A Recollection of James Joyce

Abstract

It was in 1908 — the summer, I think — that I read Joyce’s Dubliners in manuscript.¹ The stories were written out in cheap notebooks in a copperplate hand that would have won for a schoolboy a prize in calligraphy. They were handed to me by George Roberts, the managing-director of Maunsel & Co., a publishing firm of which I was then a member. Roberts was a very good judge of a book, besides being a fine printer; but one, at least, of the stories gave him pause: such is my recollection. This was ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’, in which Dublin’s grave councillors are depicted in discussing, among other matters, the private life of King Edward VII. As I look back, it occurs to me that the firm’s hesitation, so far as this particular story was concerned, may have been due to a desire not to prejudice itself with Lady Aberdeen, the then Lord Lieutenant’s wife, by whom it had been commissioned to publish tracts relative to her anti-tuberculosis campaign. But of this I am not certain. I took the manuscript home, the issue still undecided, and I am ashamed to think of the length of time I had it in my possession. A month or two at least. It visited with me the house of a friend near Bray, Victor Le Fanu, a nephew of the novelist, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, the agent for Lord Meath’s estates, and in my mind’s eye I can still see it lying open on the table of his book-room, for I had invited his opinion upon it.

Envoy (Dublin), 5 (May 1951) 44–5.