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Some Observations on the Text of Dubliners: "The Dead" by Robert E. Scholes
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191

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Some Observations on the Text of Dubliners: "The Dead"
by
Robert E. Scholes [*]

Complaints about the texts of standard editions of James Joyce's works are fairly common, but they are usually directed at Ulysses and Finnegans Wake rather than at Joyce's earlier works. Yet the standard American Editions of Dubliners, from the first edition of B. W. Huebsch to the Modern Library, and the standard English editions, from the first edition of Grant Richards to Jonathan Cape, are among the most unJoycean texts of all Joyce's printed works — for reasons which become apparent when the prepublication printing history of the book is considered.

The present study is based primarily on a detailed examination of the manuscript and printing history of "The Dead." This story has been selected because of its length and importance in Dubliners and because the manuscript and printed versions available for its textual study are more complete than those available for the consideration of the other stories in Dubliners. Examinations of the textual histories of other stories in the collection indicate, however, that what is true of "The Dead" is also true of them, and that generalizations made on the basis of a study of "The Dead" will be valid for Dubliners as a whole.

The main outlines of the printing history of Dubliners have been recounted by Gorman and Ellmann in their biographies of Joyce and in the bibliography of Slocum and Cahoon.[1] In 1905 Joyce offered a


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manuscript of twelve stories to Grant Richards. In February 1906 Richards accepted the book for publication, and Joyce sent him a thirteenth story, "Two Gallants." In April the book went to the printer. When the printer objected to certain words and passages in the stories as indecent, a long controversy ensued between Richards and Joyce, with the result that Richards declined to publish the book and returned Joyce's manuscript. Probably the whole book was never set up in type for this impression. Two printed pages of proof survive, in the Houghton Library at Harvard, and they exhibit some peculiarities which make one suspect that no honest attempt to set up the whole edition was ever made. The two pages are from the beginning of "Two Gallants," the story which Joyce added to the collection after the manuscript was in Richards' hands. Joyce's instructions were that this story should be inserted between "After the Race" and "The Boarding House," where it now stands as the sixth story in all modern editions (Letter: Joyce to Richards, 22 Feb. 1906, at Harvard). But the surviving proofs of the story are numbered 12 and 13, indicating that it was certainly not the sixth story printed, and they do not follow consecutively — there is a gap of approximately one page in the text between the first page (numbered 12) and the second (numbered 13).[2] In the margin of p. 13 is the notation "we cannot print this," the printer's initials, and the date — 17 April 1906. Joyce himself commented on the peculiarity of beginning the process of printing his book with the sixth story (Letter: Joyce to Richards, 16 June 1906, at Harvard).

Whatever mysterious machinations went on, it is most unlikely that any more than a few pages of proof were ever typeset in this first attempt at Dubliners. By the time Joyce's negotiations with Richards had reached a dead end in October 1906, the manuscript had been expanded to fourteen stories by the inclusion of "A Little Cloud" (Letter: Joyce to Richards, 9 July 1906, at Harvard). In the next year Joyce wrote the final story, "The Dead,"[3] but it was not until April 1909 that he succeeded in interesting another publisher in Dubliners. Joseph Hone of Maunsel and Co., Dublin, agreed to look at the manuscript (Letter: Hone to Joyce, 18 April 1909, at Cornell) and in September 1909 Joyce was writing to Richards that Messrs. Maunsel hoped


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to bring out his book early in the coming Spring (Letter: Joyce to Richards, 4 Sept. 1909, at Cornell).

The book was announced by Maunsel for the Spring of 1910 and Joyce received and corrected proofs in June of that year.[4] But even as the proofs were being corrected the now-familiar pattern of attempted censorship began again. Messrs. Maunsel objected to passages in "Ivy Day in the Committee Room"; Joyce did not make the requested changes in proof; and publication of the stories was delayed (Letters: Roberts to Joyce, 7 June 1910 and 9 Feb. 1911, at Cornell). Some time before the final collapse of negotiations on Joyce's visit to Dublin in September 1912, an edition of one thousand copies is believed to have been run off — probably in July of 1912.[5] But when Maunsel finally refused to publish the book and Joyce tried to purchase the sheets from John Falconer, the printer (so that he could publish them himself under the imprint of the Liffey Press), the sheets were reported destroyed by the printer.[6] Joyce always said that his book was "burned" (See Gas From a Burner, for example) but if one thousand copies of the sheets of Dubliners were actually destroyed, the deed was undoubtedly accomplished by the easier and less wasteful process of guillotining.

Despite the destruction of the edition, this Dublin setting of Dubliners is of considerable importance to those interested in Joyce's text, for Joyce obtained — "by a ruse," he said[7] — a set of proofs from this edition, which subsequently became the printer's copy for the first published edition of his book. (See Slocum A8 and Joyce's letters to Richards of 24 Jan. and 4 March 1914, at Harvard).

Joyce's difficulties in finding a publisher continued until November 1913, when he again approached Grant Richards. Richards accepted the book for the second time late in January of 1914 (Letter: Joyce to Richards 27 Feb. 1914, at Cornell; the contract is at Yale) offering Joyce the same royalty agreement as in 1906; and Joyce accepted the


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contract (later referred to by J. B. Pinker as a "terrible document," see letter: Pinker to Joyce, 7 May 1915, at Cornell). In April of 1914 Joyce read proof on the Richards edition, (Letter: Joyce to Richards, 8 May 1914, at Harvard) expecting to have a chance to read revised copy before publication. In May he learned that he was not going to have a second chance at the proofs, and he sent Richards a list of corrections to be forwarded to the printer (Letter: Joyce to Richards, 14 May 1914, at Harvard). Most of these corrections have never been made to this date in any edition. (Joyce's list is printed as an appendix to this study.) In June of 1914 Dubliners was finally published.

A detailed study of the textual history of "The Dead" must rest on six documents:

  • A. Fragments of a holograph manuscript with printer's notations in the Slocum collection at Yale.
  • B. A complete manuscript — partly typed but completed in the hand of an amanuensis — in the Cornell Collection.
  • C. An almost complete set of galley sheets from the Dublin printing, in the Slocum Collection.
  • D. An almost complete copy of a late stage of the destroyed Dublin edition — sewn but not bound — in the Slocum Collection.
  • E. A complete set of page proofs of the Grant Richards edition, 1914, in the Slocum Collection.
  • F. The first edition itself (copy used for this study is in the Slocum Collection).

The interrelationships of these six documents are fairly complex but they can be traced with considerable certainty. Document A bears the notations of the Irish printer and was the copy text for the Maunsel (Dublin) printing.[8] If it were complete there would be no need to consult document B at all. But since A is fragmentary its relationship to B must be established in the hope that B can tell us something reliable about the missing parts of A. Fortunately the relationship is not difficult to work out. B is undoubtedly a faithful (though inexact in a few instances) copy of A. The occasional misreadings of the typist, like "Malius" for "Malins" and "wooed" for "waved" can be directly related to misleading handwriting in the holograph MS. Some of the typist's and amanuensis' mistakes, such as "parent" for "gaunt" and various omissions of letters and words, have been corrected in Joyce's


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hand to conform (in places where this is verifiable) to the holograph MS.[9] But apparently changes were made in the holograph MS after copy B was taken from it, since various alterations, written in red ink on the holograph, are not reflected in the copy. For example, Joyce changed the name of Gretta Conroy's first love from "Fury" to "Furey" in the extant pages of the holograph, but allowed "Fury" to stand throughout B. We must infer that the red-ink changes post-date the copy and that some of the other changes which were apparently made before the Dublin galleys were printed would probably show up as redink changes if the missing pages of the holograph could be located. Thus Joyce undoubtedly corrected the words of the song, "The Lass of Aughrim," in this manner, after learning the true version from Nora Barnacle's mother, who sang it to him on his trip to Galway in August, 1909 (Letters: James to Nora Joyce, 26 and 31 Aug. 1909, at Cornell).

The corrected holograph manuscript, document A, became the printer's text for the Dublin (Maunsel) edition (see fn. 8 above). The relationships among the various texts can be illustrated most clearly by tracing one passage through all its stages. This passage (pp. 255, 256 of the Modern Library Edition; p. 227 of Jonathan Cape, 1954) is unfortunately among the missing parts of document A, but it was corrected by Joyce in document B,[10] and apparently no red-ink changes were made in A after B was copied. The passages are designated here by lower-case letters corresponding to the upper-case designations (above) of the documents from which they are taken. The variants among these will be discussed later.

b-1 (MS in hand of amanuensis, corrected by Joyce, pp. 20-21)

Nobody answered this question and Mary Jane led the table back to the legitimate opera. One of her pupils had given her a pass for Mignon. Of course, it was very fine, she said, but it made her think of poor Georgina Burns. Mr Browne could go back farther still to the old Italian companies that used to come to Dublin, Tietjens, Trebelli Ilma de Murzka, Campanini, the great Giuglini, Revelli, Aramburo. Those were the days, he said, when there was something like singing to be heard in Dublin. He told too of how the top gallery of the Old Royal used to be packed night after night, of how one night an Italian tenor had sung five encores to Let me like a soldier fall, introducing a high C every time, and of how the gallery boys


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would sometimes in their enthusiasm unyoke the horses from the carriage of some great prima donna and pull her themselves through the streets to the hotel. Why did they never play the grand old operas now, he asked, Norma, Lucrezia Borgia? Because they could not get the voices to sing them: that was why.
—O, well, said Mr Bartell D'Arcy, I presume there are as good singers to day as there were then—
—Where are they? asked Mr Browne defiantly—
—In London, Paris, Berlin, said Mr Bartell D'Arcy warmly.
I suppose Caruso, for example, is quite as good, if not better than any of the men you have mentioned.—
c-1 (from galley 8 of the Maunsel printing, 1910)

Nobody answered this question, and Mary Jane led the table back to the legitimate opera. One of her pupils had given her a pass for Mignon. Of course, it was very fine, she said, but it made her think of poor Georgina Burns. Mr. Browne could go back farther still to the old Italian companies that used to come to Dublin—Tietjeus, Trebell's, Ilma de Murzka, Campanini, the great Gingliui, Revelli, Aramburo. Those were the days, he said, when there was something like singing to be heard in Dublin. He told too of how the top gallery of the Old Royal used to be packed night after night, of how one night an Italian tenor had sung five encores to Let me like a soldier fall, introducing a high C everytime, and of how the gallery boys would sometimes in their enthusiasm unyoke the horses from the carriage of some great prima donna and pull her themselves through the streets to her hotel. Why did they never play the grand old operas now, he asked—Norma, Lucrezia Borgia? Because they could not get the voices to sing them: that was why.

—O, well,—said Mr. Bartell D'Arcy,—I presume there are as good singers to-day as there were then.—
—Where are they?—asked Mr. Browne, defiantly.
—In London, Paris, Berlin,—said Mr. Bartell D'Arcy, warmly. I suppose Caruso, for example, is quite as good, if not better than any of the men you have mentioned.—
d-1 (from page-proofs of Maunsel printing, 1910, pp. 260-261)

Nobody answered this question and Mary Jane led the table back to the legitimate opera. One of her pupils had given her a pass for Mignon. Of course, it was very fine, she said, but it made her think of poor Georgina Burns. Mr Browne could go back farther still to the old Italian companies that used to come to Dublin—Tietjens, Trebelli, Ilma de Murzka, Campanini, the great Giuglini, Revelli, Aramburo. Those were the days, he said, when there was something like singing to be heard in Dublin. He told too of how the top gallery of the old Royal used to be packed night after night, of how one night an Italian tenor had sung five encores to Let me Like a


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Soldier Fall, introducing a high C every time, and of how the gallery boys would sometimes in their enthusiasm unyoke the horses from the carriage of some great prima donna and pull her themselves through the streets to her hotel. Why did they never play the grand old operas now, he asked—Norma, Lucrezia Borgia? Because they could not get the voices to sing them: that was why.
—O, well,—said Mr Bartell D'Arcy, —I presume there are as good singers today as there were then.—
—Where are they?—asked Mr Browne defiantly.
—In London, Paris, Vienna,— said Mr Bartell D'Arcy warmly.—I suppose Caruso, for example, is quite as good, if not better than any of the men you have mentioned.—
e-1 (page-proofs from the Richards first edition, 1914, pp. 246-247)

Nobody answered this question, and Mary Jane led the table back to the legitimate opera. One of her pupils had given her a pass for Mignon. Of course, it was very fine, she said, but it made her think of poor Georgina Burns. Mr Browne could go back farther still, to the old Italian companies that used to come to Dublin—Teitjeus, Trebell's, Ilma de Murzka, Campanini, the great Gingliui, Revelli, Aramburo. Those were the days, he said, when there was something like singing to be heard in Dublin. He told too of how the top gallery of the old Royal used to be packed night after night, of how one night an Italian tenor had sung five encores to Let me like a Soldier fall, introducing a high C every time, and of how the gallery boys would sometimes in their enthusiasm unyoke the horses from the carriage of some great prima donna and pull her themselves through the streets to her hotel. Why did they never play the grand old operas now, he asked, 'Norma, Lucrezia Borgia? Because they could not get the voices to sing them: that was why.'

'O, well,' said Mr Bartell D'Arcy, 'I presume there are as good singers to-day as there were then.'

'Where are they?' asked Mr Browne defiantly.

'In London, Paris, Berlin,' said Mr Bartell D'Arcy warmly. 'I suppose Caruso, for example, is quite as good, if not better than any of the men you have mentioned.'

f-1 (Grant Richards first edition, 1914, pp. 246-247)

Nobody answered this question and Mary Jane led the table back to the legitimate opera. One of her pupils had given her a pass for Mignon. Of course it was very fine, she said, but it made her think of poor Georgina Burns. Mr Browne could go back farther still, to the old Italian companies that used to come to Dublin—Tietjens, Ilma de Murzka, Campanini, the great Trebelli Giuglini, Ravelli, Aramburo. Those were the days, he said, when there was something like singing to be heard in Dublin. He told too of how the top gallery of the old Royal used to be packed night after night,


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of how one night an Italian tenor had sung five encores to Let me like a Soldier fall, introducing a high C every time, and of how the gallery boys would sometimes in their enthusiasm unyoke the horses from the carriage of some great prima donna and pull her themselves through the streets to her hotel. Why did they never play the grand old operas now, he asked, 'Dinorah, Lucrezia Borgia? Because they could not get the voices to sing them: that was why.'

'O, well,' said Mr Bartell D'Arcy, 'I presume there are as good singers to-day as there were then.'

'Where are they?' asked Mr Browne defiantly.

'In London, Paris, Milan,' said Mr Bartell D'Arcy warmly. 'I suppose Caruso, for example, is quite as good, if not better than any of the men you have mentioned.'

Some of the differences between b-1 and c-1 are of indeterminable significance. The change from "the hotel" to "her hotel," for example, may be due to a mistake made in the preparation of B, a red-ink change in A, or a compositor's change in the preparation of C. But other differences allow us to make inferences with almost absolute certainty. The various changes in the spelling of proper names are undoubtedly due to the compositor's inability to read Joyce's holograph accurately in those instances where he could not guess at the correct spelling on the basis of his own knowledge. We have seen how the typist of document B had trouble with the proper name "Malins," reading a u for the n. The compositor of C had the same trouble here (and also earlier when he misread the Irish phrase "Beannacht libh" as "Beaunacht libh"—as it appears in galley 7). In this case he has read "Tietjeus" for "Tietjens", "Trebell's" for "Trebelli", and "Gingliui" for "Giuglini". Passage d-1, from the final Maunsel printing includes the correction of all these misspellings and some other changes of the sort which would have been made only by Joyce. "Berlin" in b and c (and presumably in the missing part of a) becomes "Vienna" in d, and "Old Royal" becomes "old Royal". Texts C and D are impressed from the same setting of type,[11] though C is in the form of unpaged slip galleys and D is in the form of numbered pages, apparently in the last stage of preparation before sewing and binding.[12] We cannot now tell how many states of this impression existed between the galleys and the final printing, but numerous corrections were made and incorporated into state D. In "The Dead" alone three hundred commas were removed between C and D; over thirty hyphens were removed, the hyphenated


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constructions being modified to either one or two words; and a substantial number of textual changes were made. (The most important of these will be considered below.)

When the Dublin impression of Dubliners was destroyed by Manusel's printer, Joyce, as we know, obtained a set of proofs which became the copy-text for Grant Richards' printer. The normal assumption would be that Joyce would take the last and most correct text, in this case text D. But this was not a normal situation. The text he was able to get, he got "by a ruse"; and it was certainly not text D. A glance at passages c-1, d-1, and e-1 will show that e contains the same absurd mis-spellings which we found in c, and that the third on the list of operatic cities is once again Berlin. This can mean only that the printer's copy for E must have been much closer to C than to D.

There are several reasons why we must be satisfied with saying that the printer's text in this case is close to C rather than simply inferring that C was the copy-text. Joyce and Richards in their correspondence unmistakably refer to pages rather than galley sheets;[13] and a few parts of E seem closer to D than to C (as when Mr. Browne's skin, "dark yellow" in galley 3 of C, becomes "swarthy" on p. 268 of D and remains so on p. 225 of E). In these cases we cannot be sure whether the corrections to C have been incorporated in some other set of page-proofs—a hypothetical, partially corrected C1—or whether Joyce has introduced corrections by hand in a set essentially the same as C but in pages rather than galleys. We can note, however, that wherever substantive changes occur between C and E, they are marked by a culling out of commas in the surrounding passages; and wherever D indicates that corrections should have been made in C which were not, in fact, made before E was printed, the surrounding area remains heavily punctuated in E (as in C), and the commas are finally culled out in the First Edition itself, state F.

The whole problem of punctuation in the text of Dubliners is an important and interesting one. This problem can be divided into two main aspects—the punctuation of direct discourse and the use of the comma. Joyce was habitually a light punctuator. The textual history of Dubliners indicates that he was twice forced to go through his text, once in the Irish printing and again in the English, removing what he considered an excess of editorial or compositorial punctuation, culling out more than three hundred commas from "The Dead" between C and D, and over two hundred and twenty-five between E and F, after


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having eliminated more than fifty between C and E. He preferred not to use a comma before the conjunctions and, but, and for. This practice has occasionally resulted in confusion. Compare, for example, the following sentences from the six texts:
  • a-2 (p. 18) Probably in the school they had gone to as girls that kind of work had been taught for one year his mother had worked for him as a birthday present a waistcoat. . . .
  • b-2 (p. 10) same as a-2
  • c-2 (galley 4) Probably in the school they had gone to as girls that kind of work had been taught for one year; his mother had worked for him as a birthday present a waistcoat. . . .
  • d-2 (p. 273) same as a-2 and b-2
  • e-2 (p. 230) same as c-2
  • f-2 (p. 230) Probably in the school they had gone to as girls that kind of work had been taught for one year. His mother had worked for him as a birthday present a waistcoat. . . .

Here, Joyce in his manuscript avoided using the standard comma before the phrase "for one year" which would have made it clear that "for" in that case was a conjunction and not a preposition. An officious compositor in setting text C changed Joyce's sentence, wrongly breaking it after "for one year" instead of before it. Joyce corrected this change so that D reads as A and B do in this passage, but E naturally follows C. Finally the reading was emended even further in the wrong direction in F (by a compositor or editor) and so it stands in our modern editions —Modern Library, p. 238; Jonathan Cape 1954, p. 212. This is one of the corrections Joyce sent Richards in lieu of a second proof-reading, apparently having missed it—as he missed many others in his haste—on the first reading. (See Appendix.)

Joyce's views on the subject of the punctuation of direct discourse were even less orthodox than his views on the comma. He strongly objected to the use of the inverted comma or quotation marks, and expressed these views to Grant Richards in February 1906 and again in March of 1914. As Joyce's views on the subject are very strong, and since the published volume of his letters prints this passage in a somewhat garbled form, the passage is reprinted here in the notes.[14] In the


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Irish printing of Dubliners Joyce nearly succeeded in having his usage in the matter of quotations followed accurately. Passage b-1 above illustrates Joyce's habitual method of punctuating quotations in the Dubliners manuscripts. A dash introduces every paragraph which is either in part or wholly direct discourse, and another dash concludes each such paragraph. (In his later works he dropped the concluding dash.) But c-1 (above) shows that the Irish compositors did not follow Joyce entirely. They used the dash as if it were a quotation mark, trying to surround every directly quoted speech with dashes which exclude the narrator's statements: "—O, well,—said Mr. Bartell D'Arcy, —I presume . . ." etc. This peculiar blend of Joycean and normal usage is not a strictly Irish development. One finds, for example, both techniques combined rather confusingly in the fifth chapter of the Modern Library edition of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. At any rate, the heavy use of dashes in C remains unchanged in the final Irish text D. Either Joyce was satisfied or the compositor stood firm.

Grant Richards, however, insisted on normal English usage; thus in text E the dashes are replaced by inverted commas. We can even note in e-1 (above) how, at the end of the long first paragraph, the English compositor clumsily converted indirect into direct discourse through mistaking the dash used as colon in c-1 for a dash introducing a quotation. This stands as direct discourse in the modern English text (Cape, 1954) even though the use of the conditional past tense is clearly an indirect mode of rendering what would be present tense in direct discourse; but the modern American text (Modern Library) even more confusingly closes with quotation marks which have no mate opening the quotation anywhere in the paragraph. The main point of all this interest in the method of presenting direct discourse is that no edition of Dubliners has ever been printed which follows the usage desired by Joyce, though he was able to enforce his views on these matters in the books which followed Dubliners.

Passage f-1 (above) indicates the way in which Joyce corrected text E and also it reveals that his correction was not perfect. He rearranged the operatic passage and corrected the spelling; Berlin he again replaced, this time by Milan instead of Vienna as in d-1; and for Norma he substituted the more recondite Dinorah; but he missed the erratic capitalization of Let me like a Soldier fall and the introduction of the awkward direct discourse at the end of the first paragraph. That he did not pick up all the mistakes is not surprising. He had promised Grant Richards to return corrected proof two days after receipt (Joyce was still in Trieste at the time) and he expected to have a chance to correct


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revised copy. (Letters: Joyce to Richards, 8 and 14 May 1914, at Harvard). Also, by this time he had corrected Dubliners countless times and the human law of diminishing returns had undoubtedly begun to affect him. The more one reads over the same work, the less one sees of what is actually on the page. And, finally, he must have been mainly preoccupied with his new work, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which he was engaged in completing for the Egoist, the London periodical which had started publishing the novel in February 1914 (see Ellmann, p. 364). All these factors combined, readily account for the lack of thoroughness of Joyce's corrections of text E for the Grant Richards First Edition of Dubliners in 1914.

Now we may turn to ten of the improvements which Joyce had made in the Irish text of "The Dead" between C and D which he never reintroduced in the English edition, and which consequently have been omitted in all modern printings of the book. These improvements were made only in proof; and, therefore, when Joyce was unable to obtain a late state of the Irish printing he had no record of these changes. In all cases cited below, Text F substantially follows C and E, the modifications made in D having been lost when C1 became printer's text for E.

    Change 1:

  • Text F. 'Well, I'm ashamed of you,' said Miss Ivors frankly. 'To say you'd write for a paper like that . . .'
  • Text D. "paper" changed to "rag" (CF. Modern Library p. 240; Jonathan Cape, 1954, p. 214)

    Change 2:

  • Text F. 'The fact is,' said Gabriel, 'I have just arranged to go—'
  • Text D. "just" changed to "already" (ML 242/JC 215)

Note that changes 1 and 2 serve to make Miss Ivors a bit more outspoken in her attack and to make Gabriel's refusal of her request that he join in a trip to the west of Ireland seem a bit less impromptu.

    Change 3:

  • Text F. '. . . What row had you with Molly Ivors?' 'No row. Why? Did she say so?' 'Something like that. . . .' 'There was no row,' said Gabriel moodily. . . .
  • Text D. "row" changed to "words" in all instances and "was" changed to "were" (ML 245/JC 217-218)

    Change 4:

  • Text F. Her son-in-law was a splendid fisher. One day he caught a beautiful big fish and the man in the hotel cooked it for their dinner.

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  • Text D. Her son-in-law was a splendid fisher. One day he caught a fish, a beautiful big big fish: and the man in the hotel boiled it for their dinner. (ML 245/JC 218)

In change 4 Mrs. Malin's personality is rendered more vividly; the mode of preparation of the fish made more specific.

    Change 5:

  • Text F. 'And do you mean to say,' asked Mr Browne incredulously, 'that a chap can go down there and put up there as if it were a hotel and live on the fat of the land and then come away without paying anything?'
  • Text D. —And do you mean to say,—asked Mr Browne incredulously, —that a fellow can go down there and put up there as it if were a hotel and then come away without paying a farthing?—(ML 258/JC 229)

In Change 5, Text D, "anything" becomes "farthing". But note that "chap" in text F is not a relapse after a change to "fellow" in D, but a new change introduced between E and F, probably for the same reason that "farthing" was introduced between C and D—to make Browne's speech more concrete and Browne, therefore, more vivid.

    Change 6:

  • Text F. The table burst into applause and laughter at this allusion.
  • Text D. "allusion" changed to "sally" (ML 262/JC 233)

    Change 7:

  • Text F. 'Someone is fooling at the piano, anyhow,' said Gabriel.
  • Text D. "fooling" changed to "strumming" (ML 266/JC 236)

Both 6 and 7 seem to be attempts to find words more in keeping with the mood or tone of the passages they are in.

    Change 8:

  • Text F. 'Yes, sir,' said the cabman. 'Make like a bird for Trinity College.' 'Right, sir,' said the cabman.
  • Text D. In the cabman's second speech "said" is changed to "cried". (ML 269/JC 239)

Another change in the interest of vividness, "cried" expresses the cabman's relief at finally getting a direction he understands.

    Change 9:

  • Text F. A ghastly light from the streetlamp lay in a long shaft from one window to the door.
  • Text D. "ghastly" changed to "ghostly" (ML 278/JC 247)

This is a most important correction. Text B reads "ghostly", C "ghastly", probably due to a misreading of A by the compositor of C. Joyce made the correction in D but did not pick it up again in his proof-reading of E. The slightly eerie connotations


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of "ghostly" with its suggestion of Ibsen's play Ghosts (a spiritual ancestor of Joyce's story) are much more appropriate for this scene than the more horrible connotations of "ghastly".

    Change 10:

  • Text F. '. . . He gave me back that sovereign I lent him and I didn't expect it really. It's a pity he wouldn't keep away from that Browne because he's not a bad fellow really.'
  • Text D. the second "really" changed to "at heart" (ML 279/JC 248)

These ten changes represent only the obvious substantive changes made in the text of "The Dead" by Joyce and subsequently lost. Texts D and F also vary through compositorial errors introduced in E which passed unnoticed into F and thence into modern texts. The simply ungrammatical "The peals of laughter which followed Gabriel's imitation of the incident was interrupted. . . ." (ML 268/JC 238, my italics) is just an error—B, C, and D all reading "were". And there are other similar problems. A study I have now in progress of the other stories in Dubliners indicates that many other substantive changes have been lost from the text. But a textual study of "The Dead" alone is enough to establish the fact that we are reading one of our most precise and careful writers in editions which can be greatly improved, which can be made both more correct and more Joycean.

Appendix

When Joyce learned that he was not going to have a second opportunity to read proof on the first edition of Dubliners, he prepared the following list of corrections and sent them to Grant Richards for action. Unfortunately, the corrections were not made. Some of the more obvious errors in punctuation and grammar have been detected and eliminated in later editions, but over twenty of these corrections have never been made in a printed text of Dubliners. In addition to matters of correctness, matters of tone and pace are attended to in this list. The most important correction noted here is undoubtedly that for p. 265, which transfers back to Gretta Conroy a speech mistakenly given to her husband by the compositor of the Grant Richards edition. This list of unmade corrections plus the as yet untotaled number of lost improvements (such as those for "The Dead" discussed above) should certainly be taken into account when a new edition of Dubliners is prepared.

The list which follows is exactly as Joyce made it, with page and line references to the First Edition. Page and line references to current American and English editions have been added in parentheses after Joyce's corrections, ML referring to Modern Library, JC to Jonathan Cape, 1954. Whenever the correction has been made in the modern editions, this fact is noted in the parenthesis.


205

Page 205

    DUBLINERS Misprints

  • page 11: line 26: for imbecile!' read imbecile! (corrected—ML 9:29/JC 9:16)
  • " 34: " 8: " gauntlet " gantlet (ML 34:9/JC 30:2)
  • " 56: " 6: " form's " form' (ML 59:17/JC 50:20)
  • " 65: " 30: " umbrella " sunshade (ML 66:15/JC 59:11)
  • " 68 " 27: " grocer's hot " hot grocer's (ML 69:15/JC 61:30)
  • " 86: " 5: " roystered " roistered (ML 87:8/JC 77:29)
  • " 88: " 28: " notice " notices (ML 90:4/JC 80:16)
  • " 89: " 11: " doorways " doorway (ML 90:20/JC 80:28)
  • " 95: " 11: " hand, " hand (ML 96:31/JC 86:14)
  • " 104: " 8: " Blast (italics) " Blast (plain) (ML 106:8/JC 95:8)
  • " 105: " 1: " hairless " hairless that (ML 106:27/JC 95:23)
  • " 111: " 26: " first " first, (corrected ML 114:2/JC 102:9)
  • " 135: " 2: " produce " product (ML 138:7/JC 123:16)
  • " 140: " 6: " League " league (ML 143:16/JC 128:7)
  • " 142: " 31: " Park " park (ML 146:14/JC 130:24)
  • " 158: " 10: " sir, " sir' (ML 162:26/JC 145:3)
  • " 158: " 11: " Mr. Henchy,' " Mr. Henchy, (ML 162:26/JC 145:3)
  • " 158: " 19: " drank " drunk (ML 163:4/JC—corrected— 145:12)
  • " 162: " 16: " and " 'and (sorrected—ML 167:7/JC 148:27)
  • " 162 " 23: " him, " him (ML 167:15/JC 149:4)
  • " 164 " 25: " coward, " coward (ML 169:21/JC 151:9)
  • " 170 " 20: " gentlemen. " gentlemen, (ML 175:26/JC 157:3)
  • " 190 " 29: " footpath, " footpath (ML 197:9/JC 175:8)
  • " 200 " 27: " D'ye " Do you (ML 207:22/JC 184:17)
  • " 203 " 3: " Munno " Mmmno (ML 210:3/JC 186:20)
  • " 215 " 2: " Manmon " Mammon (corrected—ML 222:8/JC 197:23)
  • " 215 " 10: " this " his (corrected ML 222:17/JC 198:2)
  • " 230 " 24: " year. His " year his (ML 238:31/JC 212:18)
  • " 265 " 13: " he " she (ML 274:28/JC 244:14)
  • " 268 " 24: " too. " to. (corrected—ML 278:11/JC 247:11)

Notes

 
[*]

I wish to express my gratitude to the Houghton Library of Harvard University and the Cornell University Library for allowing me to make use of their important unpublished Joyce materials in preparing this study, and especially to the Yale University Library for giving me complete freedom to quote from the invaluable manuscripts and proofs of Dubliners at Yale. I am also grateful to the Committee on Research Grants of the University of Virginia and the Richmond Area Fund for financial assistance with this project.

[1]

Herbert Gorman, James Joyce (London, 1949), pp. 145-158, 169-176, 195, 211-217, 219-221; Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (1959), see index; Slocum and Cahoon, A Bibliography of James Joyce (1953), A8.

[2]

Slocum and Cahoon (A8) suggest that the story was "expanded" in the 1914 edition, but it seems more likely that it was abbreviated by the printer in 1906. The two pages do not blend coherently; the speakers' roles become interchanged in the second page of this 1906 page-proof, indicating omission of a page. In all other respects the text is substantially that of the later editions.

[3]

See Ellmann, Ch. 15, for the genesis and background of this story.

[4]

The galley-proofs of "The Dead" (at Yale) are dated by the printer "June 19/ 10". Roberts' letters to Joyce of 30 April and 7 June 1910 (at Cornell) indicate that the first set of proofs was mailed to Joyce on 7 June. See also Slocum A8.

[5]

Slocum and Cahoon find no reason to doubt that 1000 copies were actually printed and they are probably correct. In a letter of 9 Aug. 1912 (at Cornell) Roberts suggested that Joyce try to get Grant Richards to take over the sheets printed by Falconer of Dublin.

[6]

The end of Dubliners is told simply and graphically by Charles Joyce in a letter to Stanislaus Joyce, 11 Sept. 1912 (at Cornell). Less than a week before, his letter of 6 Sept. had been full of hope for the prospects of Dubliners being published by himself and his brother as the Liffey Press.

[7]

Letter: James to Stanislaus Joyce, 2 Sept. 1912 (at Cornell). I have speculated on the nature of the ruse in the forthcoming Joyce Miscellany No. 3, in an essay on Joyce's broadsides.

[8]

Since "The Dead" had not been written when Richards first had Dubliners partially printed in 1906, and since the 1914 edition was set from proofs rather than MSS, the only printer who could have made notations on the Yale MS of "The Dead" is the Irish printer.

[9]

See Cornell MS (typed and hand written by amanuensis), pp. 2, 9; Yale MS pp. 3, 16. Corrections in Joyce's hand in the Cornell TS-MS are on pp. 1, 20, 21, 35, 38, 39, 42, 44, 45, 48, 49, 55, and 56.

[10]

The passage contains a word missed by the amanuensis in copying (apparently) and supplied by Joyce—p. 21.

[11]

The two impressions have been compared on the Hinman collating machine at the University of Virginia..

[12]

The pages have neat, uniform margins; the leaves have been hand sewn. This text is probably the only survivor of the 1000-copy Irish edition.

[13]

Richards in his letter of 23 March 1914 (at Cornell) informed Joyce that pages 3-4 and 13-14 of "The Sisters" had been lost and Joyce in his letter of 26 March (at Harvard) replied that he was supplying typed copies of the missing pages. In the same letter Joyce asked Richards to return the title page of the Dublin edition.

[14]

Letter: Joyce to Richards, 4 March 1914, at Harvard. "As regards the inverted commas the Irish compositors are not to blame. I myself insisted on their abolition: to me they are an eyesore. I think the page reads much better with the dialogue between dashes. But if you are persuaded of the contrary I agree to waive the point and let the inverted commas replace the dashes. But I think you ought not to reject my suggestion at once. I think the commas used in English dialogue are most unsightly and give an impression of unreality."


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