It's Thursday night, 12 May 1881.
We're in the back bedroom of a small new rented house at 30 Emorville avenue, on the corner of St Vincent street in southwest Dublin, Ireland.
Snoring on the bed is 31yo Jack Joyce, sleeping off another day of increasingly heavy social drinking. Beside him, awake, is his young wife May, who'll turn 22 on Sunday.
Jack and May in 1888
Their first anniversary was just a week ago, but she's already lost one baby, born premature. She worries about their future-- Jack stands to inherit a decent income, but already he seems bent on drinking it all up. His mother had kept a firm hand on him while he was still living with her, but she never liked May or May's family (the Murrays) so she moved back to Cork in a huff after the wedding.
Jack claims he's still suffering over the death of the lost baby, but he's also started saying terrible things about May's father and brothers when he drinks... which is starting to be all the time. The only other Murray he had a kind word for was her mother (née Flynn-- the 'Morkans' in Dubliners), who died in February at age 49... so now, even though her family lives just two blocks away, May feels awfully alone.
Jack has a few powerful political connections who'd helped him line up a good civil service job, but he unexpectedly failed the exam when he took it in April. Now he's trying to pull strings and get a second chance...
Stop.
A new son has just been conceived within her: James Augustine Joyce.
James's future friends will be older, Catholic boys: JF Byrne is already a year old, sleeping a few blocks northeast, near the heart of the city. Tom Furlong is also one. Francis Skeffington and Oliver Gogarty are almost three. Gogarty lives in a fancy house on Rutland Square, on the north side of the city (his father is a successful doctor). Vincent Cosgrave and Hanna Sheehy are almost four-- the Sheehys live a few blocks northeast of the Gogartys. (Gogarty will have three younger siblings, Hanna four.) George Clancy is in Limerick (age unknown).
The love of James's life, Nora Barnacle, won't even be conceived for two more years, but her older sister is already on the way, in Galway-- the Barnacles married in February.
Stop.
A few doors away on Emorville avenue, 14yo George W Russell is sleeping.
Russell at 18yo
Russell and Joyce won't meet for twenty years, but Jack has noticed the gangly lad with his faraway gaze. He's doing well at a small private school during the day, and he's begun taking art classes at night.
But George is looking forward to going back north to Armagh for the summer-- his family only moved down to Dublin three years ago, when his father was offered a bookkeeping job here. Last summer when he went back to visit his aunt, George met a girl named Carrie Rea, and they've been keeping in touch.
Russell's closest future friends, currently scattered across Dublin, Ireland, and the UK, will include many of the great Irishmen of his generation, mostly younger Protestants: Charles Weekes is also 14, William Magee is 13, Arthur Griffith is 10, Richard Best is 9, James Cousins and George Roberts are 8, James Starkey is 2.
(10yo JM Synge lives with his mother west of Dublin, a mama's boy, terrified of Hell, who sometimes enjoys quiet walks in the Dublin hills. His older brother will shortly dishonor the family name by showing himself the most brutal of Irish landlords.)
Stop.
Two blocks south, but not quite in the 'real' Dublin, 15yo Protestant-Jew Leopold Bloom sleeps at his parents' house on Clanbrassil street. Like his father Rudolph (nearing 70), he's spent the day selling trinketware door-to-door, returning home to a family dinner of noodles cooked by his mother.
He had to drop out of school last year but he's staying in touch with his High School chums: Donald Turnbull, Abraham Chatterton, Owen Goldberg, Jack Meredith, Percy Apjohn, Daniel Magrane, and Francis Wade. He recently experimented with a prostitute named Bridie Kelly, but the future love of his life, 10yo Molly Tweedy, is still in Gibraltar with her father, sergeant-major Brian Tweedy.
(Bloom's realworld doppelganger, 14yo Alfred Hunter, is in Belfast.)
The hottest topics of conversation among Bloom's friends for the last few years have been the Home Rule Party (founded 1874) and the Land League (founded 1879), with 35yo Charles Stewart Parnell (CSP) and 35yo Michael Davitt their heroes. Ireland is ripe for a revolution to throw off British rule. Three bad harvests in a row have led to many thousands of evictions of tenant farmers who couldn't meet their rent, and national sympathies have turned violently against the heartless Anglo-Irish landlords.
Parnell appeared out of nowhere in 1875, winning a seat in the British House of Commons and beginning an inspired campaign of parliamentary obstruction, and giving speeches thruout Ireland encouraging collective boycotts of the worst landlords. His charisma quickly pushed the Home Rule Party leader Isaac Butt into a back seat (where he died quietly in 1879).
In the elections last year, Parnell's tireless campaigning delivered victories for some 25 MPs pledged to follow his lead-- including Jack Joyce's candidate, Maurice Brooks. Both Bloom and JSJ try to be there every time Parnell speaks in Dublin.
As their popular support grows, the speeches of Parnell, Davitt, and the others have been growing more and more incendiary, and last November fourteen of them were charged with conspiracy against the landlords... but they were acquitted by a Dublin jury in January. Then just a week later, Michael Davitt was thrown back in jail on a related charge.
The winter before last, Parnell made a speaking tour of the USA on behalf of the Land League, convincing the several million Irish emigrants to contribute hundreds of thousands of dollars to the cause. After Davitt's arrest, these funds were moved to Paris so the government couldn't seize them. []
Parnell with chin, and Katie
Parnell could have used this crisis to call a general rent strike, but he chose not to-- perhaps because his emotional commitment has shifted 180 degrees in the last year. Last July he met and fell in love with 35yo Katie (Mrs William) O'Shea. They became lovers in October, and Parnell has shaved off his beard to make himself less recognisable at their rendezvous. (In two weeks he'll impregnate her at a hotel in Brighton.)
Victoria in 1883; Gladstone by Millais, 1879 []
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72yo William Ewart Gladstone has been re-elected Prime Minister after an interruption by Disraeli, and is offering incremental concessions to the Irish agitators. 62yo Queen Victoria regrets the loss of Disraeli.
Stop.
On the north side, almost midway between Gogarty's and Sheehy's, sleeps the unsuccessful 42yo painter John Butler Yeats (JBY) in a rented room... without his wife, who's still living outside London with three of their four children. (The youngest, 9yo Jack, has been farmed out to his Sligo grandparents.) They'll be moving to Dublin too when the lease runs out in the summer.
JBY is a living victim of Land League agitation-- he regrets the loss of Isaac Butt! The tenants on the farmland he inherited have gradually stopped paying rent... and he's come back to Dublin in the hope that commissions for portraits will take up the slack.
His oldest son, 16yo Willie Yeats (WBY) is finishing his fourth year at Godolphin School, west of London, considered a hopeless case until this year, when he began to excel in science. (He'd avoided learning to read until such a late date that his spelling will never recover.)
Willie has begun to cultivate an aristocratic pose to hide his insecurities. Two years ago, JBY took him to see Henry Irving's brilliant interpretation of Hamlet, and this image dominates his self-projections, to the point of imitating Irving's strut and his "brooding, broken wildness".
Irving as Hamlet []
Yeats' first friend in Dublin will be 14yo Charlie Johnston, recently arrived from Ulster, living the southern suburb of Rathmines and going to Bloom's old High School. 22yo poetess Katherine Tynan, who'll be WBY's early booster, is on her parents' farm west of Dublin.
Tynan by JBY, 1886
The sheep with their little lambs
Passed me by on the road;
All in the April evening
I thought on the Lamb of God. [1895?]
WBY's 14yo muse-to-be Maud Gonne is gallivanting around Europe with her younger sister, already breaking hearts (and already five foot ten!). Their father Major Thomas Gonne has been ten years a widower, and will be transferred back to Dublin soon to suppress the various rebellions.
28yo Augusta Persse married 62yo Sir William Henry Gregory last year near Galway, becoming Lady Gregory, and is now pregnant (though local gossip is saying the boy's father is Sir William's blacksmith).
21yo Douglas Hyde is taking exams at Trinity's divinity school but still studying at home in Roscommon, his father trying to force him into the ministry instead of the literary career he'd prefer. He's becoming active in the Gaelic Union, and publishing militantly nationalist poems in self-taught Irish under the playful pseudonym 'An Craoibhin Aoibhin' (the dear/ sweet/ delightful little nut-branch, pronounced 'un creeveen eeveen').
![[moustachio'd]](/web/20110703042058im_/http://robotwisdom.com/jaj/img/hyde82.jpg)
Hyde in 1882, by Sarah Purser []
51yo Fenian John O'Leary is still in exile in Paris with his sister Ellen (and with Joseph Casey, aka 'Kevin Egan'). O'Leary met Parnell for the first time in February, when he came down about the Land League funds. 29yo George Moore has just ended seven years of wild oats in Paris by moving to London, and starting to write. (The Land League is threatening his inherited income, as well.)
A new Gilbert and Sullivan operetta opened last month, called 'Patience'. Everyone recognised it as a parody of 27yo Oscar Wilde and aestheticism, though Wilde is just three years out of Oxford. []
Frank Miles
Wilde is living with a friend named Frank Miles in Chelsea, and preparing to publish his first book (Poems) in June. [] He was 'discovered' at Dublin's Trinity College by now-42yo John Pentland Mahaffy, who's about to publish Alexander's Empire.
Mahaffy; Matthew Arnold
59yo Matthew Arnold resigned as professor of poetry from Oxford 14 years ago, and is finishing an edition of Byron. [] 47yo William Morris is experimenting with tapestries in Hammersmith. []
The aesthetes generally are in disarray. 42yo Walter Pater is still tutoring at Oxford [] but is missing out on promotions due to a homosexual scandal. [] 44yo Algernon Charles Swinburne has recently retired in poor health to the home of his friend 49yo Theodore Watts-Dunton outside London. [] 52yo Dante Gabriel Rossetti is in Burchington, England, recovering from an 1872 nervous breakdown. [] 62yo John Ruskin resigned from Oxford two years ago, suffering from mental illness. []
Pater
80yo John Henry Newman (Catholic since 1845, Cardinal since 1879) is in Birmingham, England [] shortly to be painted by Millais. []
![[]](http://web.archive.org/web/20110703042058/http://www.utoronto.ca/stmikes/library/images_big/newmanmillais_big.gif){kind=link}
21yo Florence Farr is about to graduate from Queen's College in London, planning an acting career. 22yo Havelock Ellis is preparing to start medschool in London. 25yo Dubliner George Bernard Shaw has been living with his mother in London for nine years, and is now writing his third unsuccessful novel... and deciding to become a vegetarian-- the first in an endless series of nonconformist displays. []
Shaw
53yo Henrik Ibsen is in Norway working on 'Ghosts', his third 'problem play' in his new, realistic prose style. (For 15 years he's been living on an honorary lifetime government pension.)
50yo Helena P Blavatsky and 49yo Henry S Olcott are in India with 41yo AP Sinnett and 23yo Mohini Chatterjee, having founded the Theosophical Society six years before with now-30yo William Q Judge (who will become Russell's main guru). They claim to be receiving physical letters from Tibetan masters by occult means.
The Order of the Golden Dawn is still seven years off, but two of its three founders-- 53yo WR Woodman and 32yo WW Wescott-- are about to meet the third and most important, 27yo Samuel Liddell Mathers, under the aegis of a kabbalistically-inclined Rosicrucian society.
Mathers c1882; Mina Bergson c1885?
16yo Dublin-born Mina Bergson (sister of the future philosopher) is at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, and will soon meet 21yo heiress Annie Horniman.
Stop.
Go.
Six weeks after James Joyce was conceived, Jack's mother Ellen died in Cork, leaving him free to squander her modest fortune as he liked. Three weeks after that, he doubled his prospective income by clinching the civil service job, and the Joyces celebrated by moving to the seaside of Kingstown (near the famous Tower). In November, Jack sang at a concert at the Antient Concert Rooms. (Jack and May both enjoyed the nightlife of theaters and concerts and music-halls.) And near the end of the year, May's 57yo father John Murray disgraced himself utterly and forever in Jack's eyes by marrying his 35yo niece, less than a year after his wife's death.
John Murray in 1888
In July, pregnant Katie O'Shea's husband grew suspicious and challenged Parnell to a duel, but he managed to lie his way out of it. In August, Parnell founded the United Ireland weekly newspaper, and in October he and other leaders were jailed for advocating a rent boycott.
Wilde donated a copy of his Poems [] to the Oxford Union's library, who narrowly voted to refuse it as immoral. [] In December, the producer of G&S;'s 'Patience' financed a one-year US lecture tour for Wilde, to prepare the way for the operetta there. []
Willie and the family joined JBY in Dublin in the fall, settling outside of town in Howth, on the northern coast. WBY started at the High School on Harcourt street, two blocks south of his father's studio, so 42yo father and 16yo son rode the train in an hour early each morning so they could breakfast at the studio, debating everything, and that studio became WBY's real classroom. (Fifty years later he wrote "I have tried to do and say those things that accident made possible to me... the accident being I suppose in the main my father's studio.")
![[scratchy]](/web/20110703042058im_/http://robotwisdom.com/jaj/img/jby.jpg)
JBY by JBY in 1919
This studio was 'a large room with a beautiful 18thC mantelpiece' in a tenement house at 44 York street. JBY's artsy friends sometimes joined them-- especially 37yo Trinity professor Edward Dowden (expert on Shakespeare and Shelley) and sharptongued 33yo painter Sarah Purser. []
![[redhead]](/web/20110703042058im_/http://robotwisdom.com/jaj/img/purser2.jpg)
Purser in her prime
JBY used their time together to give Willie a crash-course in English literature, reading aloud the liveliest passages from all the greats, while dismissing the importance of his classes in history, geography, and geometry.
JBY had decided 13 years before to follow his artistic muse rather than the safe profession of law. But he'd found neither a reliable income (his portraits were rarely finished) nor an original style. He had, however, developed a philosophy of art: 'Obey no voice except emotion, and know all emotions.'
On the one hand, this led him to promote WBY's spontaneous self-expression (and apparently his aristocratic posing as well). But in his 1914 memoirs WBY would complain that he was also terrorised by his father's descriptions of "my moral degradation and my likeness to disagreeable people".
So for WBY, the next decade would be a process of finding his own identity within his father's projected ambitions... but during this 1881-82 school year he hadn't yet gotten interested in poetry-- they both imagined his future must lie in the sciences. He was an avid chess player, and loved to explore Howth (hill, castle, and environs), sleeping on the hillside on warm nights.
The new environment allowed Willie to re-invent himself, and the schoolboys accepted his father as a glamorous celebrity rather than a desperate ne'er-do-well. WBY quickly became best friends with 14yo Charlie Johnston, together planning to start a natural sciences field club. Johnston's father was a wealthy Protestant political leader, violently anti-Catholic, anti-Land-League, anti-Parnell, anti-Catholic-University, and incidentally pro-temperance, and a Grand Master of the Knights of Malta. []
If WBY's education had been proceeding normally, he should have been entering Trinity College by now, following Yeats family tradition. But he deferred for two more years, trying to master the minimal requirements for the qualifying exams... and finally chose not even to attempt Trinity.
Born towards to end of 1881 were Padraic Colum and Samuel Chenevix Trench ('Haines').
In January, Jack Joyce started his new job, 10am to 4pm, working out of an office behind the Bank of Ireland, but responsible for door-to-door tax collection in the "Rural Districts" west and south of the city. One of his fellow collectors was Frederick Buckley, who supplied the comic story JAJ would use in Finnegans Wake, about shooting a Russian general during the Crimean War.
Clerking next door at the Bank was tall, elegant, and bald Patrick Conway, experiencing the seven-year itch in his marriage to a stout ex-nun and heiress, born Elizabeth Hearn, now fortysomething. She was a friend of Jack's mother, and will be immortalised by James as 'Dante'.
On 18 Jan, Wilde interrupted his lecture tour to visit 62yo Walt Whitman, who served him homemade elderberry wine and kissed him on the lips on parting. (Wilde had not yet begun to explore his gay impulses.)
Wilde in Jan 1882; Whitman in 1881 []
(Their age-difference was almost identical to newlywed Lady Gregory's, with her husband!)
As her due-date neared, May prevailed on Jack to move back closer to her family, to Rathgar (their fifth address in two years), and at 6:00am on Thursday, 02 Feb, James was born at 41 Brighton Square West. (His middle name is given alternately as Augustine, Agustin, and Agusta.) Both Joyces joined the local church choir.
Also born in 1882 were Richard Sheehy, Mary Elizabeth Cleary ('Emma'), and James Stephens. And May's 25yo brother William ('Richie Goulding') married 19yo Josephine Giltrap-- James's beloved Aunt Jo.
Katie O'Shea gave birth to Parnell's daughter, Sophie Claude O'Shea, on 15 Feb, but she survived only two months.
In February the Society for Psychical Research was formed in England by Dubliner William Barrett.
In April, 53yo Dante Gabriel Rossetti died in Burchington, England, never having fully recovered from an 1872 nervous breakdown. []
The Gonnes were back in Dublin by May 1882, living at the Royal Barracks. Parnell got out of prison on 02 May, and was greeted by his sister with "I thought they'd hang you!"
The Chief Secretary, villainous 'Buckshot' Forster, resigned in protest of Parnell's release, and was replaced by Lord Cavendish, who was promptly assassinated by the Invincibles in Phoenix Park, along with Forster's villainous Under-Secretary, on 06 May. []
Douglas Hyde finagled a term on-campus in the spring, his father still insisting he become a minister. His new friends included well-connected 22yo Charles Oldham, whose Trinity rooms were becoming a social hub in Dublin. (He had probably met JBY already, via Sarah Purser.)
In the fall, WBY got his first crush on his distant cousin, vivacious 20yo Laura Armstrong, awakening from "the metallic sleep of science" and writing his first serious poetry, imitating Shelley.
1883 was a very quiet year. Yeats stayed in the High School until Xmas, writing lots of poetry that's lost. His 18yo friend Frederick James Gregg challenged him to collaborate on a Spenserian verse play. (Gregg and Johnston teased Willie about his aristocratic airs, and his Darwinian convictions, by placing him at the summit of their diagrammed 'tree of evolution'.)
In the fall, the Yeats family had to move to a cheaper neighborhood, 10 Ashfield terrace in Harold's Cross (between the Blooms and the Joyces-- maybe within Jack's tax-route?). WBY continued to visit Laura near Howth, but she was engaged so this was an asymmetrical relationship. JBY treated himself to a new studio at 7 St Stephen's Green.
Also in the fall, George Russell started fulltime at the Metropolitan School of Art in Kildare street.
On 20 Nov, WBY heard Oscar Wilde speak.
CP Curran and Eugene Sheehy were born.
Dec: 3yo JF Byrne's father dies unexpectedly
JAJ c1884
1884: Byrne starts at Carmelite 'Infant's School' in Clarendon street, becomes altar boy
41yo David Sheehy elected to Parliament (from Galway)
OGD cypher manuscript
Dr Gogarty dies
George Russell feels presence of supernatural beings in hills south of Dublin
"...the heart of the hills was opened to me, and I knew there was no hill for those who were there, and they were unconscious of the ponderous mountains piled above the palaces of light, and the winds were sparkling and diamond clear, yet full of colour as an opal, as they glittered through the valley, and I knew the Golden Age was all about me, and it was we who had been blind to it but that it had never passed away from the world."
11Dec: Russell meets Katherine Tynan
WBY, 1888
Russell meets SJ O'Grady; visits WBY in Bedford Park, meets William Morris; paints series depicting development from birth 'in Divine Mind' to perfection on earth, voice says "Call it the Birth of Aeon"
03 June: a few days after his First Communion, JF Byrne has an ecstatic religious experience
06Nov: Russell's critical letter to Blavatsky, probably about WBY, probably source of AE typo
Russell adopts 'AE' pseudonym based on printer's misreading of intended 'Aeon'
12yo Gogarty starts five years of hell at Stonyhurst
Gogarty to Clongowes for a year, saves choking student by quick action, writes poem about cricket match between heaven and hell
Gogarty starts at UC