irish republic. Lacking humor, nostalgia, dialect, picturesque characterizations, or hunting scenes, this novel simply did not meet the expectations of the Somerville and Ross readership. Reviews of An Enthusiast were generally positive, however. Despite Somerville's concerns about its reception by a Catholic audience, notices in the Irish press were somewhat more favorable than those in the British press, and the [End Page 99] novel was not the political disaster Somerville had feared.4 Reviewing for The Freeman's Journal, Susan Mitchell describes Somerville's "experiment" as "enormously interesting." She places Palliser in the tradition of Robert Emmet and Charles Stewart Parnell, and...

The Lion Who Did Not Roar . . . Yet: The Editorials of James A. McMaster - May 1860 to May 1861

April 2011 marked the 150 th anniversary of Confederate batteries firing on Fort Sumter; April also was the 191 st anniversary of James A. McMaster's birth (1820-1886). One of the most renowned converts to Catholicism in nineteenth-century America, McMaster was a formidable apologist for the Catholic religion - as he understood it in his ultramontane thinking - editor of the New York Freeman's Journal (hereafter Freeman's Journal ) for almost forty years, an eloquent man of letters, and a bold, if antagonistic, theological and political controversialist. From late 1861, he was one of the first Catholic journalists to bitterly oppose Lincoln and the war effort, and has to be counted among the leading Copperheads in the Northeast who had a national audience. This article explores and documents the "pre-Copperhead McMaster" in the final hours of the antebellum period, from the nomination and election of Abraham Lincoln to his suspension of habeas corpus . McMaster's editorials from this period provide us with a base-line to measure just how far from his pre-war thinking he would travel after May 1861, and also serve to remind us of a McMaster who once was more in line with the majority of his Catholic coreligionists in the North during the early war years: pro-Lincoln, pro-Union, and anti-abolition. After a telescoped biography, the article will present: a) the context of the period, particularly the various Catholic opinions on slavery and abolition; b) an examination of the Freeman's Journal 's editorials dealing with Lincoln's nomination, election, inaugural, and response to the firing on Fort Sumter, placing his positions relative to other Catholic journalists of his time; and c) a conclusion tracing the trajectory of McMaster's career for the remaining wartime years.

Myopic Beauty: The Map, the Photograph, the Palimpsest, and Joyce

Myopic Beauty:The Map, the Photograph, the Palimpsest, and Joyce Joseph Nugent (bio) Gabriel pointed to the statue, on which lay patches of snow. Then he nodded familiarly to it and waved his hand. —Good night, Dan, he said gaily. (Joyce, Dubliners 216) James Joyce, too, was familiar with it, and familiar with the family of Daniel O'Connell, the man it honored. He had particular reason to be. Two generations before, his grandfather had married into the prosperous O'Connells of South Kerry. Dan, the Joyces claimed, was one of their own. Of course, the family connection was difficult to prove, but the Liberator himself, Richard Ellmann tells us, was happy to indulge the notion (11). That would have been enough for James Joyce, who knew that history was more than a paper trail. History, Joyce understood, was a lived condition, its traces all around. In Dublin it underlay the fabric of the city, was written in its very stones, confronted the citizen at every turn, was omnipresent, ghostly, nightmarish. And in 1882, the year that James Augustine Joyce was born, even as the metropolis turned its eyes to the future, with the much-heralded Irish Exhibition of Arts and Manufactures, it marked the centenary of the Irish Volunteers and, Janus-like, looked backwards too. Dublin was a place of retrospective [End Page 266] aspiration, its eyes set firmly on a past it did not want the citizen to forget. Since 1808 the hero of Trafalgar had presided over Sackville, not yet O'Connell, Street from the great Doric column that was the Nelson Pillar. Victorians knew the value of the great man as aspirational device and of emulation as ideological tool. As the cult of the fallen hero spread across the nation-states of Europe, boulevard and thoroughfare were colonnaded with warriors and leaders, reifications in bronze and stone of the glory of the race. Surmounted by the great and good, idealized types, these monuments were rubrics of the national narrative, assertions of a seamless continuity between glorious past and certain future. A newly confident Irish people, too, set out to ossify the exemplary qualities of its dead for the edification of its youth. On August 15th, 1882, the Freeman's Journal reported, "Hundreds of thousands, young and old, hopeful in heart for a great and glorious day," braved a dismal downpour to converge on O'Connell Bridge. They had come to celebrate the opening of the Exhibition and to witness the unveiling of what was to be the most imposing piece of public sculpture to grace the city yet. It had been conceived barely a decade after the Great Famine. On this, the feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, John Henry Foley's magnificent memorial was finally ready to be unveiled. The proceedings of the much-anticipated day would proclaim the breadth of Dublin's industry displayed by its menfolk marshalled in grand procession. From all corners of the city came its tradesmen: the city's horseshoers, then its nail makers, its printers, cork cutters, butchers, basket makers, its skinners, plumbers, bottle-makers, brush makers, saddle makers. "At one o'clock … the veil fell to the Lord Mayor's signal, and the O'Connell Bronze stood revealed," wrote the Freeman's; then "a mighty roar went up from ten thousand throats." At that very moment "the sun suddenly opened its beams through the drenching rain, and gloriously lighted up the monument and the crowded platform" (O'Hanlon lxxiii). The gods were smiling. Four Winged Victories surround the monument's base. Here are Patriotism and Fidelity, resplendent, massive, in resounding bronze. Courage and Eloquence, two more embodiments of the qualities the [End Page 267] Irish people revered O'Connell for, sit out of sight. Between them are mounted the four great shields of Ireland's provinces. For years James Joyce carted his own coat of arms from dingy flat to other flat, a step ahead of the landlord, proud, like his father, of his ancestry. Strange, then, that in the pantheon of Irish heroes it was not to his reputed kinsman but to Parnell he always looked. Joyce was patriotic, but his patriotism was not of...

"The Children of the Nation?": Representations of Poor Children in Mainstream Nationalist Journalism, 1882 and 1913

"The Children of the Nation?":Representations of Poor Children in Mainstream Nationalist Journalism, 1882 and 1913 Margot Gayle Backus (bio) In his novel A Star Called Henry (1999), Roddy Doyle has his fictional protagonist Henry Smart, a fourteen-year-old Irish Citizen Army volunteer, ask the socialist labor organizer and Easter Rising leader James Connolly to add something to the founding document of the Irish state, the 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic, "about the rights of children." This invention invites readers to consider that the Proclamation's famous commitment to "cherish all the children of the nation equally" might have been intended and understood, by at least some of the Rising's participants, as not merely symbolic but as a commitment to actual children. This move [End Page 118] on Doyle's part intervenes, perhaps deliberately, in a debate among literary critics about the significance of child imagery in early-twentieth-century Irish nationalist writing. Some critics view the use of such child metaphors as a necessary and empowering rhetorical move that presented Irish nationalists, rather than the nation itself, long personified as Mother Ireland, as the agents of national destiny, while others dismiss or decry them as infantilizing the Irish and naturalizing their domination by the British.1 Critical analyses of modern Irish nationalism's representations of children have typically focused on these images' symbolic dimension, while the significance of these representations as expressions of attitudes toward real children have been largely ignored. Doyle's imagined exchange between James Connolly and a juvenile Citizen Army volunteer, whom the reader has seen grow up homeless on the streets of Dublin, makes suddenly self-evident an alternative reading: that in a society in which vast hordes of homeless children subsisted or died under the most marginal of circumstances, some of those who fought to establish an independent Ireland would have had the welfare of literal children as a high priority.2 For such readers, the key phrase "all Ireland's children" would have emphasized class disparities among literal children rather than metaphorical divisions among Ireland's religious and political factions. [End Page 119] That the Easter Proclamation's child imagery almost surely was read by some nationalists as primarily literal and by others as metaphorical can be explained by notable changes in nationalist representations of children that this article traces in the coverage of the 1913 Lockout by the nationalist newspaper of record, the Freeman's Journal. It argues that during this period, the editors, writers, and artists of the Freeman's Journal increasingly deployed representations of poor children that could be read as simultaneously symbolic and literal, so as to de-emphasize a series of material and predominantly class-based conflicts within the nationalist front. Over its history, the Freeman's Journal, published in Dublin from 1763 to 1924, consistently represented the interests of the most economically and politically powerful caste to claim nationalist credentials, while at the same time presenting those interests as those of the nationalist movement as a whole.3 Originally established as a mouthpiece for the Protestant "Patriot" movement, the Freeman's Journal was nominally nonsectarian up to the Land Wars in the late nineteenth century. By 1877, however, the personal conversion to Catholicism of the Freeman's editor, Edmund Dwyer Gray, was matched by the gradual conversion of his newspaper to a conservative nationalism that identified Ireland's interests with those of the Catholic hierarchy and the economic requirements of a bourgeoning Catholic middle class.4 These shifts in the paper's editorial positions and reporting took place in a context of competition among nationalist factions and newspapers. To maintain its readership, the Freeman's Journal at times allied itself with more progressive elements within the nationalist front. For instance, in the early 1880s, when its star reporter, William O'Brien, left the paper to become founding editor of the Land League's new weekly newspaper, the United Ireland, the Freeman's Journal reined in its opposition to Parnell's leadership so as not to lose circulation to the new publication.5 Similar pressures would [End Page 120] later drive the Freeman's Journal's editorial policy to the right, away from the interests...

Quotation Marks, the Gramophone Record, and the Language of the Outlaw

Quotation Marks, the Gramophone Record, and the Language of the Outlaw Damien Keane (almost voicelessly) Excuse me. I am suffering from a severe chill, have recently come from a sickbed. A few wellchosen words. (U 15.998–99) Taken from Leopold Bloom's trial sequence in "Circe," the words of my epigram have a claim to being the first in Ulysses actually spoken by John F. Taylor, the nationalist barrister renowned in Dublin for his oratorical skill. While Taylor is more commonly associated with "Aeolus" and its famous analogy between the Israelites enslaved in Egyptian bondage and the Irish oppressed under British rule, the speech in which the analogy is elaborated in the earlier episode is presented as a lengthy quotation, recited from memory by Professor MacHugh to the assembled pressmen and hangers-on in the offices of the Freeman's Journal. Thus, although Taylor's words have appeared in the novel prior to "Circe," it is only in the fifteenth episode that the reader can finally identify a moment in the text when Taylor himself might be the speaker of words—and, quite aptly, words about choosing words—that have been attributed to him. Even so, it would seem at best naively literal, and at worst outrageous, to advance such a claim on the evidence of "Circe," particularly when the episode is understood as a hallucinatory or textual unconsciousness. Considered as an archive (in the Foucauldian sense), however, "Circe" serves to expose and illuminate aspects left inchoate or underdeveloped in earlier moments of the novel, bringing out what had been latent in the narrative and re-casting acts of interpretation as part of an ongoing process of misrecognition and limitation. As in "Aeolus," Taylor's appearance in "Circe" inheres precisely in the enunciation of words attributable to him; in "Circe" alone, though, this relation pivots explicitly on the textual apparatus framing the identity of the speaker. A capitalized dramatic tag immediately preceding the words names their speaker as "J. J. O'MOLLOY" (U 15.997), although the tag itself is preceded by an italicized stage direction describing O'Molloy's assumption of Taylor's ragged, phthisical features (U 15.993–96). Immediately [End Page 400] following the tag, someone approximating the great orator speaks—"almost voicelessly," the reader is informed parenthetically—before becoming yet another semi-materialized figment of Aeolian rhetoric. Taylor's ineluctable last gasp—the word "words"—thus gestures not toward his oratorical distinction or colloquial reputation, but toward the availability and adaptability of his own words in the public sphere. Why this "archival" series of lines in "Circe" manifests these "few wellchosen words" in the form it does is determined by the political interplay of authority and appropriation subtending the citation of Taylor's speech in "Aeolus." This is to say that the moment of Taylor's appearance in "Circe" dramatizes a highly mediated relation of authority, citation, and attribution that, in "Aeolus," remains unspecified and occluded, even as the features of the relation strongly inform the significance of the seventh episode. In light of the severely bared fictional device of their Circean reenactment, then, the reporting and reception of Taylor's words in "Aeolus" are themselves revealed to be a reenactment, pointing not to some prior section of the novel, but to the textual archive (in the material or institutional sense) of early twentieth-century Irish political culture. By fictionalizing the historical conditions in which it simultaneously participates, "Aeolus" thus opens up the question of the relationship of the singular work of art to mediated reproducibility and propagation. It is to this final question that the present essay will attend. The problem of textual authority in Joyce's works remains an enduring and vital aspect of Joycean criticism, one dependent as much on the works' formal difficulty and technical recalcitrance as on their tortuous histories of composition and publication.1 That such a byzantine configuration of interpretive dilemmas has resulted in a certain methodological balkanization is unsurprising, and it is therefore fitting that this question of textual authority is perhaps most critically dynamic in relation to Ulysses, a book written partly in the somewhat literally Balkanized city of Trieste. What is surprising is how frequently...

Dying for Ireland: Violence, Silence, and Sacrifice in Dorothy Macardle's Earth-Bound: Nine Stories of Ireland (1924)

Dying for Ireland:Violence, Silence, and Sacrifice in Dorothy Macardle's Earth-Bound: Nine Stories of Ireland (1924) Jennifer Molidor Although the Irish struggle for independence provided increased access to the public sphere for republican women like Dorothy Macardle (1889–1958), women's political activism also frequently provoked scorn from male nationalists. William T. Cosgrave, for instance, responded to Cumann nam Bán's opposition to the Anglo-Irish Treaty by publicly blaming the bitter Irish Civil War on women's interference. Cosgrave claimed female activists were no "ordinary females"; quieting this "women's war" meant instigating a so-called "war on women."1 In 1922, this antagonism was demonstrated in a series of raids aimed at weakening the IRA by arresting female republican advocates like Dorothy Macardle, Maíre Comerford, and Mary Mac Swiney. Though Macardle and others protested their detention by going on a hunger strike, many were held without charge until the end of the civil war in 1923. Writing to the Freeman's Journal, the Irish Times, and the Irish Independent from Mountjoy Prison in 1922, Dorothy Macardle responded to Cosgrave's remarks on the detention and hunger strike of her friend, Mary Mac Swiney. "We were maintaining the Republican idea as writers, speakers, editors and members of the Publicity Departments Staff,—we were, that is, engaged, like Miss Mac Swiney, in speaking truths which the Provisional Government desires to keep concealed."2 By documenting the events of the Irish Civil War as an historian; by addressing injustices as a journalist; and representing the conflicts between nationalist and feminist agendas in her fiction, Macardle's life was devoted to "speaking truths." Most of Macardle's short story collection, Earth-Bound: Nine Stories of Ireland (1924) , was written during her internment in Mount joy and Kilmainham Gaols. The collection draws attention to overlooked sacrifices made by women [End Page 43] in the Irish cause. Stories like "The Brother" and "The Prisoner" present heroic male narratives of rebellion, while other stories, like "By God's Mercy" and "A Story Without An End," address women's experiences as wives and mothers of male republicans. Macardle's stories "The Return of Niav" and "The Portrait of Roisin Dhu," however, attend to the relationships between women, and demonstrate what Gerardine Meaney calls "an acute awareness of the dangers of women's symbolic function in nationalist ideology."3 The received narrative of Irish nationalism has tended to presume the masculine nature of the fight for an Irish republic, though recent scholarship has shown that women fought and suffered alongside their male compatriots, and that they did so amid gendered discourses of sacrifice—for example, the myth of Mother Ireland.4 Macardle's writings challenge such representations by linking violence against women with images of women in nationalist iconography. As Anne McClintock and others have argued, in the process of decolonization "women serve as the visible markers of national homogeneity" and as such "they become subjected to especially vigilant and violent discipline."5 For women, the noble sacrifice of "dying for Ireland," in the context of a masculine project of national solidarity, meant the sublimation of sexual difference. Dorothy Macardle's literary reputation rests in large part on her substantial 1937 history of the independence era, The Irish Republic.6 Only limited attention has been paid to her other works. Gerardine Meaney provided an intelligent discussion of Macardle's short story "The Portrait of Roisin Dhu," which is reprinted in the fifth volume of the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing. Macardle also features briefly in Margaret Ward's Maud Gonne: A Life and Unmanageable Revolutionaries, in Terry de Valera's recent memoir, in Sinéad McCoole's No [End Page 44] Ordinary Women, and in a notable article by Peter Beresford Ellis. In 2007, Nadia Smith published the first full biography of Macardle in Dorothy Macardle: A Life; Macardle also featured in Smith's study of Irish women historians. A number of encyclopedia entries make reference to Macardle, but many contain factual errors.7 Despite her complex participation in feminist and republican movements, no full-length study has yet directly addressed Macardle's novels, poems, plays, stories, and literary criticism in the...

The Language of the Outlaw: A Clarification

In his definitive biography of Joyce, Richard Ellmann quotes exten sively from a pamphlet entitled Language of the Outlaw (JJII 9In). Joyce relied on this text to craft one of the most famous sections of Ulysses, the recitation of John F. Taylor's speech in the Aeolus episode (U 7.791-870).l Professor MacHugh rehearses the speech?a lively discourse in favor of the Irish language?before the men in the Freeman's Journal office, and the analogy that organizes the argument, and indeed appears throughout Ulysses, would have been familiar in 1904: the Irish, like the Israelites enslaved in ancient Egypt, were a chosen people oppressed by a rich and powerful empire.2 My initial attempt to locate this source pamphlet was unsuccessful, and eventu ally the reason for this seemed clear. Ellmann, who quotes the pam phlet at length in both the biography and The Consciousness of Joyce, fails to note its author:3 the Irish nationalist and revolutionary Roger Casement.

An Emendation to the Joycean Canon: The Last Hurrah for "Politics and Cattle Disease"

Most Joyceans will be surprised by the lack of evidence of Joyce's authorship that supported the admission into the Critical Writings of the Irish newspaper article Politics and Cattle Disease.1 This essay will demonstrate that Joyce did not write the unsigned 10 September 1912 Freeman's Journal newspaper edito rial Politics and Cattle Disease and that there never was substantial evidence for supposing he did. The most likely author of this edito rial was William Br ay den, who was the editor of the Freeman's Journal both in 1904, when he appeared in fiction as a character in Ulysses, and in 1912, when the editorial was published. An examination of the newspaper source material has revealed the correct sub-editorial on 6 September 1912 (though not by Joyce) that Ellmann was looking for when he chose Politics and Cattle Disease, after getting a clue, while examining the Cornell Joyce collection, from a 6 September 1912 letter written by Charles Joyce.2

Raising the Wind

Raising the Wind Sean Latham The opening essay in this issue of JJQ argues that editors, biographers, and textual scholars have been too quick to attribute a rather dubious piece of newspaper writing to Joyce. In "An Emendation to the Joycean Canon: The Last Hurrah for 'Politics and Cattle Disease,'" Terence Matthews meticulously argues that we have long been mistaken in our belief that Joyce actually published a short article on foot-and-mouth disease in the 10 September 1912 issue of The Freeman's Journal. Matthews makes a measured assessment of the available textual, historical, and documentary evidence, focusing on the newspaper itself and its role in the debates about cattle disease in Ireland. The result is a convincing claim that editors of both James Joyce: The Critical Writings and James Joyce: Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing were too quick to include this piece based upon some rather thin external evidence from Stanislaus Joyce. Although such a discovery does not go to the heart of the canon, it nevertheless reminds us that textual scholarship can still profitably attend to questions of genesis as well as genetics. This opening essay is followed by a pair of studies which each reflect in quite different ways on the virtual worlds created in and around Joyce's written texts. In "Possible Worlds Theory and the Fantasy Universe of Finnegans Wake," Margot Norris offers a daring and inventive new way for venturing into Joyce's most challenging work. Using the narratological tools of possible-worlds theory, she interrogates "the Wake's narrative and fictional operation" by rigorously analyzing the ways in which the book alternatively complies with and violates generic textual codes. Using chapter I.i. as a kind of laboratory, she explores how Joyce integrates elements of fantasy, actuality, and possibility to test the relationship between text and world. As a result, we are led beyond language and plot into the Wake's deep yet riven narrative structures. In "Ulysses on Web 2.0: Towards a Hypermedia Parallax Engine," Mark C. Marino takes us from possible worlds to virtual ones. Working at the intersection of Joyce criticism and the digital humanities, he meditates on the idea of an interface while speculating about the ways in which Ulysses might be remediated as a digital object. Following up on the wide-ranging discussions which accompanied Michael Groden's now stalled Hypermedia Ulysses, he focuses, in particular, on the problems of constraint and control. As he notes, "If [End Page 421] Ulysses solicits hypertext, the response to the solicitation threatens to be a nightmarish gathering, an onslaught of commentary, a vortex of links, a perversion, a black hole. What is worse, such a project might stabilize, cite, and annotate the text to death." These problems are themselves not unique; indeed, they are the same ones faced by any interface designer working either with the static structure of the printed page or the floating windows of the personal computer. Such decisions, however, have a profound effect upon the reception and circulation of a text, and Marino concludes by imagining a collaborative model of interface and commentary—a WikiUlysses or Joyce 2.0—in which user-generated editorial content can be organized yet prevented from stabilizing the text. The model he suggests is rich with possibility, but its application to Ulysses remains sadly stymied by copyright law, though prototypes based on Dubliners and A Portrait remain a rich possibility. The final pair of essays pursue very different ends, though intersect in quite surprising ways in their reflections on the economy and epistemology of love. In "Getting Past No in 'Scylla and Charybdis,'" John Gordon transforms a small, even inconsequential scene in Ulysses—Stephen's confession that he does not believe his own theory about Shakespeare—into the resonant center of the entire book. This simple "no," he argues, is a "wound of doubt," a generative "not yet" which ripples across and even beyond the text to entwine Bloom and Molly every bit as tightly as it does Joyce and Nora, William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway. Ulysses, he contends in this elegant reading, is founded on a vortex of doubt and uncertainty created by an open question about love...

History's Echo

In the "Aeolus" episode of Ulysses, Freeman's Journal editor Myles Crawford lays a hand on the shoulder of Stephen Dedalus and tells the young man, "I want you to write something for me. Something with a bite in it. You can do it. I see it in your face. . . . Put us all into it, damn its soul" (111). Critics have long identified Ulysses as that piece of writing that self-consciously executes the newspaper editor's demand, but early Joyce critics such as biographer Richard Ellmann, it is now charged, left the novel toothless rather than biting, privileging its modernist aesthetic and supposed universal humanism over its specific, political concerns. These approaches either "defang[ed]" Joyce's purported nationalism as Vincent Cheng claims in Joyce, Race, and Empire (2), or they just flat-out ignored it, attributing both to Joyce and to his work what Emer Nolan has referred to as a "benign multiculturalism" (3).