In Finnegans Wake, the most woke book in history, James Joyce alludes in his own unique oblique fashion to a match between two Scottish football clubs, Partick Thistle and St Mirren, a fixture played at Love Street, Paisley, on Holy Saturday, the 7th of April 1928, which ended in a 2-2 draw. (1) The University of Glasgow is hosting the International Joyce Symposium from 14-19 June 2024. The conference title, ‘Across the Waters’, is well-chosen, for as my colleagues organising this event point out, Joyce has a connection with this city that goes back to his earliest travels and forward to his last great work: ‘For James Joyce, as for many Irishmen and women, Glasgow was the first city he saw beyond his native shores. During the Summer of 1894, Joyce crossed to Scotland from Dublin on a Duke Line steamer with his father. It was also the city where his last book, Finnegans Wake, was printed by the firm of James MacLehose & Sons in Anniesland during the 1930s. 130 years after Joyce’s visit, the University of Glasgow is welcoming the James Joyce Foundation to Scotland for the first time to hold the 29th International Joyce Symposium.’ (2) Joyce was twelve years old at the time of his visit to Glasgow, and the short version is that it rained and his father drank too much and got into a fight. We only know about this jaunt at all thanks to his younger brother, Stanislaus, who describes it briefly but poignantly in his memoir, My Brother’s Keeper, published in 1958. James Joyce died in 1941, and Stanislaus in 1955, so neither brother was around to elaborate further on that Scottish journey. Richard Ellmann could take the story no further forward in his 1959 biography of Joyce, and scholars have subsequently lamented the fact that we have only a sketchy account of the writer’s first trip outside of Ireland. (3) Joyce’s visit to Glasgow with his father is touched on briefly by their respective biographers, who clearly haven’t visited the city in June, the rainy season, judging by comments like ‘The visit was spoiled by rain’, and ‘Depressingly, it poured with rain.’ I laughed out loud when I read those remarks. So, we don’t know much about Joyce’s Glasgow bucket list, except that it bucketed, but perhaps we know more than we think we know. We certainly know enough about the route Joyce would have taken to Glasgow by boat and train, and the things he might have seen on the way, to be able to follow in his footsteps – or wallow in his wake – up to a point. What I aim to do here is map out Joyce’s journey as far as is possible given the scarcity of sources and the barebones information provided by Stanislaus. (4)
Joyce’s first sight of Scotland would be the view of Princes Pier Station at Greenock, where the Duke Line docked. This was the first port of call for passengers on the way to Glasgow, some twenty miles from their final destination. In fact, we know exactly what Joyce’s first view of Scotland was, because we have some remarkable photographs of his landing point in 1894, the year after that it was revamped to compete with the neighbouring port of Gourock. (5)
The new station opened on 25th May 1894, so the Joyces would have disembarked here. But what did they see on their journey from Dublin? Imagine if we could join the young James Joyce on that trip with his father and see the journey through his eyes. Luckily we can, thanks to a tour guide from the time. Although published in June 1884, exactly ten years before Joyce’s journey, this account describes the overnight sea crossing in some detail, and points to the landmarks that passengers would pass as they travelled, from dawn to dusk, from Dublin to Greenock, from the Liffey to the Clyde. (6)
In Ulysses there’s a reference to ‘Dublin and Glasgow Steam Packet Company – The Duke Line, 70-72 North Wall Quay.’ Joyce was precise about these things. The Duke Line – or the Dublin & Glasgow Steam Packet Co., to give it its official title, as Joyce does – was formed in 1823, and sailed from the North Wall Quay on the Liffey to Princes Pier in Greenock and onwards by connecting train to Glasgow Central railway station, a total journey time of around 12-14 hours, the last leg by train in Joyce’s time taking between 45 minutes and an hour.
We don’t know the exact date of Joyce’s journey, though it probably took place sometime around June. We don’t have passenger lists for travel between Ireland and Scotland for this period so we don’t know which boat Joyce sailed on or the dates of travel. He could have been aboard any of the ‘splendid saloon paddle steam ships’ run by the company, including the Duke of Argyll, the Lord Clyde, and the Lord Gough. Joyce might have been onboard the iron paddle steamer, Duke of Leinster, built by Robert Duncan & Co. of Port Glasgow and launched in 1870. It was a vessel with a troubled history. On the 19th of November 1874 it ‘ran down jolly boat of HMS AURORA off Prince’s Pier (outward for Dublin); 15 of 30 in the rowing boat were drowned or killed by the impact.’ (7) Whatever vessel they travelled in, Joyce and his father would have stepped onto Princes Pier into a town that was a home from home.
First off, upon arrival in Greenock the Joyces may have been met by John Joyce, a 41-year-old railway porter living in the town at 21 Wellington Street. (8) They would have heard Irish accents aplenty. According to Shaun Kavanagh: ‘In the whole of Britain, by 1871 only London had more Irish migrants per head of population than Greenock.’ (9) Greenock was a hub of Irish cultural and political activity. The Greenock Irish National Association founded in 1865 would prove a seedbed for the Scottish contribution to the Easter Rising of 1916. (10)
Joyce would have been interested to know of the Greenock Burns Club, founded on 29 January 1802, and known as ‘The Mother Club’ because of its pioneering advocacy of the poet’s work. (11) Originating in Greenock Ayrshire Society in 1801, by the time of Joyce’s arrival in the town it was a bastion of Burns enthusiasm. According to the current website: ‘In 1894 the club’s activities were described thus: “Few if any clubs of a similar kind have done such excellent and praiseworthy work among the young people of the community. It has encouraged the reading of the great master’s poems, singing of his pure songs…and created and fostered a taste for the works of the other poets and literary men who shine with him in the galaxy of enduring fame.”’ The 1894 Invitation to the Greenock Burns Club reads: ‘Dr Nansen finds himself forestalled at the NORTH POLE by the proverbial Scotsman, but is consoled by an invitation to the local BURNS CLUB DINNER’, a reference to Norwegian Nobel prizewinning polymath Fridtjof Nansen’s polar expedition. Nansen is part of the ‘nansense’ of the Wake. (12)
There is so much to say about Greenock, this historic port town, the gateway to Glasgow for the young James Joyce, but what did the twelve-year-old Joyce make of Glasgow itself? Not much would be the short answer if we looked no further than Stanislaus, who speaks of a ‘visit of a few days in summer to Glasgow, at the invitation of the captain of one of the Duke liners, who was a friend of my father’s. The great joke of the visit, which was spoiled by rain, was that my father, soused to the gills on the return trip, had a heated and noisy argument about politics with the captain, an anti-Parnellite. Fortunately, the captain was a teetotaller on board though not one on shore. “By God, man”, my father would conclude in telling this wonderfully good story, “if he had been drinking he would have thrown me overboard.”‘ John Joyce was steaming on the steamer home, and steaming in Glasgow too. Stanislaus closes this account of his brother’s Glasgow visit with a couple of sentences that strike a chord: ‘I can picture my brother as a handsome young boy, all eyes and nerves, traipsing about in the muggy drizzle of Glasgow after his tipsy father. In Dublin I have more than once seen children, younger than my brother was at that time, trying to lead a staggering mother home.’ (13)
So there it is. On the surface, we know very little about Joyce’s Glasgow visit other than that it pissed, his father got pissed, and pissed off the ship’s captain, biting the hand that fed them their passage. All very Glasgow. (14) Not much trickledown besides the rain, the drink, and the piss. Yet 1894 was no ordinary year for the city. Joyce’s visit coincided with a defining moment for the arts and culture. The Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts organised an ‘Exhibition Illustrative of Old Glasgow’ at the Galleries at 175 Sauchiehall Street. Items on display included books, chap-books, maps, magazines, manuscripts, periodicals, and portraits. Many were personal donations, but the University of Glasgow featured prominently as a contributor to the contents. A short prefatory note to the 450-page catalogue of the exhibition, published in July 1894, reads: ‘The Council of the Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts have organized the Exhibition in order to illustrate the history and progress of Glasgow. The exhibits range in date from the earliest times until about the middle of this century. All the exhibits have a direct connection with Glasgow and its industrial, social, and civic life.’ (15)
So much for culture, what about sport. What might Joyce have made of Glasgow’s two great football clubs at the time – Celtic FC and Partick Thistle FC. We know that the name of the latter stuck in his mind from that mention in Finnegans Wake. It’s unlikely that Joyce saw a football match in Glasgow with his father in 1894, since he was there around June during close season, but he would have been aware of the importance of football as a form of popular culture. In season 1893-94, Celtic won League Division 1, finishing seven points ahead of their nearest rivals, Heart of Midlothian. The list of teams below them in the table of ten features some unfamiliar names to modern eyes: St Bernard’s, Third Lanark, Leith Athletic, and Renton. Partick Thistle finished fifth in League Division 2, topped by Hibernian. Again, a few unfamiliar names finished above and below them, including Cowlairs, Port Glasgow Athletic, and Abercorn.
At the risk of embarking on a wild goose chase, and providing some useless information, let me take a brief detour now and scrape some barnacles off the boat. It’s well-known that the starting-point for Joyce’s second novel, Ulysses, was his date with Nora Barnacle on 16th June 1904, ten years after his Glasgow trip, and that ‘when James Joyce’s father heard the surname of the girl with whom his son had run away, he exclaimed, as unable as his son ever to resist a pun, “Barnacle? She’ll never leave him”’. (16) If we go back to Glasgow ten years earlier we find another Barnacle, a Bearsden Barnacle. On the 19th of March 1894 Mary Ann Clark died in Bearsden (also known as New Kilpatrick) of apoplexy and congestion of the lungs. (17) She was 57 years old. Mary Ann’s maiden name was Barnacle, and her father, Thomas Barnacle, was a Master Baker. Norah Barnacle, Joyce’s first love and the muse behind the Bloomsday scenario, was also the daughter of a baker called Thomas. This is the kind of coincidence Joyce thrived on. But perhaps it was more than a coincidence. Perhaps Mary Ann was a relative of Norah’s. (18) Barnacle was a West of Ireland name, and Norah’s father, according to her biographer, ‘came from a line of Galway bakers’. (19) Whether that line stretched from Galway to Glasgow at some point in the mid-nineteenth-century I leave to others to untangle. Nora’s biographer, Brenda Maddox, tells us that ‘In the west of Ireland Barnacle was a common enough surname.’ (20) Conversely, there were only a handful of Barnacles in Scotland in the nineteenth century. (21) I wouldn’t wish to get into a bareknuckle fight with Joyceans – notoriously pugnacious – about whether Mary Anne Barnacle was a relative of Norah’s, although from my research it looks like neither she nor her father were born in Scotland.
Thus far James Joyce in Glasgow, but what about Glasgow in James Joyce. He appears not to have made much of his visit, but Joyce’s association with Glasgow did not end with that rowdy return trip to Dublin with his drunk dad. As Richard Barlow remarks, ‘Scotland provided Joyce’s first taste of a physical escape from Ireland. Later its literary culture would provide a different type of withdrawal.’ (22) Indeed when Stanislaus was trying to bail out his brother, Scotland became a great getaway story: ‘Stanislaus, still struggling to pay the debts Joyce had left behind, had new instructions for creditors: tell them he had gone to Scotland.’ (23) Stanislaus’s own admiration for Scottish literary culture is expressed in his memoir: ‘Scotland, too, has its Gaelic poets; but it has a host of poets even before Burns, in comparison with whose songs Anglo-Irish love poetry until Yeats is a very thin vintage.’ (24)
There are some passing allusions to Glasgow in the short story collection Dubliners, which has a Glasgow connection insofar as the publisher, Grant Richards, was born in Hillhead in the neighbourhood of the University. In ‘Grace’, Mrs Kernan reflects on her offspring: ‘Her two eldest sons were launched. One was in a draper’s shop in Glasgow and the other was clerk to a tea-merchant in Belfast. They were good sons, wrote regularly and sometimes sent home money.’ (25) In ‘The Dead’, Gabriel Conroy asks Mrs Malins about her crossing: ‘She lived with her married daughter in Glasgow and came to Dublin on a visit once a year. She answered placidly that she had had a beautiful crossing and that the captain had been most attentive to her. She spoke also of the beautiful house her daughter kept in Glasgow, and of all the friends they had there.’ (26)
References to Glasgow have been detected in Ulysses too, including Stephen’s line, ‘I suspect […] that Ireland must be important because it belongs to me’, which makes one editor ask ‘Could this be an allusion to the popular Scottish drinking song? “I belong to Glasgow, / Good old Glasgow town, / But what’s the matter with Glasgow / For it’s going round and round? / I’m only a common old working chap, / As anyone here can see, / But when I’ve had a couple of drinks of a Saturday, / Glasgow belongs to me.”‘ (27) ‘I Belong to Glasgow’ was written by Will Fyffe in 1920. Joyce would have liked the story behind it; ‘Fyffe, or so the story goes, met his greatest inspiration late one night at Central Station, Glasgow. […] That night at Central Station he met a drunk. According to Albert Mackie’s The Scotch Comedians (1973), the drunk was “genial and demonstrative” and “laying off about Karl Marx and John Barleycorn with equal enthusiasm.” Fyffe asked him: “Do you belong to Glasgow?” and he replied: “At the moment, at the moment, Glasgow belongs to me.”’ (28) ‘I Belong to Glasgow’ was not the only Scottish song that registered with Joyce. Stanislaus mentions a trip to London by James and his father in April 1900: ‘My father came back with funny garbled versions of popular songs, and my brother declared that the music hall, not poetry, was a criticism of life.’ (29) In ‘A Little Cloud’, one of the stories in Dubliners, Joyce alludes to the 1911 music hall song co-written and sung by Harry Lauder, ‘A Wee Deoch an Doris’. (30) Lauder became a weel-kent face in London as a stage Scotsman, but his professional debut took place in Larkhall in 1894. Joyce could have caught him in Dublin in July of that year when Lauder played in Dame Street. (31)
Joyce’s last work, Finnegans Wake was printed by the firm of James MacLehose & Sons, printers to the University of Glasgow, at their printing and bookbinding works at 15 Foulis Street in Anniesland in 1939. In 1972 MacLehose printworks, purpose-built in 1905, was taken over by another expanding business with strong University of Glasgow connections, Barr & Stroud Ltd, optical instrument engineers, co-founded by Archibald Barr, a former student of the University and later Regius Professor of Civil Engineering and Mechanics. Barr & Stroud were makers of periscopes and rangefinders for the navy and army, and built Scotland’s first minicomputer between 1958 and 1963. (32) In Finnegans Wake, in a passage rich in fleeting allusions to Scottish waterways like ‘so firth and so forth’ (200.13), ‘That’s the thing I’m elwys on edge to esk’ (202.15), and ‘Drop me the sound of the findhorn’s name’ (204.21), we find the following: ‘Linking one and knocking the next, tapting a flank and tipting a jutty and palling in and pietaring out and clyding by on her eastway’ (202.10-12). James Atherton noted that ‘“cly” with the meaning of “carry off illegally” is probably a part of “clyding” […] together with “gliding” and the river Clyde’. (33) Lawrence Rainey suggested ‘clyding merging “gliding” with the river Clyde in Scotland’, and ‘eastway echoing the word “estuary,’” but also saying which way the Liffey flows.’ (34) In ‘clyding’ we might also hear ‘colliding’ and ‘colluding’, and in ‘eastway’ we might detect the Clyde Estuary as well as the eastward direction of Joyce’s youthful journey from the lips of the Liffey to the mouth of the Clyde.
The bibliographical bloodhound will enjoy sniffing out more allusions to Glasgow and Scotland in Joyce. (35) In Finnegans Wake we find the query, ‘Arran, where’s your nose?’ (204.31-2.) This is, we are told, a reference to the notorious smell of Arran Quay on the Liffey in Dublin, the quay named after Richard Butler, Earl of Arran, whose title applied to the Aran Islands off the West coast of Ireland, not to be confused with Arran Island, ‘belonging to the Duke of Hamilton’, which Joyce’s boat nosed past at sunrise in the summer of 1894, unless, like the man himself, we rejoice in such confusion.
I end this excursus with a portrait of the Dublin artist by Glasgow counterpart, Gerry Mangan. The border text reads: ‘Portrait of the artist as an elderly metempsychotic, plucking the heartstrings on a minor quay of the Anal Livia harking to a harpie blowing his own Sireen ni Houlihan singing cocks and muscles alive aliffey a plurabell book and candlewicker to wake up Finnegan to begin again to plug in the five-pin djinn again to forge the cochlea of his race in the Smithfield of his sole mio before he flies too close to – yes – the Sony and melts the wax in his ear phoney in nomine patrimony et filibuster et mollification.’
IMAGE CREDITS
The images of Princes Pier Greenock in 1894 and Robert Maclehose the Printers in 1968 are courtesy of http://canmore.org.uk/collection. The image of the Celtic FC squad in season 1893-4 is from Celtic Wiki https://www.thecelticwiki.com/celtic-team-line-up-1893-94/. The Robert Maclehose 1905 colophon is courtesy of the University of Glasgow Special Collections, https://www.gla.ac.uk/myglasgow/library/files/special/exhibns/gupress/gupress20century.html. The images of Glasgow Central Station, St Enoch Station and Jamaica Street are awaiting credits. Please contact the author if you have details of the copyright holders. Greenock Burns Club Annual Dinner invitation is from Greenock Burns Club at https://www.greenockburnsclub.com/documents. And last but most joyous, ‘Portrait of the Artist as an elderly metempsychotic’ is by Glasgow poet, cartoonist, playwright and journalist, Gerald Mangan, and was produced in 1992 for The Honest Ulsterman, https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poet/gerald-mangan/.
USED NOTES
(1) This occurs in a fragment of radio commentary in a pub. ‘Partick Thistle agen S. Megan’s’ (Finnegans Wake, 378.18-19) is mentioned alongside a game between Crystal Palace and Walsall and the coincidence of the two results – a 4-goal draw and a 4-goal victory (Palace beat Walsall 5-1 at Selhurst Park) – has been painstakingly traced to this date. See Peter J. Reichenberg, ‘Finnegans Wake: The Dating Game’, James Joyce Quarterly 46, 2 (2009): 362-365, at 363. According to Richard Barlow: ‘Probably the similarity of “Partick” and “Patrick” attracted Joyce; the team name almost brings together the patron saint of Ireland with the national symbol of Scotland.’ Barlow, The Celtic Unconscious, pp.254-255, n30. Reichenberg offers more detail: ‘Partick Thistle and St. Mirren evoke the names of two Irish saints: Saint Patrick and Saint Mirren. The name Partick, from the Gaelic aper dhu ec, means the place at the mouth of the dark river. Partick is an area of Glasgow on the north bank of the River Clyde. Saint Mirren was an Irish monk, the founder and abbot of Paisley Abbey, Renfrewshire, Scotland. He is the patron saint of Paisley and of the St. Mirren Football Club.’ Reichenberg, ‘Finnegans Wake: The Dating Game’, p.364. The nicknames of these two clubs – the Jags and the Buddies – captures their prickly but friendly rivalry, and with St Mirren being also known as ‘the Saints’, and the Partick/Patrick pun, we can see why Joyce fastened on this particular pairing.
(2) Across the Waters: XXIX International James Joyce Symposium University of Glasgow, 14-19 June 2024, https://ijjf2024.glasgow.ac.uk/.
(3) I first became interested in Joyce and Scotland 25 years ago when I published a newspaper article on the subject: Willy Maley, ‘Bloomsday Scenario: James Joyce had a lot to say about Scotland … almost all of it bad’, The Sunday Herald (Seven Days: Scotland’s Current Affairs Magazine, 13 June 1999), p.10. The following year I published a critical essay on the subject: Willy Maley, ‘“Kilt by Kelt Shell Kithagain with Kinagain”: Joyce and Scotland’, in Derek Attridge and Marjorie Howes (eds.), Semi-Colonial Joyce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp.201-218.
(4) Richard Barlow, the major authority on James Joyce and Scotland, sets the bar high with his erudition and insight. In his groundbreaking book, The Celtic Unconscious, Barlow says: ‘It is unfortunate that so little is known about Joyce’s trip to Scotland.’ Barlow, The Celtic Unconscious, pp. 14-15. Despite the lack of flesh on the bones of Joyce’s Scottish sojourn, Barlow suggests that ‘it is highly likely that it would have brought him into contact with the results of waves of emigration, the mass movement of Irish labor-seekers into western Scotland in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Indeed, given the very high numbers of Irish immigrating to Glasgow and environs in this period, it would have been difficult to avoid coming into contact with Irish workers.’ Barlow, The Celtic Unconscious, p.54.
(5) ‘Greenock Princes Pier was rebuilt for the Glasgow and South Western Railway in 1894 in a grand Italianate style. This was to counter the Gourock extension of the Caledonian Railway which opened in 1889 (and even the opening of Craigendoran Pier on the north bank in 1882).’ ‘Greenock Princes Pier (2nd)’, Railscot, https://www.railscot.co.uk/locations/G/Greenock_Princes_Pier_2nd/#:~:text=Greenock%20Princes%20Pier%20was%20rebuilt,the%20north%20bank%20in%201882). More information on the excellent Canmore site: ‘Princes Pier Railway Station, an impressive railway terminus overlooking the Firth of Clyde, was designed by the Glasgow architect, James Miller, and built in 1893 for the Glasgow & South Western Railway Company. The architectural photographer, Harry Bedford Lemere, was commissioned to photograph the building in 1894. The booking office occupied the central part of the terminus. It had a first-floor balcony with views across the pierside to the water, and was flanked by large Italianate stair-towers with tile-hung walls and pyramidal roofs that acted as imposing beacons for the paddle steamers drawing up to collect the train passengers at the quayside. In the late 19th century new rail networks encouraged leisure travel, and the Glasgow & South Western Railway Company’s line from Glasgow allowed holidaymakers to travel directly to Greenock to embark onto the paddle steamers that would take them ‘doon the water’ to the popular seaside resorts of Helensburgh, Dunoon and Rothesay on the Firth of Clyde. Source: RCAHMS contribution to SCRAN.’ Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/collection/716997, PHOTO CREDIT https://canmore.org.uk/file/image/716997.
(6) J. H. D. Molony (ed.), The Tourist’s Guide, compiled by J.H.D. Molony. June, July, Sept., Oct. 1884 (Dublin: The Official Guide Ltd., 1884), June, p.8.
(7) Scottish Built Ships: The History of Shipbuilding in Scotland, https://www.clydeships.co.uk/view.php?ref=5573
(8) Post-Office Greenock directory for 1894-189, https://digital.nls.uk/87493573. This John Joyce’s death certificate was viewed at https://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk.
(9) Shaun Kavanagh, ‘Home Rule, Sinn Féin and the Irish Republican Movement in Greenock’, in Kirsty Lusk and Willy Maley (eds.), Scotland and the Easter Rising: Fresh Perspectives on 1916 (Edinburgh: Luath Press, 2016), pp. 94-100, at p. 94.
(10) ‘The Young Ireland Society in Greenock organised weekly lectures, usually followed by a debate and singing of national songs.’ Kavanagh, ‘Home Rule, Sinn Féin and the Irish Republican Movement in Greenock’, p. 96. The Irish Revival had strong roots in Greenock: ‘In Greenock, this cultural revival took the form of associational culture; organisations like the Ancient Order of Hibernians and Gaelic football clubs such as St Patrick’s, Sarsfields, and Eire Og in Port Glasgow, fostered a sense of ethnic Irish identity in Greenock. Indeed, this new ethnic and cultural confidence led members of the republican Young Ireland Society to stand in defiant separation from electoral politics. In the process, they distanced themselves from the majority of the Greenock-Irish community. The pursuit of Gaelic ethnic virtues would ultimately be attained through political separatism. By rallying and maintaining support for anti-British sentiment and emotional Irish nationalism, Irish republicans appealed to simple expatriate feeling, evoking images and memories of ‘home’ through organisational meetings, and readily accessible writings and songs. In short, Irish republicanism in Greenock provided a portable identity – a way of ‘being Irish’ outside Ireland.’ Kavanagh, ‘Home Rule, Sinn Féin and the Irish Republican Movement in Greenock’, p. 96.
(11) See Clark McGinn, ‘The True Date of the Foundation of the Greenock Burns Club’, Burns Chronicle 131, 2 (2022): 156-170.
(12) https://ichscotland.org/wiki/greenock-burns-club. On Nansen, see Alison Lacivita, ‘Polar Exploration in Finnegans Wake’, Joyce Studies Annual (2013): 312-326.
(13) Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper: James Joyce’s Early Years edited, with an introduction and notes by Richard Ellman, preface by T. S. Eliot (New York: Viking Press, 1958), p. 60. On this passage, and Stanislaus’s own qualities as a writer, see Wyatt Mason, ‘A Staggering Mother’, Harper’s Magazine (July 2, 2008), https://harpers.org/2008/07/a-staggering-mother/.
(14) Joyce’s visit to Glasgow with his father is touched on briefly by their respective biographers, who clearly haven’t visited the city in June, the rainy season, judging by comments like ‘The visit was spoiled by rain’, and ‘Depressingly, it poured with rain.’ Richard Ellmann, his first critical biographer, drawing on the recollection by Stanislaus observes: ‘He was the only one of the children who got along easily with their father. The two liked to travel together, and that summer of 1894 John Joyce brought James along on a trip to Glasgow. He had made friends with the captain of one of the Duke liners that sail between Dublin and Glasgow, and took up the captain’s invitation to make the journey. The visit was spoiled by rain, but it gave John Joyce another sea story; on the return trip he and the captain quarreled violently over Parnell. “By God, man,” John Joyce would say afterwards, “if he had been drinking he would have thrown me overboard.”‘ Richard Ellmann, James Joyce: New and Revised Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982; first published 1959), pp.40-41. The biographers of Joyce’s father likewise touch on the episode: ‘In June news came that Jim had vindicated his father’s boasts about him to Fr Conmee and had been awarded £22 for himself and £1 2-4s.od for the College in the 1894 Preparatory Grade Intermediate Examination. The money was paid to John but he passed it on to Jim, who promptly began to spend it, even taking his parents out to dinner at an expensive restaurant. It was probably this windfall and the goodwill it engendered between them that prompted John to invite Jim to accompany him on a summer trip to Scotland (perhaps, as “The Dead” seems to hint, for the wedding or funeral of one of the Malinses) . John did not have to pay for the sea crossing: as a seafaring man who knew the language since his Queenstown days, he had made friends with some of the personnel of the shipping companies when he was a Collector in the North Dock Ward and persuaded the captain of one of the Duke Line steamers to allow them an unused berth up the Irish Sea. Jim with his winnings could help to subsidise food, entertainment and somewhere to stay.
As Stanislaus remembered, they went first to Glasgow, then a city with a greater claim than Dublin to be the Second City of the Empire: its industrial vigour – in shipbuilding and locomotives – was quite unlike anything to be found in Dublin. James Joyce’s notes for Stephen Hero, however, strongly suggest that their final destination was beyond Glasgow and that a visit to Edinburgh featured in the lost chapters of that book – the existing parts of which are firmly rooted in fact. Depressingly, it poured with rain, which likely forced them to spend much of their time sheltering in city gin palaces. In delineating the development of the father-son relationship on this jaunt, another Stephen Hero note on the same page states darkly: “We cannot educate our fathers.” On the return voyage to Ireland the kindly captain was severely provoked by his inebriated friend who insisted on arguing vehemently and tediously with him about his favourite subject – Parnell. Afterwards, as he acted out an entertaining version of the story for the family, John reflected wryly that he was lucky not to have been seized bodily and thrown into the Irish Sea. Jim may not have been able to educate his father, but he was certainly learning a good deal from him and about him.’ John Wyse Jackson and Peter Costello, John Stanislaus Joyce: The Voluminous Life and Genius of James Joyce’s Father (London: Fourth Estate, 1998; first published 1997), pp.185-6.
(15) Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts: Exhibition Illustrative of Old Glasgow (Glasgow: William Hodge and Company, 1894), p.vi.
(16) Brenda Maddox, Nora: The Real Life of Molly Bloom (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), p. 9.
(17) Mary Ann’s death certificate was viewed at https://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk. Mary Ann was married to Edward Clarke in the Kelvin Registration District of Glasgow in 1877. Her marriage certificate gives her name as ‘Mary Anne Barnacle’.
(18) According to her biographer, ‘Nora Barnacle was born in March 1884 on either the twenty-first or the twenty-second (church and state records disagree). Her birth took place in the Galway City Workhouse, not because her family was penniless — they were not — but because the handsome limestone-terraced institution, which had sheltered more than a thousand people during the Great Famine of 1847-48, later served as general hospital for the city.’ Maddox, Nora, p. 9. Norah Barnacle became Nora after meeting Joyce, dropping the ‘h’. She was ‘Norah’ on her birth certificate but ‘Nora’ after she met Joyce. Norah Barnacle’s parents were called Thomas and Annie (nee Healy) and they had a daughter called Mary, Norah’s older sister.
(19) Maddox, Nora, p. 9.
(20) Maddox, Nora, pp. 9-10.
(21) On the 28th August 1848 Charles Barnacle married Elizabeth Tullo in Dundee, and the 1851 census lists three Barnacles in Canongate – Elizabeth Barnacle, aged 24, Henry Glanville Barnacle, aged 31, and Henry, aged 1. Information taken from https://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk.
(22) Barlow, The Celtic Unconscious, p.15.
(23) Maddox, Nora, p. 76.
(24) Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, p.158.
(25) Harry Levin (ed.), The Essential James Joyce (St. Albans, Herts.: Granada, 1977), p.124.
(26) Levin, The Essential James Joyce, p.149.
(27) Don Gifford, Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce’s Ulysses (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p.550.
(28) Ian Jack, ‘Will Fyffe: Glasgow and the art of drinking’, The Guardian (3 June 2006), https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/jun/03/featuresreviews.guardianreview23.
(29) Stanislaus Joyce, My Brothers Keeper, p.96.
(30) See Cóilín Owens, ‘Harry Lauder: A Little Cloud’, James Joyce Literary Supplement 15, 1 (2001): 6-8.
(31) Owens, ‘Harry Lauder: A Little Cloud’, p.6.
(32) See Paul A. V. Thomas, ‘Solidac: an early minicomputer for teaching purposes’, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 15, 4 (1993): 79-83.
(33) J. S. Atherton, ‘Ā Few More Books at the Wake’, James Joyce Quarterly 2, 3 (1965): 142-149, at 144.
(34) Lawrence Rainey (ed.), Modernism: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), p.291, notes 283-4.
(35) Richard Barlow is the exemplary scholarly sleuth in this regard, and The Celtic Unconscious is a treasure chest of material on Joyce and Scotland. Here I have simply thrown a pebble into the water to make a small ripple.
FURTHER READ HEARINGS
S. Atherton, ‘Ā Few More Books at the Wake’, James Joyce Quarterly 2, 3 (1965): 142-149.
J. B. Baddelay, Ireland, Part I. Northern Counties, including Dublin and Neighbourhood. 20 Maps and Plans, by Bartholomew, 4th edition, Thorough Guide Series (London: Dulau, July 1897).
Richard Barlow, ‘Crotthers: Joyce’s Scots Fellow in Ulysses’ in Notes and Queries 57, 2 (2010): 230-233.
Richard Barlow, ‘The “united states of Scotia Picta”: Scottish Literature and History in Finnegans Wake’, James Joyce Quarterly 48, 2 (2011): 305-318.
Richard Barlow, ‘“Northern Ire” and “invertedness”: Macbeth, the Wake, and the North’, in John McCourt (ed.,) Shakespearean Joyce – Joycean Shakespeare (Roma: Anicia, 2016), 121-130.
Richard Barlow, The Celtic Unconscious: Joyce and Scottish Culture (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2017).
Richard Barlow, ‘James Joyce and Walter Scott: Incest, Rivers of History, and “old useless papers”‘, Scottish Literary Review 12, 1 (2020):1-18.
Finn Fordham, ‘“A hubbub caused in Edenborough”‘, review of The Celtic Unconscious: Joyce and Scottish Culture by Richard Barlow, Breac: A Digital Journal of Irish Studies (July 17, 2019: https://breac.nd.edu/articles/a-hubbub-caused-in-edenborough/
Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts: Exhibition Illustrative of Old Glasgow (Glasgow: William Hodge and Company, 1894).
Clive Hart, ‘Notes on the Text of Finnegans Wake’, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 59, 2 (1960): 229-239.
Ian Jack, ‘Will Fyffe: Glasgow and the art of drinking’, The Guardian (3 June 2006), https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/jun/03/featuresreviews.guardianreview23.
Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper: James Joyce’s Early Years edited, with an introduction and notes by Richard Ellman, preface by T. S. Eliot (New York: Viking Press, 1958).
Joseph Kelly, ‘Stanislaus Joyce, Ellsworth Mason, and Richard Ellmann: The Making of “James Joyce”‘, Joyce Studies Annual 3 (1992): 98-140.
Eleni Loukopoulou, ‘James Joyce and the Modern Scots’, The Journal of Modern Periodical Studies 12, 1 (2021): 87-124, https://doi.org/10.5325/jmodeperistud.12.1.0087
John Lurz, ‘Literal Darkness: Finnegans Wake and the Limits of Print’, James Joyce Quarterly 50, 3 (2013): 675-691.
Hugh MacDiarmid, In Memoriam James Joyce (Glasgow: William MacLellan, 1955).
Clark McGinn, ‘The True Date of the Foundation of the Greenock Burns Club’, Burns Chronicle 131, 2 (2022): 156-170.
Carol McGuirk, ‘Reading Scotland in Later Joyce’, review of The Celtic Unconscious: Joyce and Scottish Culture by Richard Barlow, James Joyce Literary Supplement 33, 1 (2019): 14-16.
Willy Maley, ‘Bloomsday Scenario: James Joyce had a lot to say about Scotland … almost all of it bad’, The Sunday Herald (Seven Days: Scotland’s Current Affairs Magazine, 13 June 1999), p.10.
Willy Maley, ‘“Kilt by Kelt Shell Kithagain with Kinagain”: Joyce and Scotland’, in Derek Attridge and Marjorie Howes (eds.), Semi-Colonial Joyce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp.201-218.
Vivian Mercer, ‘When The Artist Was A Young Man’: Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper: James Joyce’s Early Years edited, with an introduction and notes by Richard Ellman, preface by T. S. Eliot (New York: Viking Press, 1958), The New York Times (2 February, 1958).
Wim Van Mierlo, ‘Editing the Wake’, review of Finnegans Wake by Danis Rose and John O’Hanlon, James Joyce Literary Supplement 25, 2 (2011): 6-9.
H. D. Molony (ed.), The Tourist’s Guide, compiled by J.H.D. Molony. June, July, Sept., Oct. 1884 (Dublin: The Official Guide Ltd., 1884), June, pp. 3-8.
Edwin Morgan, ‘Dialogue I: James Joyce and Hugh MacDiarmid’, In James Joyce Broadsheet 9 (1982): 5.
Edwin Morgan, ‘James Joyce and Hugh MacDiarmid’, in W. J. McCormack and Alistair
Stead (eds), James Joyce and Modern Literature (London, 1982), 202-217.
Cóilín Owens, ‘Harry Lauder: A Little Cloud’, James Joyce Literary Supplement 15, 1 (2001): 6-8.
V. M. Plock, ‘“Knock knock. War’s where!”: History, Macbeth and Finnegans
Wake’ in Joyce Studies Annual, article no. 9 (2006): 212-223.
Peter J. Reichenberg, ‘Finnegans Wake: The Dating Game’, James Joyce Quarterly 46, 2 (2009): 362-365.
J. Tutty, ‘The City of Dublin Steam Packet Company’, Dublin Historical Record 18, 3 (1963): 80-90.