Ulysses — The World, the City, and the Day

Base document 02 · The setting Everything standing behind the novel on Thursday, 16 June 1904.

THE DAY ITSELF

Thursday, 16 June 1904. The narrative opens at 8 a.m. on the roof of a Martello tower at Sandycove and closes somewhere after 2 a.m. on Friday the 17th in a bed at 7 Eccles Street — with the last episode given no hour at all in Joyce's own schema. Roughly nineteen hours of clock time, and one that escapes it.

Why that date. It is the day Joyce first walked out with Nora Barnacle, a chambermaid from Galway working at Finn's Hotel. They had met on Nassau Street on 10 June; an arrangement for the 14th came to nothing; on the 16th she came, and they walked out to Ringsend. Joyce took the most private day of his life and made it the only day of his public epic. He never explained the choice in print. The whole monument stands on a first date.

The weather in the book: a fine, warm, hazy June day, the sun coming and going; a great thunderstorm breaking around ten at night; a clear sky after midnight with a visible comet-tail of stars. Joyce wrote the novel from Trieste, Zurich and Paris, between 1914 and 1921, working from Thom's Dublin street directory for 1904, back copies of the Evening Telegraph, and letters to his aunt Josephine asking for details he could not otherwise check — how many steps down to the area at Eccles Street, whether an ordinary man could climb the railings. He said that if the city were destroyed it could be rebuilt from his book. That is a boast, but it is not only a boast.

Two real events of that week are in the text:

The Ascot Gold Cup, run that afternoon in England, won by an outsider named Throwaway at twenty to one, beating the favourite Sceptre. Joyce used the genuine result, and built a whole comic misunderstanding on the horse's name.
The burning of the excursion steamer General Slocum on New York's East River the previous day, 15 June 1904, killing over a thousand people, most of them German immigrant women and children. It is in the newspapers the men are reading. A real catastrophe drifting through the small talk of a Dublin morning.

PART ONE — IRELAND

The constitutional position

Since the Act of Union of 1801, Ireland had no parliament. It was governed as part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, sending roughly a hundred MPs to Westminster, where they were permanently outnumbered. Day-to-day administration ran out of Dublin Castle, under a Lord Lieutenant (the Viceroy, a ceremonial British aristocrat) and a Chief Secretary for Ireland (the working politician).

In June 1904 the Lord Lieutenant was William Humble Ward, 2nd Earl of Dudley — the man whose cavalcade crosses Dublin at the end of episode 10, on his way to open a charity bazaar. The Chief Secretary was George Wyndham.

So the political shape of the country is: an ancient nation, formally absorbed into a neighbouring state, administered by a viceroy, and unable to legislate for itself. That is the air every character in the novel breathes, whether they discuss it (constantly) or not (Molly).

What Home Rule was

Home Rule was not independence. It was a proposal for a devolved Irish parliament in Dublin, handling domestic affairs, with the Crown retained, the Empire retained, Westminster retaining defence and foreign policy. Dominion-style self-government inside the United Kingdom. It is important to grasp how moderate it was, because the ferocity of the resistance to it — and the fact that it never passed in any workable form — is what eventually made moderation look pointless.

The sequence, as of 1904:


1886	Gladstone's First Home Rule Bill — defeated in the Commons; splits the Liberal Party
1893	Second Home Rule Bill — passes the Commons, killed by the House of Lords
1904	Nothing on the table. The Conservatives are in power and opposed. The movement is stalled
1912	Third Home Rule Bill introduced — passed 1914, immediately suspended for the war
1916	The Easter Rising
1922	The Irish Free State

Joyce is writing between 1914 and 1921 about a day in 1904 — that is, he is describing the last years of the constitutional era while living through its violent replacement. The pub politics in Ulysses is the talk of men who do not know that their entire approach has eight years left.

Parnell, and the wound underneath

Charles Stewart Parnell — Protestant landlord, leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, "the uncrowned king of Ireland" — brought Home Rule within reach in the 1880s through extraordinary parliamentary discipline. In 1889 he was named in the divorce case of Katharine O'Shea, with whom he had lived for years. The Liberal alliance collapsed, the Catholic bishops turned on him, his own party split, and he died in 1891, aged forty-five, broken.

For a generation of Irishmen this was not a scandal but a betrayal by their own people at the instruction of their own church, and it left a permanent bitterness. Joyce's father was a Parnellite whose fortunes never recovered; the family's decline runs alongside the country's. Parnell haunts Ulysses — his brother appears playing chess, men still half-believe the coffin was filled with stones and he will return, and the pattern of a great man destroyed by an adulterous entanglement sits directly underneath a novel about a cuckolded advertisement canvasser. By 1904 the party had been reunited under John Redmond, but the energy was gone.

The cultural war

By 1904 the political route was blocked, so nationalism had largely moved to culture.

The Gaelic Athletic Association (1884), founded by Michael Cusack — the model for the Citizen — to promote Irish games and ban members from playing "foreign" sports.
The Gaelic League (1893), founded by Douglas Hyde, to revive the Irish language, which was collapsing.
The literary revival — Yeats, Lady Gregory, Synge, A.E. — building a national literature out of myth and peasantry. The Abbey Theatre would open six months after Bloomsday.
Arthur Griffith, whose The Resurrection of Hungary appeared in 1904, arguing that Ireland should copy Hungary's dual-monarchy arrangement with Austria and simply withdraw its MPs from Westminster. Sinn Féin grew out of this the following year.

Joyce was hostile to nearly all of it — he thought the revival was sentimental, parochial, and a substitute for thinking, and he refused to write in Irish or about noble peasants. The novel is unmistakably Irish and unmistakably refuses the Irish Revival. In episode 9 Stephen sits in a room full of these men and is not asked to contribute to their anthology. That slight is Joyce's own.

There is a good joke buried in the politics: the book hints that Bloom — Jewish, Hungarian by descent, the outsider everyone despises — gave Griffith the Hungarian idea in the first place.

Religion, and the Jews of Dublin

Ireland was overwhelmingly Catholic, and the Church's authority over education, morality and daily life was close to total — it had helped destroy Parnell and it shaped everything Stephen is trying to escape. Above it sat a shrinking Protestant Ascendancy holding a wildly disproportionate share of land, wealth and office.

Dublin's Jewish community was small — a few thousand people — and mostly recent: refugees from the pogroms of the Russian Empire and Lithuania who had arrived from the 1880s and settled around Clanbrassil Street in an area nicknamed Little Jerusalem.

Five months before Bloomsday, in January 1904, a Redemptorist priest in Limerick preached against the town's Jews and set off a boycott that drove most of the community out. It is usually called the Limerick pogrom. When the Citizen turns on Bloom in a pub in June, this is not an abstract prejudice. It is the news.

Bloom's own position is stranger than either side allows: baptised three times, Jewish by descent and by the city's judgement, ignorant of Hebrew, married to a Catholic, believing none of it, and insisting — correctly — that he is Irish because he was born in Ireland. The book puts a man with no clean category at the centre of a society obsessed with categories.

The economy

Emigration had been bleeding the country for sixty years. Ireland's population fell from roughly 8.2 million before the Famine to about 4.4 million by 1901. To leave was normal; to stay was, in a sense, the anomaly.
The Wyndham Land Act of 1903 — the previous year — was the most consequential legislation of the era: government loans allowing tenant farmers to buy out their landlords. It effectively ended the landlord system and defused the land question, which is part of why nationalist energy shifted to culture and to the constitutional question.
Cattle were the great export — which is why Mr Deasy's letter about foot-and-mouth disease is not a comic irrelevance but a matter of national income, and why Stephen carrying that letter into a newspaper office is a plausible errand.

PART TWO — ENGLAND AND THE WORLD

Britain in 1904

Edward VII had been on the throne for three years. Victoria died in 1901 and the long Victorian certainty was quietly loosening; this is the Edwardian moment — richer, looser, more anxious.
Arthur Balfour (Conservative) was Prime Minister.
The British Empire was at its territorial maximum — roughly a quarter of the world's land surface and a quarter of its people. Ireland was its oldest possession and its permanent anomaly: adjacent, formally integrated, treated as a colony, populated by white Europeans who were nonetheless routinely described in the vocabulary reserved for subject races.
The Second Boer War (1899–1902) had ended two years earlier, and had damaged Britain's self-image — a world empire taking three years to subdue two small farming republics, using concentration camps to do it. Irish opinion had been broadly pro-Boer; an Irish brigade fought for the Boers while tens of thousands of Irishmen served in the British Army. Molly's father was a garrison officer, and her memories of Pretoria and Ladysmith come from that world.

The wider world that year

The Entente Cordiale, April 1904 — Britain and France settle their colonial quarrels. Two months before Bloomsday, and the beginning of the alignment that produces 1914.
The Russo-Japanese War, from February 1904 and running through the day of the novel. Japan would defeat Russia in 1905 — the first modern defeat of a European empire by an Asian power, and a signal to every colonised people on earth.
The Younghusband expedition reached Lhasa that summer: Britain forcing a treaty on Tibet.
Technology on the cusp. The Wright brothers had flown for the first time six months earlier. Marconi had sent a signal across the Atlantic in 1901. Motor cars were rare and startling; the telephone existed and was uncommon; cinema was a fairground novelty — Joyce himself would open Dublin's first cinema five years later. Dublin's trams, however, were electric and excellent, and the book runs on them.
The intellectual weather. Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams had appeared in 1900; Einstein's revolutionary papers would come in 1905. Joyce, writing in the 1910s, builds a book whose interior monologue and simultaneity are unimaginable without that shift — but he sets it in 1904, just before, so that his characters live in a world whose foundations are about to be pulled out.

The point of all this for the novel: 16 June 1904 is a date of enormous retrospective irony. Everyone in the book assumes the world will continue as it is. Within twelve years there is a rising in Dublin, within ten a European war that kills some 35,000 Irishmen, within eighteen an Irish Free State and a civil war. Joyce is writing about the last ordinary day.

PART THREE — DUBLIN, THE CITY

Size and standing

Roughly 290,000 people lived within the city boundary at the 1901 census, and something over 350,000 counting the surrounding townships — Rathmines, Pembroke, Kingstown, Clontarf — which had their own councils and lower rates and had taken much of the middle class out of the city proper. (Figures approximate; worth checking against the census returns before publication.)

Dublin is often called the second city of the Empire. This was true in the eighteenth century and had not been true for a hundred years. By 1904 Glasgow, Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool and Calcutta were all far larger and far more important. The phrase survives as a memory of lost status — which is exactly the city Joyce writes: a capital without a parliament, a Georgian city without its aristocracy, a port without an industry. Grand streets, decayed houses, no money, enormous talk.

The shape of the ground

The River Liffey runs west to east through the middle and empties into Dublin Bay. It divides the city into a north side — the old Georgian quarter, by 1904 largely tenement slums — and a south side, holding Trinity College, Dublin Castle, Grafton Street, the professional class and the wealthier suburbs.
Two canals ring the city: the Royal Canal to the north, the Grand Canal to the south. "Between the canals" meant the city proper.
East is the bay, and beyond it the Irish Sea and England. South-east the coast runs down through Sandymount, Blackrock, Kingstown and Sandycove to Dalkey. North-east the peninsula of Howth closes the bay — the hill where Bloom proposed.
To the west, Phoenix Park — one of the largest enclosed city parks in Europe, containing the Viceregal Lodge, the residence of the Lord Lieutenant, and the site of the 1882 political murders that still shadow the conversation.

Poverty

This is the fact most easily lost behind the book's comedy. Dublin had among the worst slum housing in Europe, and a death rate frequently cited as the highest of any city in the United Kingdom. The great Georgian houses of the north side, abandoned by the gentry after the Union, had been subdivided into single-room tenements, one family to a room, sometimes a dozen to a room, sharing one privy in the yard. Estimates from the 1913 housing inquiry — the best figures available, and nine years after Bloomsday — put roughly 87,000 people in tenement dwellings, about a third of the city.

Tuberculosis and infant mortality were extreme. The 1913 Lockout and the Church Street tenement collapse are less than a decade ahead.

Ulysses registers this without a single passage of social protest: Dilly Dedalus buying a French primer while her sisters boil shirts for soup; Dignam's widow left with nothing; the one-legged sailor begging along Eccles Street; Bloom quietly calculating what a funeral costs a family with no money.

Work and drink

Industry was thin. Guinness at St James's Gate was the largest brewery in the world and the city's largest employer. Jacob's made biscuits, Jameson and Power's made whiskey, the port moved goods, and beyond that Dublin was a city of clerks, shop assistants, carters, dockers, domestic servants and commercial travellers — a service economy for an administration and a hinterland.

Licensed premises were everywhere; Bloom amuses himself trying to work out whether one could cross the city without passing a pub. Bloom's own trade — canvassing advertisements on commission for a newspaper — is precisely of this world: respectable, insecure, and slightly beneath the notice of the men he drinks near.

Getting around

Electric trams, run by the Dublin United Tramway Company, radiating from Nelson's Pillar on Sackville Street. Fast, cheap, modern, and the circulatory system of the novel — episode 7 opens and closes with them.
Trains: the Dublin & South Eastern along the coast to Kingstown and Dalkey — how Stephen gets in from the tower and the school; the Great Northern out to Mullingar, where Milly is.
Horses for everything else: cabs, jaunting cars, drays, and the funeral carriages. Boylan's approach is announced all afternoon by the jingling of a hired car.
The mail boat from Kingstown to Holyhead — the way you left Ireland, as Joyce did.

Named places worth knowing before the itinerary

Sackville Street (renamed O'Connell Street in 1924) — the great north-side boulevard: Nelson's Pillar at its centre, the General Post Office, the newspaper offices, the tram terminus. Twelve years later it burns in the Rising.
Trinity College — Protestant, Ascendancy, sitting like a walled island in the middle of a Catholic city.
Dublin Castle — the administration, and its detective division; a name that means "the government" and also "informers."
Glasnevin Cemetery — the great Catholic burial ground, founded in 1832 by Daniel O'Connell because Catholics had nowhere dignified to be buried. O'Connell lies under a round tower there; Parnell lies there too.
Monto — the red-light district north-east of Sackville Street, around Montgomery and Mabbot Streets. Reputedly the largest in Europe, tolerated because of the nearby barracks, and situated a few hundred metres from the imperial post office. Joyce calls it Nighttown.
The Martello towers — squat gun-towers built along the coast around 1804 against a Napoleonic invasion that never came. By 1904 they were let as lodgings. Joyce really did live in the Sandycove tower, for about six days in September 1904, with Oliver Gogarty and a man named Trench; Trench had a nightmare and fired a pistol, Gogarty then fired at the pans above Joyce's bed, and Joyce walked out in the middle of the night and never went back. He moved the episode to June and gave it to Stephen.

HOW THE SETTING WORKS IN THE BOOK

Three things worth carrying into the itinerary.

One. The city is the plot. There is almost no story in Ulysses — a man leaves home, walks about, and comes back. What replaces plot is place: the meaning is generated by who is where, at what hour, in relation to whom. This is why the map and the clock are not supporting material. They are the structure.

Two. Joyce's Dublin is exact and it is gone. The street directory he used was real; the shops he names existed; the tram routes and the funeral route can be walked today. But the tenements have been cleared, Monto was closed in 1925, Nelson's Pillar was blown up in 1966, Sackville Street has another name, and 7 Eccles Street was demolished in the 1960s — its front door survives in a museum. The most exhaustively documented city in literature is largely a city that no longer exists.

Three. The scale is deliberately small. Almost everything happens within about two kilometres of the river. Two men walk in circles around a small provincial capital for nineteen hours, and Joyce insists this is the material of an epic. The claim of the book is that the Odyssey is not somewhere else.

Base document 02. Continues in base document 03 — the itinerary, episode by episode, place by place, hour by hour.