Heyward Ehrlich, Some Notes on Dubliners (350:699, Joyce/Yeats, Spring 2004)
[dub_notes.doc]
1. Joyce described the stories as falling into four categories of evolving consciousness: childhood,
youth, maturity, and public life. Which stories would you place in each category?
2. The order of composition of the stories may be of some interest, continuing as he negotiated with
publishers. Three stories were published in 1904; later composition and revision continued until 1907.
Order of
Composition/
Publication
1/ 1
2/ 4
3/ 5
4/ 10
5/ 7
6/ 9
7/ 11
8/ 12
9/ 2
10/ 13
11/ 3
12/ 14
13/ 6
14/ 8
15/ 15
Title
Publication
The Sisters
13 Aug 04, Irish Homestead
Eveline
0 Sept 04, Irish Homestead
After The Race
7 Dec 04, Irish Homestead
Clay
rejected by Irish Homestead, Jan 05
Boarding House
Counterparts
Painful Case
Ivy day in Committee Room
An Encounter
A Mother
Araby
Grace
Two Gallants
Little Cloud
The Dead
Comp/Revision Dates
Rev May-June 06
Rev 1906, several titles
July 05
July 05
July 05, rev 1906
Aug 05
18 Sept 05
Sept 05
Oct 05
Oct-Nov 05
Feb 06
1906
1907
3. Money, 1904-1907: Irish money was, of course, English, twelve pence (p) to the shilling (s), and
twenty shillings or 240 pence to the pound (l or £), often written as l/s/d.. In 1900 the English pound was
worth about $5.00, the penny about 2 cents. Monetary inflation was about five-fold by 1980 -- tenfold or
more by 2000. So the 1900 penny was worth at least 20 cents by 2000. But this does not take into account
buying power. Farrington pays one penny for a glass of porter in a pub, probably a two-hundred fold
increase today (at least $2.00), but his night of drinking and treating costs nearly 6s. At the end of “Two
Gallants” the gold coin, a sovereign, is £1 or 20s, estimated to be the girl’s wages for 6-7 weeks. In Ulysses
Stephen as a schoolteacher earns £3/12/0 (504 pence) a month, at least $1000 in year 2000 dollars.
4. Motifs: It has been suggested that Joyce’s changes in “The Sisters” hint at symptoms of a
particular kind of paralysis (a word added in revision) for the old priest, called GPI (general paralysis of the
insane), or general syphilis of the nervous system. Parallels or parodies of familiar literature abound in
Dubliners. Arthurian romance and traditional Irish music are motifs in the background of “Araby,” Tristan
and Iseult appears in “A Painful Case,” which starts in Chapelizod (Iseult’s Chapel); “Ivy Day” evokes the
presence of Parnell; and “Grace” became the subject of a joke between Joyce and his brother Stanislaus
regarding the vulgarized parallels to Dante’s Divine Comedy. The texts themselves are connected by
repeated motifs (green-eyes, brown objects, popular literature and song, bicycles, erotic gazing, mothering,
sexual frustration, social posing, religious Puritanism, male-bonding, the image of escape, etc.). Joyce
depicts characters by their thought and language patterns and repetitions, which differ by their education,
class, situation, gender, and sexuality. The epiphany, or “sudden spiritual manifestation,” while central to the
theories of young Joyce and young Stephen (SH, P), it is later mocked by the older Stephen (U).
See Gifford, Joyce Annotated: Notes for Dubliners and Portrait (1967, 2nd ed., U of California, 1992)